Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of determining who is the very best, who sets the standard, and what that standard is. Mystery Shopping data is particularly useful when seen in relative terms – a chain of outlets or branches in which the scores on a matrix of service key performance indicators that ranges from 98% to the weakest at 24% gives everyone a good idea of where they are relative to their peer group.

Many organisations use benchmarking to compare themselves with other similar organisations – or even dissimilar ones who share similar challenges.

Why Should I Benchmark

If you don't know what the standard is you cannot compare yourself against it. If a customer asks "What is the MTBF on your gadget?" it is not enough to know that your Mean Time Between Failures is 120 hours on your standard gadget and 150 for your gadget-plus model.

You also have to know where your competitors stand. If the company against whom you are competing for this order has a MTBF of 100 hours you are probably okay. However, if their MTBF is 10,000 hours who do you think will get the order?

What can I Benchmark

Most of the early work in the area of benchmarking was done in manufacturing, such as the example above. Today benchmarking is a management tool that is being applied almost anywhere, from customer service to sales effort and technique.

Once we decide what to benchmark, and how to measure it, the challenge is to decide out how the winner became “the best” and develop a plan which brings everyone in the business up to or beyond that standard.

Benchmarking is usually part of a larger project, contact us to discover exactly how you business is performing today, and start to plan how to be even better in the future.

Benchmarking: Contact Centres. Finance, HR, IT, Procurement

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