The service silo problem has a solution, and it’s working

It’s Sam’s first week on the job and he’s already a project manager—sort of. The project is getting the support he needs from different business units across the organization. From finance, he needs his relocation expenses reimbursed; from HR, help choosing a benefits plan; from facilities, his parking space assignment; and from IT, his VPN fixed. Simple requests, yet each bounces across siloed departments, each with their own individual service tools and timelines.

As this scenario shows, without centralized coordination, support for employees is a fragmented, cumbersome experience. IT is ahead of the service game, with AI-powered IT service management platforms and principles that deliver faster ticket resolution times and high employee satisfaction. Other business teams like HR, finance, and legal are not just taking notice—they’re taking action and seeing similarly impressive, or better, results. 

That’s a key takeaway from the 2025 Freshservice Benchmark Report. For the first time since Freshworks began IT service benchmarking in 2021, its annual report includes dedicated metrics for enterprise service management (ESM). The comprehensive report analyzes over 187 million tickets from 10,743 organizations across 118 countries.

The report finds that not only are enterprise-wide business teams adopting ITSM principles and platforms—such as unified, AI-driven ticket management, knowledge bases for self-service, and automated ticket categorization and prioritization—they’re excelling with them, sometimes outperforming IT: While IT teams are achieving 74.1% first contact resolution rates, business teams using ITSM processes and tools are reaching 79.5%, the report finds.

“Organizations that are winning today aren’t those with the most complex systems, they are the ones that have mastered the art of uncomplicated service delivery,” Shaonli Nath, director of product marketing at Freshworks, explained during a recent webinar on ESM. “The big enterprise opportunity lies in tackling the silo challenge through deliberate cross-functional collaboration, and this is where ESM comes in,” she added.

The hidden cost of overly complicated service

A tangle of service platforms and practices is more than an inconvenience. It can grind productivity to a standstill. 

“What a typical day looks like when there’s a lack of ESM continuity is a lot of no accountability, a lack of organization and priority when addressing issues,” said Derick Jones, senior IT service desk manager at Champion X during the webinar. 

He painted a picture of “organized chaos” where departments “don’t really know what they don’t know.”

Nearly half of all organizations identify internal silos as their biggest obstacle to effective service delivery. “Service gaps occur all of the time because we either don’t understand the process, the process hasn’t been identified, or something has changed within the organization that broke the way that we used to do it,” added Jonathan Brown, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group during the webinar.

How ESM is closing the gap

For business teams adopting ITSM principles across business units, ESM is effectively closing those service gaps. As the benchmark report shows, the results that those teams are achieving through unified platforms are matching or surpassing those of IT teams: 

• Average ticket resolution time: 29.08 hours

• First contact resolution: 79.5% (surpassing IT’s 74.14%)

• Resolution SLA adherence: 95.2%

• Customer satisfaction: 97.83%

And ESM adoption is gaining momentum. For every 14 IT agents, there are now 10 business agents using service management platforms in most organizations. But at some organizations, cultural resistance to change can be a roadblock to some business units giving up the tools and practices they are most comfortable with, especially when those tools deploy unfamiliar tech like AI co-pilots and chatbots. 

Read also: How AI is moving service delivery beyond IT

According to Champion X’s Jones, companies can speed adoption outside of IT by focusing on strategic change management rather than technological sophistication. The most effective pitch to stakeholders from department leaders to employees using the ESM tools is that “you’re not trying to change everything they’re doing,” he said. “You’re trying to improve their daily work experience.”

Freshworks’ Nath said effective ESM adoption requires “intelligent subtraction”—simplifying before optimizing. Organizations should create “service network maps” that function like efficient transit systems. “The beauty of a connected service network is that employees don’t need to understand the complexity underneath. They just need to know that it works,” she said.

AI is only part of the solution

AI in ITSM can serve as a force multiplier for faster service delivery and improved outcomes through self-service. Organizations using Freddy AI Copilot saw 76.6% faster resolution times, while Freddy AI Agent achieved 65.7% ticket deflection rates, saving an estimated 431,270 hours of agent time annually, the benchmark report shows.

But AI in itself can’t bridge enterprise-wide service gaps when implementing ESM, noted Brown. “Organizations trying to AI their way out of broken systems are setting themselves up for more spectacular failures,” he warns. Success requires foundation-first approaches: Simplify processes, then strategically apply intelligence.

Jones recommended starting with an organization-wide service delivery process assessment, advising, “Complete a detailed assessment of what you currently have and then think about what’s nice to have, what do you want, where do you want to be?” He emphasized that ESM practices and platforms “will be the engine to getting you where you need to be.”

Brown envisioned ESM delivering the same organizational impact as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems did decades earlier. “I think where we are from a technical standpoint is where we were with ERP maybe 20 or 25 years ago,” he observed.

Just like ERP did in its early adoption, ESM can remove obstacles to employees not only doing their work but enjoying it, a benefit not only to them but the company as whole, said Brown.

The goal, he said, is to create organizations where “the work we’re doing is actually producing business value and not just bureaucracy. That’s how you move from effort to joy.”