Use real-time benchmarking to identify gaps and improve service performance

[Manjeet Singh]

ServiceNow Benchmarks helps you measure and compare the performance of your key KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) with peers. But how do you use Benchmarking report data and turn it into actionable information?

I will explore two scenarios below to give you an idea on how you can use ServiceNow Benchmarks to identify gaps and do further analysis to continuously increase service performance opportunities.

Two ways Benchmarks can be leveraged to help improve your service performance

1. Scenario #1: Company A, who is struggling to improve their key KPI performance. Let's call it a Struggling Company.
2. Scenario #2: Company B, who is able to improve the performance on some KPIs in last 6 months. Let's call it an Improving Company.

Scenario #1. Using leading and lagging indicators approach for analysis

Let's look at monthly Benchmarks snapshot of company A below. Clearly, the performance of priority KPIs are pretty bad and this company is struggling to improve its service performance.

How Company A can improve its service performance

We can diagnose the performance gap on the KPIs above if we understand what the cause and effect relationship between leading and lagging KPIs are.

Leading KPIs, are forward looking KPIs that can be used to identify process bottlenecks and pre-empt performance degradation. Lagging KPIs, are the end indicators whose performance is impacting the leading KPI. Understanding the linkage between leading and lagging KPIs is enormously powerful because it enables you to diagnose what is going on in any Benchmarking scenario.

Here is the part that I think is the most compelling — if you are a ServiceNow customer, you not only have access to the integrated Benchmark data in your Instance, but you have access to a complimentary version of Performance Analytics.

If you aren't already leveraging it — here's how. Use Performance Analytics to identify key leading and lagging process indicators that will help you build meaningful dashboards for root cause and relationship analysis.

In case of company A, the diagnosis revealed the following:    

• Categories are not defined correctly, which is causing wrong assignments.
• Lack of experience in tech staff because of high turnover and new employees.
• SLAs are not defined to handle high priority incidents in a timely manner.
• Poor quality of CMDB - % of duplicate and stale CI is very high.
• Knowledge is not properly maintained and used — incident deflection is not happening.

Remediation action in case of company A:

• Provide training to improve first call resolution
• Implement SLA and escalations to handle Incidents and request
• Work on improving quality of Knowledge and CMDB
• Focus on immediate request fulfillment using Self Service and Automation.

Scenario#2: Identifying why gaps exist and what can be improved

This is the Monthly Benchmarks reports for Company B. This company's KPI performance has been improved in last 6 months.

In case of company B, the Diagnosis using Performance Analytics revealed the following:

• Number of reopen count is high, which is impacting Incident MTTR.
• The number of new incidents not updated in last 7 days count is high.
• The number of requests are getting filed as incidents number is high.
• Problem management is not used to handle incidents which need root cause analysis.

Here is possible remediation action in case of company A:

• Reduce the number of reassignments.
• Avoid re-open tickets. Provide training to service desk staff as needed.
• Focus on improving MMTR to reach a goal of below 120 minutes.
• Focus on immediate request fulfillment using Self Service and Automation.
• Keep doing what you are doing which has helped you improve in last 6 months.

What we have seen in above Company A and Company B scenario is that Benchmarks are not just about comparing and looking at performance gaps. Benchmarks is about diagnosing why the gaps exist and doing something about it. Diagnosis and prescription naturally follow measurement and comparison. Measurement is a starting point of Benchmarking. Comparison with a peer group is the second step, then diagnosing and prescribing to remedy the issue is last.

If you have real time benchmarking at your fingertips then this type of measurement, comparison, diagnosis and comparison is really simple. When you optimize, you are taking out inefficiencies in support service and improving your customer satisfaction score.

It's always good to see an organization using Benchmarks to improve their operational performance.

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