Why Most Service Desks Are Still Broken—And What You Can Do About It

Inside a ServiceNow Knowledge 25 session that should be required listening for every IT Ops leader

Heinken BV Product Manager Tjebbe Jehee shared the company’s 5-year transformation journey to modernize its Global Service Desk, serving more than 100,000 users worldwide.

The cornerstone of this shift?

Eliminating email as a support channel.

This bold move dramatically increased Virtual Agent adoption and empowered more users to self-serve, reducing manual workloads and elevating overall service efficiency.

Below, you’ll see a detailed breakdown of what Heineken did and how you can apply these strategies to your Service Desk.

At Knowledge 25, we sat in on a session that revealed a deeper, more uncomfortable truth most IT leaders are quietly living with:

Your service desk might be digitized, but it’s still broken.

The session was led by Heinken’s BV Product Manager, Tjebbe Jehee Heineken—a seasoned professional who inherited a freshly “transformed” ITSM program. 

• Harmonized global processes? Check. 
• Centralized service desk? Check. 
• Fully deployed ServiceNow platform? Check.

But none of it mattered when reality hit.

“My phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Everyone was emailing. Everything was urgent. And no one knew what to do.”

It was his first week on the job. A job that, on paper, should have been a dream: take over a global service management engine that had just completed its multi-year standardization effort.

Instead, he walked into a firestorm.

Local IT teams were frustrated. The global service desk was overwhelmed. The outsourcing partner—tasked with delivery—was caught in a cycle of blame and burnout.

“There were accusations going back and forth. The partner said we were raising too many tickets. We said: ‘We hired you to fix it!’ But the contract wasn’t built to handle collaboration—it rewarded inertia.”

Every head in the room nodded in quiet recognition. 

Most leaders had lived it: invest in a new platform, roll out the processes—and still watch users default to email. Provisioning requests bounce between teams like a game of ticket ping-pong. And “automation” ends up meaning nothing more than a templated form no one wants to fill out.

That disconnect—between investment and reality—is the silent frustration lurking behind too many dashboards.

Here’s what this Heineken leader understood: the job isn’t just to keep the lights on. It’s to rebuild trust between the business and IT, between users and systems, and between people and the tools meant to support them.

“We had all the tools. But if people don’t use them—or can’t use them—it doesn’t matter. It’s not transformation. It’s just paperwork.”

And that’s the crux of it.

As an IT operations leader or service desk manager, you’ve probably spent the last few years ticking off all the right boxes. 

But if your teams are still buried in repetitive tickets, if your users are still bypassing your portals, and if your strategic partners feel more like adversaries… something’s off.

The good news? It’s fixable.

The better news? That session didn’t just lay out the problems. It laid out the path forward.

Here’s why your automation journey may be stalling—and what teams like Heineken did to change the game.

You Standardized the Platform. So Why Are You Still Firefighting?

You bought the tools. You unified the processes. You rolled out the change management plan.

And yet… the fires keep coming.

This is the harsh reality of modern IT operations: you can check every box for transformation and still find yourself in a reactive spiral.

At Knowledge 25, Tjebbe Jehee shared exactly what that looks like. His story wasn’t about failure. It was about the gap between systems and experience and how even the best-laid architecture can crumble without user-centric design.

“Every country had once run its own service desk. After harmonization, everyone was supposed to follow the same playbook. But it just wasn’t working.”

What he inherited was a textbook example of global IT transformation:

• A centralized service desk, fully outsourced to a managed partner
  
• A harmonized global process framework, replacing dozens of regional variations
  
• A modern ServiceNow deployment, built to scale
  

It looked flawless—on paper.

But from the moment he stepped into the role, the façade cracked.

“In my first two hours, my phone didn’t stop ringing. Users weren’t just frustrated—they were bypassing the entire system. Emails flooded in. Complaints escalated. No one trusted the platform.”

The culprit? Not the tools themselves but how those tools were implemented and experienced.

The portal was technically functional but functionally unusable. 

It asked users to self-diagnose configuration items, pick from thousands of app fields, and navigate jargon-laden forms. So they didn’t. They went around it. Straight to email. 

