Sign-In Problems Are Primary Drivers of Help Desk Tickets, Study Finds -- Campus Technology

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Sign-In Problems Are Primary Drivers of Help Desk Tickets, Study Finds

By Sean Parker
11/09/26

Sign-in problems account for up to 53% of help desk tickets at individual enterprises, but network issues can take significantly longer to resolve, according to a new report from ControlUp.

Analyzing 1,069,110 help desk tickets, the IT operations company identified password resets, account lockouts, and multifactor authentication (MFA) issues as major drivers of support demand.

At one large enterprise, account-related tickets took a median of 11 minutes to resolve, compared with 50 hours for network problems. Meanwhile, 87% of network and phone tickets were reassigned between teams, compared with 20% of account tickets.

MFA enrollment and re-enrollment problems appeared at 40% of organizations, with one in five linking these issues to employees replacing or upgrading their phones. Virtual desktop problems appeared at 55% of organizations analyzed.

Traditional phone support remained a major channel for IT assistance.

Among organizations that recorded how support requests were submitted, 57% reported that phone calls accounted for approximately two-thirds or more of contacts. At one organization, that figure reached 99%.

Machine-generated tickets from monitoring, security, backup, and patching systems appeared at half of the organizations studied. At 15%, automated tickets represented between 25% and 50% of all requests.

The research covered enterprises across retail, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, construction, energy, and IT services.

ControlUp said the findings highlight the need to evaluate recurring problems and their operational impact rather than relying solely on ticket volume and resolution speed.

"IT organizations have traditionally measured support performance by how quickly they close tickets, but that doesn't tell the whole story," said Simon Townsend, senior vice president of marketing and office of the CTO at ControlUp.

"A password reset that takes a few minutes and an infrastructure failure that disrupts an entire location shouldn't carry the same operational weight."

For more information, visit the ControlUp site.

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