In the last few years an increasing number of companies, have committed to benchmarking themselves against others to provide a comparison for their customer management practices. In the past Business to Consumer (B2C) has led the way. Now Business to Business (B2B) organisations are also increasing their focus, but why is this and has it had a positive impact?

In some cases this has been a valuable learning exercise, but for many others benchmarking has had little positive impact. This brief article, written by two business practitioners, suggests how benchmarking can deliver real value.

Before you start we suggest you challenge yourself and your colleagues by asking:

1. Why are you benchmarking?
2. What do you want to learn?
3. Who are you benchmarking against?
4. Does the Customer care and will your business benefit?

Of course this, with respect to the ‘typical answers’, could not happen in a real company? Or could it?

To stay with our “typical” company and their focus on customer satisfaction tracking, you might consider it as a promising start to get some focus on satisfying customers rather than annoying them. However, in order for the business and their customers to get real value out of the exercise, more thought and business sense needs to be applied.

Is there a way to focus on the important and actionable areas?

The good news is yes and there are three initial steps.:

1. Have a good, hard look at the reality of your customer interactions.
2. Identify the elements of the customer proposition that really make a difference to your customers commitment.
3. Understand your service performance at these key touch points.

If you do not know how you are performing against these critical stages you risk missing early indicators of potential issues let alone identifying actions to address problems.

So simply comparing your annual, aggregate “satisfaction” score with someone else’s or an industry benchmark level may be a start but you are not extracting the true value from your customers’ feedback. You must listen to, learn from and act on this to take it beyond a “customer alibi”.

Benchmarking - to know where you are is just the start of the journey

There are many things you can try to measure, hence benchmark:

1. The “Customer Experience”
2. The time it takes to answer a call, respond to an online query, to reply to a letter, settle a claim or get an order to your client
3. The awareness of: your brand, brand values, proposition, product feature & benefits
4. The sales & service performance of your front line staff against your competition
5. The intention of your customers to recommend
6. Internal staff satisfaction…..

Understand and challenge

Again the key point is to really understand and challenge why you are doing this and be committed to act upon the findings.

For example, is it really useful for you to know that on average one industry is slightly better at managing customers or satisfying customers than another? Or that a percentage of your customer base indicate they may recommend you to someone else? So what? -  how can you act on this information?

How well aligned is your organisation?

Within any organisation it is very useful to know how well aligned the organisation’s departments, management, individuals and suppliers really are with its customer strategy. How effective they are at delivering the brand promise, also acquiring and keeping the most valuable customers and maximising the potential of the customer base.

It is the ‘drilling down’ into these key areas that really makes a difference to customer and business understanding (and eventual performance), which many organisations find difficult to achieve. This difficulty can strike when trying to establish their own desired level of performance let alone be able to compare with best in class.