Service Desk Benchmarking Peer Group Selection

How Does YOUR Service Desk Stack Up?

Part 3: Service Desk Benchmarking Peer Group Selection

How to Ensure a Fair, Apples-to-Apples Comparison of
Your Service Desk Benchmarking Data

Introduction

The first question we often hear from Service Desk that wants to join a MetricNet benchmarking consortium is “How many companies do you have in your database from my industry?” An equally common question is “Do you have companies ABC, and XYZ in your database?” Both of these questions assume that a valid Service Desk benchmark must include only companies from your specific industry. Sometimes this assumption is accurate, but oftentimes it is not. The fact is, there are many other factors besides industry affiliation that are more important – sometimes far more important – when selecting a peer group for benchmarking comparison.

Service Desks can improve their overall performance based on internal benchmarks alone, but will eventually experience diminishing returns in their improvement efforts unless they look outside their own organizations. It is in comparing themselves to peers that they can put their results into context, and begin to experience “breakthrough” improvements. For example, a Service Desk may take pride in reducing its cost per call by 10%, but not realize that their peers are still 30% lower in cost!. Your Service Desk performance is therefore best examined in light of comparisons to appropriate peer groups. This begs the question of what is an appropriate peer group…one that ensures a fair, apples-to-apples comparison of your Service Desk?

From 30 plus years of benchmarking experience and more than 1,000 Service Desk benchmarks, MetricNet has developed a proprietary technique called Dynamic Peer Group Selection™ that ensures a fair and accurate benchmark of your Service Desk. Here, for the first time, MetricNet explains the process, and provides an approach for selecting a valid peer group for your benchmark.

Reality Check

Let us start by debunking a couple of common myths about benchmarking. This is important because it sets the stage for how to select your benchmark peer group.