In today’s digital-first business environment, IT support and maintenance has evolved far beyond troubleshooting and break-fix operations. This critical business function now sits at the intersection of technology enablement, operational excellence, and customer satisfaction. For senior executives overseeing IT operations, the challenge has shifted from simply keeping systems running to leveraging support functions as strategic assets that directly impact business performance and customer loyalty. Recent research demonstrates that organizations prioritizing exceptional experiences—both for customers and employees—are seeing measurable improvements in key metrics including retention rates, operational efficiency, and profitability.
The Evolution of IT Support: Past to Present
The evolution of IT support has been remarkable over the past two decades. What began as a purely reactive function focused on addressing technical problems has transformed into a strategic capability that can significantly influence business outcomes. In the early 2000s, the introduction of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) frameworks brought structure and process orientation to IT service management, but still maintained a primarily internal focus.
By the 2010s, as businesses became increasingly dependent on technology for core operations, IT support gained prominence but was still widely viewed as a necessary cost center. The prevailing mindset among executives was cost containment and standardization—keeping support expenses as low as possible while maintaining acceptable service levels.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the next phase of evolution, as remote work demands created unprecedented pressure on IT support functions. Organizations that had previously underinvested in modern support capabilities suddenly found themselves struggling to maintain business continuity. This watershed moment highlighted the strategic importance of robust, resilient IT support systems that could adapt to rapidly changing business conditions.
Today in 2025, the most successful organizations have completely reimagined IT support and maintenance. Rather than viewing it as an expense to minimize, forward-thinking executives recognize it as a strategic lever that directly impacts customer satisfaction, employee productivity, and ultimately, business performance. This shift has been driven by compelling evidence that connecting technical support excellence with broader customer and employee experience initiatives yields substantial returns.
Key Challenges and Experience-Driven Solutions
Siloed Data and Fragmented Systems
The modern IT landscape is characterized by a complex web of applications, platforms, and systems that often operate in isolation from one another. This fragmentation creates significant challenges for both support teams and the customers they serve. Research indicates that 76% of customer service agents feel overwhelmed by disconnected systems and information they must navigate to resolve a single customer inquiry. For customers, this manifests as frustrating experiences where they must repeatedly provide the same information or endure prolonged resolution times while agents switch between multiple databases.
These disconnected systems also create significant business impacts beyond customer frustration. In high-churn industries like telecommunications, 75% of customer complaints stem from issues related to billing errors and complex service setups caused by fragmented systems. Each of these negative interactions increases the likelihood of customer defection, directly impacting revenue retention and growth.
By adopting a customer experience-centered approach to system integration, organizations can address these challenges while simultaneously improving operational metrics. The implementation of unified customer data platforms that integrate CRM systems with support ticketing databases creates a 360-degree customer view, ensuring all teams work from the same comprehensive data. This integration dramatically improves first-contact resolution rates while reducing the cognitive load on support personnel, leading to both improved customer and employee experiences.
Customer Churn and Retention Management
Today, customer retention has become a critical driver of profitability. According to McKinsey research, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95% in high-touch industries. For IT support organizations, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity—support interactions often occur at moments of customer frustration, making them critical touchpoints that can either cement loyalty or accelerate departure.
Analysis shows that in SaaS businesses, the speed of issue resolution often has a greater impact on renewal rates than pricing. This highlights the direct line between operational support metrics like mean time to resolution (MTTR) and business outcomes like customer lifetime value. Furthermore, fragmented service experiences contribute to an estimated $75 billion in annual losses within the U.S. economy.
Organizations that recognize this connection are implementing experience-driven investment strategies that analyze which specific aspects of customer experience most strongly drive loyalty and prioritize investments in those areas. By deploying predictive analytics models that identify at-risk customers before they churn, support teams can enable proactive intervention strategies rather than waiting for cancellation calls. Companies implementing such proactive support models report churn reductions of up to 15% within the first year of implementation.
AI Adoption and Workforce Transformation
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies presents both tremendous opportunities and significant challenges for IT support organizations. Gartner predicted that by 2024 (which is now the recent past as we’re in 2025), AI will handle 30% of all B2B customer support requests. While the potential efficiency gains are compelling, the human element of this transformation cannot be overlooked.
Organizations are discovering that the most effective approach is not wholesale replacement of human agents with AI, but rather thoughtful integration that amplifies human capabilities. Companies using generative AI are 35% less likely to report agents being overwhelmed by information during customer interactions1. These AI-augmented support approaches help agents find information faster, automate follow-up work, and reduce tab-switching between multiple systems.
