2025 Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a critical skill for every professional, however, so called “industry standards” are often out of date and represent lazy benchmarking. The Forum aims to promote and elevate the art of benchmarking from “averages” to actionable learning. This information is designed to support the data presented in the 2025 Best Practice Guide, challenge your thinking and help you to draw out meaningful learning so you can do something different.

Time: Understanding shrinkage

Shrinkage suggests something bad, a cost and an issue that needs to be reduced. Time is something we need to understand and protect to truly maximise our investment. Look for similarities and differences and consider why these do and don’t exist. Most importantly consider the impact of change, as one category changes another must follow as there is only 100% of time. Critically, consider other factors which aren’t included in this visualisation, like attrition, employee satisfaction, quality and customer experience. These data-combinations help you to tell the story with numbers and draw understanding and meaning to make better decisions.

Service Levels

Grade of service and other service levels have evolved since their conception in the 1970’s. Unfortunately, not all of these changes have been built on scientific study, theoretical understanding and data analysis. Therefore, there are still many examples of “doing what we’ve always done” and “industry standard”. The range of service levels now being used, informs us to look beyond “standard” and consider relevance to the service we want and can afford to provide. Again, look for data-combinations with the percentage of calls answered and average speed of answer, along with abandon rate. In addition, consider quality scores and customer satisfaction like CSAT and NPS.

Team Structures

Ratios are often referenced when comparing Resource Planning teams to the size of the operation. However, the range of team size compared to the operation varies so much across the industry this number should only ever be cautiously used. There are so many variables from the hierarchy and organisational structure of a business to the decision-making process and operational coverage, in addition to the complexity of the operating model (channels and skills) and technology being used. Therefore, we need to measure the value of the team output and how this supports the delivery of strategic objectives far more than looking at a ratio.

Salaries

After National Minimum Wage and the Living Wage, there are no other standard or recognised measures to compare salary. Salary bands exist in some industries/sectors however, many organisations have an organic evolution of salaries. Where there are numbers, we can create averages which can act as an indicator, however, in the case of salaries extreme caution needs to be taken when using any average. Similar to comparing team structures and the use of ratios, we must consider the organisation culture and hierarchy, industry type, complexity of role and responsibility/accountability. The salary ranges highlight the range and variation across the industry. There may be some very similar job titles being used but the scope of responsibility will vary massively.