Service Desk Benchmarking Defined

How Does YOUR Service Desk Stack Up?

Part 1: Benchmarking Defined

How World-Class Service Desks Use Benchmarking to
Continuously Improve Their Performance

Introduction

Benchmarking is a well-established tool for measuring and managing Service Desk performance. Effective benchmarking enables you to quantify the performance of your Service Desk, compare your Service Desk to others in your industry, identify performance gaps, and define the actions necessary to close the gaps.

The power of benchmarking is that it enables a company’s Service Desk to save enormous amounts of time and energy by building upon the know how of its peers, competitors and world-class companies. Service Desks that are focused exclusively on their internal operations tend to make progress at an evolutionary pace. But, benchmarking forces an organization to look externally – at the competition. By studying the competition, and selectively adopting practices from the best-of-the-best, Service Desks that successfully employ benchmarking are able to improve their performance at a revolutionary pace.

In this article, MetricNet, a leading source of online benchmarks and a pioneer in Service Desk benchmarking, provides a working definition of benchmarking, defines a proven methodology for achieving world-class performance through benchmarking, and discusses the key success factors for effective benchmarking.