Meanwhile, the outsourced partner—meant to be a strategic ally—was stuck in a contract that discouraged innovation. Each side felt the pain, but neither could justify investing more because the benefits were so lopsided.

“We were in a lose-lose. Any improvements we made just helped the other party look better. The incentives were wrong. And the result was finger-pointing, not forward momentum.”

It’s more common than you think.

Tools rolled out but collecting dust, contracts signed without confidence, teams “aligned” in theory but disconnected in reality. The result? Wasted spend, stalled progress, and growing frustration across the board.

It’s systemic.

And it raises a brutal but necessary question for every IT ops leader:

Have you truly transformed? Or have you just digitized a broken model?

Until you answer that honestly, you’ll keep firefighting. No matter how clean your architecture diagram looks.

The Front Door Is Broken—and It’s Costing You Trust

Most IT leaders don’t think their biggest issue is the portal.

But it often is.

Because the portal is the front door to your service organization. And when that front door is confusing, clunky, or outdated, your users don’t walk through it—they walk around it.

That’s exactly what happened at Heineken.

The global service management lead showed us what users actually saw when they tried to log an issue: a screen asking them to choose from over 2,000 applications. And then?

A follow-up question: “Which configuration item do you think is impacted?”

“We were losing people at step one. Ninety percent abandoned the portal right there. The other ten? We lost them on the next screen.”

This is what broken trust looks like in IT.

From a design standpoint, the system worked. From a human standpoint, it failed.

And when people don’t trust the portal to help them, they default to the path of least resistance—email, DMs, or calling someone they know. That’s when the real damage begins:

• Your data gets messy and incomplete
  
• Tickets get routed incorrectly or not at all
  
• Your service desk becomes a triage ward instead of a resolution engine

Even though Heineken had a skilled outsourcing partner running the desk, the contractual model was fundamentally flawed.

“Any improvements we made—like reducing ticket volume—benefited the vendor. If they invested in automation, we reaped the rewards. No one wanted to act first.”

This created what economists call a misaligned incentive structure. Both parties were trapped. The business wanted efficiency. The vendor wanted predictable volume. And neither side had the margin or mandate to break the cycle.

So the front door stayed broken. The ticket volume stayed high. And the relationship stayed tense.

This is the trap so many IT operations leaders fall into. 

You’ve deployed best-in-class technology. But if the human experience is misaligned—and if the incentives between stakeholders aren’t clear—you’re not solving problems. You’re just shuffling them around.

You Can’t Scale What Users Won’t Use

When your users stop trusting the system, everything else starts to unravel.

Broken intake doesn’t just lead to poor user experience; it cripples your ability to scale, automate, and improve. Because without clean, structured input, your downstream processes become reactive and unreliable.

At Heineken, the impact of this was both immediate and far-reaching.

With users abandoning the portal and defaulting to email, the service desk was overrun, not just with tickets, but with noise. Vague requests. Incomplete information. Escalations with no context. Service agents were forced to play translator, detective, and therapist—often in that order—before any actual work could begin.

“Users would send emails like, ‘Fix it. It’s broken.’ That’s all. And the service desk would have to go back and forth just to figure out what app they meant.”

This doesn’t just slow down resolution times. It corrodes the service experience.

Every minute spent clarifying a ticket is a minute not spent solving it. And over time, that creates a service model that feels slow, opaque, and frustrating for users and agents.

But here’s the more dangerous consequence: bad data becomes baked into the system.

If your ticket metadata is wrong because users are bypassing structured intake you can’t properly:

• Automate workflows
  
• Route to the right teams
  
• Measure performance
  
• Identify repeatable patterns
  
• Justify ROI on your platform investment
  

Worse, it undermines any attempts at predictive modeling or AI augmentation down the line. You’re feeding intelligent systems with unintelligent input. Garbage in, garbage out.

And let’s not forget your strategic vendors.

In the Heineken case, the outsourcing partner was measured on ticket volume and SLA compliance. But when 75% of those tickets were avoidable or misrouted, what did SLA performance actually mean?

