Different people in your company have different goals, and they take different actions to achieve them. ServiceNow’s Performance Analytics product gets the right information to each of them, right on time, so they know the effects of their actions and their progress toward their goals. And now a pair of new videos explains how.
In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we’ll give you an overview of the basics of Performance Analytics and show you where you can learn more.
To cut straight to the videos, start with Introduction to Performance Analytics on our NOWsupport YouTube channel.
Goals and actions
Before we look at Performance Analytics, let’s take a look at the business context it operates in.
Achieving a business goal often takes actions by people at different levels in the company working together, like an executive who defines a strategy for achieving the goal, a process owner who decides on specific actions to carry out that strategy, and front-line workers who perform those actions.
For example, suppose the VP of IT wants to raise the customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) for the company’s incident management process. The owner of the incident process might decide on specific actions to achieve that goal, like increasing first-call resolution, reducing mean time to resolve (MTTR), and reducing reassignments.
Those actions for the incident process owner become goals for the technicians who handle incidents. And they’ll take different actions to achieve those goals. For example, to reduce MTTR, they might reduce the reopen count, reduce incidents not worked on for more than five days, and reduce incidents more than 30 days old.
Introducing Performance Analytics
How does Performance Analytics fit into the picture? Performance Analytics measures the results of the actions by the people at each level over time and delivers that information to each person—usually current to within one day—so they can all see how they’re doing.
Performance Analytics tracks these results using indicators, which are measurements of specific aspects of your business. In our example, the VP would use an indicator for CSAT. The process owner would use indicators for first-call resolution, MTTR, and reassignments. And the technicians would use reopen count, incidents not worked on for more than five days, and incidents more than 30 days old.
Performance Analytics measures these indicators at regular intervals, typically every day. These indicator scores show past and current performance, and Performance Analytics uses patterns in the scores to forecast future performance.
Performance Analytics displays this indicator data in widgets, visualizations that help you understand the data, like line and bar charts. These widgets appear on dashboards that are tailored to specific types of users. For our example, here’s a dashboard for the IT exec, including the CSAT score, target, and recent change.
Here’s a dashboard for the incident process owner, with first-call resolution, MTTR, and re-assignments.
And here’s a dashboard for the technicians, with unassigned incidents, active incidents, and workload.
By delivering this information to the people at each level in near-real time, Performance Analytics shows them the results of their actions and helps them adjust their actions to improve their results.
For more information
To learn more about Performance Analytics, check out these resources:
Performance Analytics video playlist
Performance Analytics product documentation
Get Started with Performance Analytics Success Playbook on the Customer Success Center
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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to deliver 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 the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.
