DEX Research & Data

Nexthink’s 2023 State of the DEX Industry survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne, found employees report only 44% of the technology issues they experience, so more than half never surface as help desk tickets. Employees absorb friction silently: they work around broken tools, accept degraded performance, and stop expecting technology to work reliably. The result is a systematic undercount of the actual experience burden employees carry.

This finding has direct implications for how IT organizations interpret their ticket metrics. Low ticket volume is not the same as a healthy experience. It may indicate an environment where employees have learned not to report problems: a significantly worse outcome.

The trend is moving the wrong way. In Nexthink’s earlier Experience 2020 survey, employees reported 55% of their issues; four years later the figure had fallen to 44%.

Telemetry, not survey answers. Nexthink's 2025 analysis of anonymized data from more than 20 million endpoints across 474 businesses counted device crashes, application glitches, and slow load times as employees actually experienced them. The average negative event lasts just under three minutes, and the number of disruptive events per week was almost identical across industries.

Because this is measured at the endpoint, it sidesteps the reporting gap entirely: it shows what employees live with whether or not they ever call the help desk.

Daily technology friction is not an edge case: it is a widespread, chronic condition across enterprise workforces. Most of it never generates a ticket. It accumulates as background noise: the slow application, the unreliable VPN, the authentication failure that resolves after three attempts. Each incident is small enough to absorb. Collectively, they represent significant lost productivity and growing employee frustration.

Half of them make that call more than half the time. The same survey found that 72% had used their own tool or AI instead of IT support, and 26% described that as their usual response. Most of these workers did not lack confidence in IT: 81% said they were completely or fairly confident their support team would solve their problems.

The implication matters for anyone who manages from the ticket queue. When small problems are routinely judged not worth a ticket, a healthy dashboard can sit alongside a frustrated workforce.

58% said their first response to a technology issue is to try fixing it themselves. Reporting competes with simply getting on with the work, and for a problem that costs a few minutes, reporting usually loses.

Past experience shapes future reporting. When a ticket is closed without a real fix, or an employee has to explain the problem from scratch at every handoff (55% said this happens most or every time), the lesson learned is that reporting does not pay off. Nearly a quarter of those with a "resolved" ticket that was not fixed were still relying on a workaround or had given up on the issue.

Speed drives self-help. Ivanti's chief security officer described the resulting shadow IT as coming from employees' desire to do their jobs when the official route is not enabling them to.

Nexthink's 2025 telemetry analysis puts the average annual cost of poor DEX at about 470,000 hours per business, roughly the work of 226 full-time employees. It also found that every 10-point increase in an organization's DEX score returns an average of 22 productive minutes per employee each week, and that retail, healthcare, and financial services lose about 1.7 times as much time as the technology sector.

Nexthink's Experience 2020 survey found employees lose an average of 28 minutes every time they have an IT-related problem. IT decision makers estimated employees hit about two issues a week, which Nexthink put at nearly 50 hours a year. Because employees said only just over half of their issues are reported, Nexthink estimated the real figure is close to 100 hours, or two work weeks, per employee per year.

These figures capture time spent dealing with problems directly. They do not include the time it takes to regain focus afterward, or the effect on deadline-sensitive work.

Nexthink reached this figure by assuming about two hours of IT downtime per employee per week and an average US salary of $48,672, which works out to roughly $2,400 per employee per year. It is a salary-cost estimate, not a measured result, and it excludes help desk labor, remediation, device replacement, and attrition.

To model your own organization with current inputs, use our cost-of-friction calculator, which uses Nexthink's 2025 telemetry averages and lets you set your own salary cost.

Nearly half of the enterprise workforce believes their technology is actively working against them, not for them. This sentiment is not a perception problem, it is a signal. It indicates that technology deployments are not meeting the needs of the people they were designed to serve. When employees feel less productive because of technology, they disengage from IT-led initiatives, reduce their willingness to report problems, and become resistant to new tools, including AI.