“The partner was doing what they were contracted to do—but not what the business needed them to do.”

That’s the quiet killer in modern IT operations: when contracts are optimized for volume, not value.

You get activity. But not progress.

And no matter how many dashboards or reports you generate, you’re still stuck in reactive mode, running a factory instead of enabling a business.

What Leading IT Teams Are Doing Differently

Let’s be clear: fixing a broken service desk doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means fixing what people experience, not just what you’ve architected.

And that’s what makes Heineken’s story so instructive. They didn’t rip and replace their systems. Heineken redesigned how they were used.

They started by identifying one central truth: if users are bypassing your system, the system has to change, not the users.

Here’s what they did and what you can learn from it:

They Rebuilt the Front Door for Humans, Not Admins

“We replaced 2,000 app fields with two simple inputs: title and description. Predictive intelligence took care of the rest.”

Instead of expecting users to know what a configuration item was—or scroll through endless drop-downs—they used ServiceNow’s machine learning to analyze plain language and map it to the correct application, service, or offering.

The result? Users stayed in the system. And because the input was cleaner, automation became viable downstream.

Takeaway: If your portal looks like a tax form, users will never use it. Prioritize simplicity, then use AI to do the heavy lifting.

They Let Virtual Agents Handle the Easy Stuff

“We built a virtual agent that could handle over 100 use cases and supported users in languages we’d never staffed for.”

Heineken introduced a digital worker, a branded virtual agent that started small (ticket status checks, basic Q&A) and grew into a frontline assistant for everything from VPN issues to device requests.

And most importantly, it didn’t dead-end users. If the bot couldn’t help, it routed them to a human, with full context and conversation history attached.

Takeaway: Your virtual agent isn’t just a chatbot. It’s tier 0 support. Train it like a team member. Promote it like a product.

They Automated the Known, Predictable, and Painfully Repetitive

One of their biggest breakthroughs wasn’t glamorous—but it was brilliant: connecting their HR system (myHR) to ServiceNow to automate joiner, mover, and leaver tasks.

“We saved 20,000 hours per year by predicting who needs a laptop, a phone, or nothing at all—before the manager even raised a request.”

Instead of relying on people to submit the right tickets at the right time, they used logic based on job title, department, and country to automate device provisioning, vendor coordination, and user access.

Takeaway: If it happens more than 100 times a year, you shouldn’t be handling it manually.

They Moved Work from People to Systems—and from Systems to Other Systems

Heineken didn’t just automate within ServiceNow. They automated across platforms.

Take Active Directory (AD). Instead of assigning agents to add users to groups manually, ServiceNow triggered AD to do it automatically. 

For tasks that required legacy systems or older interfaces, they deployed bots via UiPath to complete workflows after request approval without an agent ever opening a screen.

Takeaway: Don’t stop at automating steps. Automate handoffs. Move tasks into the systems that already know how to execute.

They Did the Unthinkable: Shut Down the Email Channel

“We just… closed it. No more emails. And guess what? Nobody freaked out.”

With a modern intake process and virtual agent in place, they cut the cord. Email was no longer a supported channel.

They promoted Microsoft Teams as a primary entry point, increased the visibility of the virtual agent, and trained users in the new flow. 

In just 3 months, they saw:

• 5x increase in virtual agent usage
  
• 10% of all user requests now flowing through the digital worker
  
• 75% of those resolved without escalation
  
• User satisfaction went up, not down
  

Takeaway: If you want behavior to change, you have to change the defaults. Promote the right channels. Then, be brave enough to turn off the wrong ones.

“It’s Not Just About Efficiency. It’s About Trust.”

That was one of the closing thoughts from the Heineken leader—and it stuck with us.

Because this isn’t just about AI, or bots, or integration. It’s about credibility.

“When you automate well, you don’t just save time. You rebuild confidence. You create a system people want to use—not one they feel stuck with.”

That’s the real payoff.

Not lower ticket volume. Not just faster resolution. But a service experience that works, earns trust, and scales with your business.

And you don’t need a massive budget or team to do it. You just need a mindset shift—from enforcing policy to enabling experience.

