What Is Benchmarking?

Broadly defined, customer care benchmarking is basically the act of measuring your company’s customer service support activity to that offered by your competitors.

Benchmarking is valuable for many reasons, including the fact that it gives you an opportunity to set goals and evaluate their outcome and also determine which companies have a competitive edge.

Once this happens, your company can design and implement a plan that will enable you to maintain an edge over the competition.

Customer Care: How Good is Good Enough?

Once you recognize the valuable role that benchmarking can play in helping your business improve its customer support services, an important question may cross your mind: “How good is good enough?”

When you seek to set a standard for customer support services, there are a variety of measures you can use to determine what will constitute service that is excellent or “good enough.”

One of the easiest measures to employ would be to set a goal that involves exceeding the performance levels of your top competitor.

This strategy is advantageous for many reasons, including the fact that accomplishing the goal would make your company the leader in customer support. Additionally, this goal gives you tangible numbers to work with rather than involving vague mechanisms through which you will evaluate the quality of the services offered.

In addition to determining how good your customer support services are in terms of what your competition is doing, you could also opt to use data derived from research regarding how to optimize customer support to devise your own criteria for what constitutes good enough.

For example, research indicates that the need for customer support is greatest between 9 and 11 am. Given this fact, you can make your staff’s ability to quickly address and resolve customer support issues during this high volume call time a measure you use to determine how good your company is at offering excellent service.

Conclusion

In today’s world, customer support has become an increasingly important measure through which businesses can gain loyal clients and increase their conversion rates.

In recognizing this principle, business owners who are interested in experiencing continual growth and expansion should know that benchmarking could be of great use to them.

By comparing their customer support efforts to those of other companies and/or implementing research-based criteria to improve the quality of services offered, businesses can increase customer satisfaction levels and subsequently maintain the positive image necessary to facilitate ongoing growth.