Workers bypass IT support as survey exposes hidden gaps

Buchanan Technologies has published survey findings pointing to a gap between standard IT support metrics and employees' actual experience of workplace technology issues. The study found that many workers do not report problems to IT support.

The company surveyed 850 employed US non-IT office workers through Pollfish, limiting responses to people who had contacted workplace IT support within the previous three months. The results suggest service desk measures such as response and resolution times may miss a substantial share of day-to-day friction because many issues never enter the ticketing system.

Among the headline findings, 82% of respondents said they had decided an IT problem was not worth reporting, while half said they made that decision more than half the time. The survey also found that 92% had done at least one of three things that leave support records incomplete or inaccurate: skipped reporting an issue, used their own tool or artificial intelligence instead of IT, or filed a duplicate ticket.

The pattern extended beyond isolated behaviour. Some 78% said they had done at least two of those things, suggesting workers often move between formal support channels and their own workarounds.

Self-service was a notable feature of the results. The survey found that 72% had used their own tool or AI instead of IT support, and 26% described that as their usual response.

The findings also pointed to a gap between ticket status and employee perceptions of whether an issue was actually fixed. According to the survey, 80% said they had experienced a ticket being marked as resolved while they believed the problem remained. Nearly a quarter of that group said they were still relying on a workaround or had abandoned the issue.

The effects described by respondents extended into work output and personal time. Two-thirds said they had lost personal time because of an unresolved IT problem, while 56% said they had missed a deadline or deliverable.

Quality over speed

Buchanan's data suggests workers place more value on the quality and reliability of support than on raw speed. Some 94% chose at least one experience-related improvement, while only 6% selected faster response and resolution on its own.

The survey also found that confidence in IT teams remained relatively high. Some 81% of respondents said they were completely or fairly confident their IT support team would solve their problems, indicating the issue may lie more in process visibility than in how workers view support staff.

That distinction matters for IT leaders who often use operational dashboards as a proxy for service quality. If employees choose not to log minor problems, solve them independently, or accept ticket closures that do not hold, management data may present a cleaner picture than workers actually experience.

Another source of friction appears during handovers. More than half of respondents, 55%, said they have to explain a problem from scratch most or every time an issue moves from a chatbot to a person or between support tiers.

Mike Werblun, chief executive officer of Buchanan Technologies, said the survey points to process issues rather than a simple lack of faith in support teams. "When employees tell us they trust their IT team and still work around it, that usually says more about the process than the people," Werblun said.

He added that those individual choices can build into a broader organisational problem. "Every workaround is a small decision someone made because the official route felt slower, and those decisions add up across a company. The organizations that get ahead of this are the ones that ask employees how support actually went, then use those answers to decide what to fix first," he said.

Measurement debate

The results come as companies look for broader ways to assess technology support beyond traditional service desk measures. Buchanan argued that organisations should combine service level agreements with experience level agreements to better capture whether support is helping staff complete their work.

The approach reflects a wider debate in corporate IT over whether ticket-based measures tell the full story. Fast response times and high closure rates can indicate efficiency in handling logged requests, but they do not show how many problems staff never report, how often they resort to personal tools, or whether a closed issue stays solved.

For businesses, the survey points to a blind spot in support operations: problems that remain outside formal records but still affect productivity. The central finding is that a healthy dashboard may coexist with a strained employee experience, especially when workers decide it is easier to work around technology problems than to open or reopen a ticket.