How to Apply this to Your Service Desk

Even if you’re not Heineken, the blueprint still holds. Start here:

Here’s how to get started:

Fix Your Intake: The Portal Is the Experience

If your portal still feels like a tax form or a maze of drop-downs, it’s broken. Period.

Today’s users expect the same simplicity from IT that they get from Google or Amazon. If they hit friction—especially at the first step—they’ll default to email, Slack, or direct calls. And when that happens, you lose visibility, accountability, and data integrity.

Start here:

• Strip your intake form down to the bare minimum
  
• Implement predictive intelligence to handle categorization
  
• Use clear, conversational language (not “CI impacted”)
  
• Design it mobile-first—because that’s how many users will access it
  

👉 Remember: Complexity behind the scenes is fine. But the front end should be intuitive—even delightful.

Find Your Repeatables: Automate What Happens Every Day

If you look closely, you’ll find repeatable, low-value tasks that show up day after day, week after week, requests that are consistent, predictable, and ripe for automation.

Onboarding. VPN. Password resets. Device provisioning. Access permissions.

These aren’t “issues”—they’re business processes that got dumped into your support queue.

What to do:

• Map your top 20 ticket types by volume
  
• Identify which ones follow the same pattern 80%+ of the time
  
• Use logic-based workflows, HR integrations, or bots to preempt them
  
• If possible, eliminate the need for users to raise tickets at all
  

👉 Pro tip: Meet with your HR and Facilities teams. They often create more tickets than they realize.

Treat Your Virtual Agent Like a New Hire

Most organizations launch a virtual agent like it’s an FAQ bot. Then wonder why no one uses it.

A good virtual agent should be trained, nurtured, promoted, and evaluated like a real employee. It should grow with the organization—and take a real load off your human team.

How to level up:

• Start with 5–10 high-volume, low-complexity use cases
  
• Include handoff logic to escalate to a human when needed
  
• Promote the agent in your channels (Teams, Slack, intranet)
  
• Monitor performance monthly and add new intents iteratively
  
• Make it multilingual if you serve a global team
  

👉 Your digital agent isn’t an add-on. It’s Tier 0. Treat it like a strategic teammate.

Audit Your Partner Model: Incentivize the Outcomes You Want

If you’ve outsourced your service desk or key IT functions, ask yourself: does the contract reward outcomes or volume?

In Heineken’s case, neither party wanted to invest in improvement because the structure was lopsided. Fixing the system meant less revenue for one and more cost for the other.

Here’s how to spot misalignment:

• Are you paying per ticket instead of per resolution or satisfaction?
  
• Do improvements reduce your partner’s revenue without benefit?
  
• Is there a roadmap clause? A shared success model?
  
• Is your vendor rewarded for reducing ticket volume?
  

If not, it’s time to renegotiate or revisit the relationship with more transparency and mutual accountability.

Kill One Legacy Channel: Make a Bold, Symbolic Move

Sometimes, change management needs a moment of boldness.

Heineken shut down email. You might not be ready for that. But you can take one symbolic step that shows your team—and your users—that the old ways won’t get us to the next level.

Ideas to consider:

• Retire a shared inbox
  
• Disable Slack or Teams DMs to support staff
  
• Redirect all tickets through your virtual agent or portal
  
• Set up auto-responses that coach users into the right flow
  
• Create a visible “countdown” campaign to signal the shift
  

The key is to pair this with enablement. Make sure the new experience is easier, smarter, and faster. Then shout about it.

👉 Bold moves drive adoption when backed by empathy and design.

Ready to Build a Smarter Service Desk?

You don’t need another tool. You need a partner who can bridge the gaps between technology, people, and processes.

At Astreya, we work with IT leaders to streamline operations, align support with business goals, and reduce the daily friction that holds teams back. We focus on customer experience and user adoption to create lasting impact.

Whether you’re optimizing your current service desk, scaling support globally, or looking to get more from platforms like ServiceNow—we’re here to help you move forward with confidence.

Let’s explore how we can modernize your support model and deliver the kind of service your users and customers actually want to use.

📅 Let’s talk Service Desk→