If your organization has opted-in to Benchmarks, you probably know that the up-to-date monthly Benchmarks peer comparison report is available right in your Instance to help you improve your service and process performance. But have you wondered, "How can I make these Benchmarks reports more useful?"
Or maybe you clicked on this post out of curiosity, wondering "What in the heck are Benchmarks?"
In either case, we've got you covered! In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we look at the basics of Benchmarks in our Benchmarks Part 1 | Overview video below, then Manjeet Singh provides a run-down of best practices that can help you get the most out of your Benchmarks peer comparison report. And don't miss the additional resources listed at the end of this post to learn more.
Best practice #1: Align your instance KPI definitions to get apple-to-apple comparisons
You get standard Benchmarks KPI definitions as part of your ServiceNow release, starting with Jakarta. Customizing KPI conditions is useful for adjusting the criteria to more accurately represent the data that your company is interested in. For example, if your implementation doesn't use priority 1 incidents, you can change the criteria for high priority KPIs from 1 to 0, which returns more accurate data for your organization.
You can see the KPI definition from two places within the product:
- Benchmarks Dashboard Page: Click on a KPI to go to Performance Trend page – Expand the “Definition” to see the detailed KPI definition.
- Benchmark Setup Page: Select a KPI – Click on Pencil Icon – the “description” field shows the KPI definition and the formula used.
Now, to align your KPI definition as per your implementation, go to Benchmarks – Setup, go to a KPI, click on the pencil Icon and edit the KPI conditions to match your implementation. Once the change is saved, you can see the updated data in the next monthly data refresh cycle.
Best practice #2: Provide Benchmarks roles to interested stakeholders in your organization
Ask yourself, "Who are the people in my organization interested in knowing how we are doing compared to other organizations in our industry, or same size companies, or companies in the same geolocation?" Then provide those people with an appropriate Benchmarks role.
The Benchmarks App comes with three roles: BM Admin, Viewer, and Recommendation Viewer. Users assigned these roles get notifications when new monthly data is available, and can look at the latest available Benchmarks recommendations for improvement ideas. This information can facilitate meaningful data-driven conversations.
- Benchmarks Viewer (sn_bm_client.benchmark_data_viewer) - Users with this role can view full benchmark reports and trends, as well as download reports in the Service Portal.
- Benchmark Recommendation Viewer (sn_bm_client.benchmark_recommendation_viewer) - Assign this role to people responsible for, or interested in, improving service KPI performance.
Best practice #3: Use the trends chart drill down feature to understand root cause of poorly performing KPIs
You can drill down on a benchmark value from the KPI performance trends chart to view the individual data that makes up that value. For example, you may want to drill down and investigate data that is presented as a value in red (lower performance) on the chart.
Go to Benchmarks -- Dashboard, and click a KPI to see the trend. To drill down further into the Performance Analytics scorecard, click a value in your benchmark data on the performance trends chart.
Best practice #4: Use the Industry-based best practice recommendations
Industry-based proven best practice recommendations are provided in the KPI performance trend view to help improve the performance of your KPIs. All recommendations are dynamic, ranked by contextual importance and are updated monthly, based on data analyzed from the previous month.
You can create an Improvement initiative with one click from a recommendation and submit it to the improvement register available in the Continual Improvement Management application.
Haven't opted-in to Benchmarks yet?
All ServiceNow customers on Jakarta and beyond are allowed to participate in the Benchmarks program by opting-in from their Production Instance. Non-Production Instances are not allowed to opt-in to Benchmarks. The Benchmarks offering is available to all ServiceNow customers at no extra cost. You can decide to opt-out anytime.
For more information
Here are additional Resources to learn more:
- Benchmarks Part 2 | Getting Started (NOWsupport YouTube video)
- Benchmarks (product documentation)
- Benchmarks Frequently Asked Questions (KB article on HI)
- Webinar: Continual Service Improvement using Benchmarks (ServiceNow Community)
- Benchmarks Podcast (ServiceNow Community)
Also see these relevant blogs on the ServiceNow Community:
- Use real-time Benchmarking to identify gaps and improve service performance
- Joy Of Benchmarks
- New KPIs and Cross-Platform Functionality
- Got 2 minutes? Why not improve your service KPI performance
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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We've found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.
To access all of the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.
