New Year. New Resolutions. New KPI Goals.

It’s the fourth week of the year, and you are back into the swing of things again. It's time to follow through on all those New Year resolutions and objectives for 2017. Achieving critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is high on everyone's to-do list, but has your business thought about benchmarking those KPIs? Studies show that world-class companies benchmark their KPIs and customer experience every year. 

When was the last time you benchmarked your data and compared it to competitors? Is your delivery relevant with your geography, scope, size, and industry? It is crucial to have this as a part of your overall delivery strategy to stay ahead of the game and continue to improve your customer experience and financial performance. Benchmarking allows you to strategically learn from others and improve by seeking out best practices and putting them in play in your business. It is important to step back and learn how others are achieving success.

Many clients I have worked with benefit from benchmarking, not only against their own peers within their industry, but also from those outside of their industry. While you can get a consulting company do this study for you in-depth here are a couple of quick and inexpensive ways to benchmark your capabilities against the competition if you are on a low budget.

1.) Mystery shopper or caller – Walk into a competitor’s store or give their customer service department a call. How did that experience fair against your own customer experience? What was better about it? What are you doing better? How easy was it to do business or reach out to them?

2.) Review their website – Scanning a competitor’s website may offer up some valuable information that is out in the open and not a company secret. You can discover how they address certain situations through published policies as well as the service channels they use to interact with their customers. If they have online chat, reach out and record your experience. If you can spend a little, purchase the product, then return it to experience the full life cycle of a customer.

3.) Internal Focus Groups – Get a couple of key leaders and even reps in a room, and ask how they did things differently at former companies. You would be surprised how many times folks join an organization and just operate under the status quo. Having these types of sessions will get the wheels going to bring new ideas to the table from talent you have already hired.

Benchmarking can be a daunting task, but using some of the simple suggestion above can get you going in the right direction to incorporate some world class best practices with little-to-no investment.

If you wish to conduct a more in-depth and data-driven benchmarking study, Arise consulting services can help you incorporate the best practices that will drive your desired results.