The experience impact of well-implemented AI systems is substantial—they can resolve up to 48% of queries without human intervention, enabling companies to save 30% in support costs while simultaneously improving satisfaction metrics. However, achieving these results requires a fundamental rethinking of both customer and employee experiences. Organizations that focus on using AI to enhance rather than replace human agents make support jobs more rewarding and improve employee retention, creating a virtuous cycle where satisfied employees deliver superior customer experiences.
Strategic Implementation for Executives
Implement Unified Experience Management
For executives looking to transform their IT support function from cost center to value driver, implementing a comprehensive experience management approach provides a strategic framework. This goes beyond traditional customer satisfaction measurements to create an integrated view of both customer and employee experience metrics that can drive decision-making across the organization.
The first step is deploying experience management software that gathers customer feedback across multiple channels (email, web, support calls) and triggers alerts for immediate follow-up to prevent churn. This technology foundation must be paired with organizational structures that break down traditional silos between technical support, customer success, and product development teams.
Successful implementations establish cross-functional experience councils with executive sponsorship, ensuring that insights from support interactions directly inform product improvements and service design. These councils should regularly review key experience metrics alongside business performance indicators, helping the organization understand how investments in experience improvement translate to tangible business results.
Even modest improvements in service channel integration could boost markets like U.S. telecom by an estimated $12 billion annually through improved retention and reduced operational inefficiency. For individual organizations, this represents a significant opportunity to gain competitive advantage through experience differentiation.
Develop Human-Centered AI Support Models
As AI capabilities continue to advance, executives must make strategic decisions about how to integrate these technologies into their support ecosystems. Rather than viewing AI implementation primarily as a cost-reduction initiative, the most successful organizations are taking a human-centered approach that focuses on augmenting both employee and customer experiences.
This strategy begins with identifying the right use cases for automation—typically high-volume, repetitive tasks where AI can provide consistent, accurate responses. By removing these routine interactions from human agents’ workloads, organizations can simultaneously improve resolution speed for customers while allowing agents to focus on more complex, satisfying work that requires empathy and critical thinking.
The implementation should include robust change management programs that help support personnel understand how AI will enhance rather than threaten their roles. Training programs should focus on developing the uniquely human skills that complement AI capabilities—emotional intelligence, complex problem-solving, and relationship building.
Businesses implementing well-designed AI solutions see 38.7% improvement in resolution time and 42.37% improvement in customer satisfaction scores. These gains come not just from automating simple queries but from fundamentally transforming how human agents work by reducing cognitive load and administrative burden, allowing them to focus their energy on delivering exceptional customer experiences.
The Future Landscape (2025-2028)
Looking ahead to the next three years, several key trends will shape the evolution of IT support and maintenance. First, we’ll see a continued shift from reactive to proactive and ultimately predictive support models. Advances in machine learning and system monitoring capabilities will enable organizations to identify and address potential issues before they impact customers, fundamentally changing the nature of the support function.
The integration of customer experience and operational data will accelerate, creating unified intelligence platforms that provide real-time insights across the entire customer journey. These platforms will break down remaining silos between traditional IT metrics like system availability and customer-centric metrics like effort score and loyalty, providing executives with comprehensive dashboards that directly connect technical performance to business outcomes.
We’ll also witness the emergence of hyper-personalized support experiences tailored to individual customer preferences and behaviors. The combination of rich customer data, advanced analytics, and flexible service delivery models will enable support organizations to deliver the right level of assistance through the right channel at precisely the right moment—whether that’s self-service, AI-assisted guidance, or high-touch human support.
Perhaps most significantly, the distinction between IT support and broader customer success functions will continue to blur. As technology becomes even more deeply embedded in every aspect of business operations, technical support will be increasingly recognized as a critical component of the overall customer experience strategy rather than a separate operational function.
Taking Action: Your Next Steps
The transformation of IT support from cost center to strategic value driver represents a significant opportunity for senior executives. To begin capitalizing on this opportunity, consider these immediate actions:
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- Conduct an experience audit that maps the current state of both customer and employee journeys through your support organization, identifying critical friction points and disconnects.
- Establish clear metrics that connect support performance to business outcomes like retention, expansion revenue, and customer lifetime value.
- Create a cross-functional innovation team charged with reimagining support processes from an experience-first perspective rather than a technology or cost-efficiency lens.
- Develop a strategic roadmap for AI implementation that balances automation opportunities with human experience enhancement.
The organizations that will thrive in the coming years are those that recognize IT support as not merely a technical function but as a strategic asset that directly impacts customer loyalty and business growth. By investing in the technologies, processes, and people that deliver exceptional experiences, you position your organization to not only meet today’s expectations but to establish competitive differentiation that drives sustainable success.
