How do you benchmark your customer service quality and standards against your competitors and industry norms?

One thing I found helpful is to make continuous improvements, and implement changes in business products, methods, and services. Benchmarking practices provide better understanding of customer wishes and expectations, allowing room for identifying areas of improvement in order to surpass those wishes and expectations. This is of course because customers are the most important data source at every stage of comparison.

When it comes to customer service I personally recommend competitive benchmarking because with this form of benchmarking you can identify exactly why a competitor is succeeding or what drives the customer satisfaction in your industry which I consider to be significant.

Benchmarking your competitors is great, but there’s another way! There are industry leaders who are more of mentors and don’t fit in as competitors especially if they’re where you see yourself in a number of years. In this unique situation, you may have been mentored from afar so finding someone who can give you access is highly recommended. This way, you can ask them directly what their success stories are and most importantly; what pitfalls to avoid If you however don’t have direct access to them, study their growth pattern, find ingenious ways to speak to trusted employees and find out what their corporate culture is, send an email to the CEO, you just never know! Finally, you can actually send someone to volunteer or intern with them!

In my opinion customer service metrics are very valuable because they provide a look behind the scenes at how we interact with our customers. We might think the service we are providing is the best of the best, but our customers might perceive things differently. To keep it simple there is wisdom in believing that the customer is always right.

Benchmarking is about collecting information and data of your own company and your reference groups. To avoid comparing apples to bananas, it is important to establish clear definitions of the metrics and business capabilities you are benchmarking. Once you feel you have all the information you can gather, you can properly analyze the data. It is important to remember that no business is perfect, and you can only learn from an open and objective analysis. This requires an open and unbiased mindset. Ideally, you involve a broad set of ( internal and/or external) experience, backgrounds, and expertise in the analysis. Once findings start to be uncovered, you can prepare reports.