Benchmarking
How Well Do You Measure Up?Benchmarking
Benchmarking lets you know how well you measure up against your industry peers.
Or indeed, companies outside of your industry who serve your customers and against whom you are likely to be compared.
Benchmarking is an “outside-in” process that objectively assesses specific areas of your performance against best practice.
The aim of benchmarking is to identify performance gaps, understand how others have moved ahead, and use this understanding to drive business improvements.
“The objective of Benchmarking is to find examples of superior performance and understand the processes and practices driving that performance. Companies then improve their performance by tailoring and incorporating these best practices into their own operations—not by imitating, but by innovating”
7 Benefits of Benchmarking
Benchmarking enables you to:
1. Achieve an objective measurement of how well you perform compared to other companies
2. Identify performance gaps against current best practice
3. Update KPIs to reflect changes in customer expectations
4. Set and monitor improvement targets
5. Develop an outside-in mindset
6. Learn from pioneers to embrace change and innovation
7. Share successes and be more confident in your relative performance
How I Can Help You Benchmark Your Business
By definition, benchmarking involves objectively comparing your business with other organisations to understand how they achieve success.
By knowing exactly how you compare, you can more accurately determine what steps you may need to take to improve your products, processes, or service delivery.
However, it is extremely difficult for organisations to be objective when benchmarking themselves due to cognitive biases and lack of quantitative and qualitative data.
That’s where I come in.
I’ve worked within the home appliance and consumer HVAC aftermarkets for nearly 2 decades.
Throughout this time, I’ve been at the cutting edge of service innovation working on current challenges. Moreover, I make it my business to keep up to date on industry trends through webinars and white papers.
As a result, I can help you to identify current areas of weakness or business that could potentially be at risk in the future.
More importantly, I can help you to drive productive and positive change to enable you to maintain or regain leadership against your peers.
Benchmarking Successes
Over the last 7 years, benchmarking has directly resulted in the following business improvements:
A new customer support website
In 2014, I benchmarked the customer support website of a major white goods manufacturer against its industry peers.
As a result, a new website was redesigned to provide an improved user experience, greater self-help options, and easier access to purchase spares, repairs, and extended warranties.
A simplified journey for repair bookings
In 2016, I benchmarked the in and out of warranty repair journey for customers of a leading home appliance manufacturer.
As a result, the journey was simplified to direct customers to dedicated teams that could provide telephone advice, repair bookings, and extended warranty cover in a single call without having to transfer internally or to external partners.
For more information, please see this case study.
A new product registration process
In 2019, I benchmarked the online product registration process of the UK’s leading heating and ventilation manufacturer against brands within the same group, its competitors within the industry, and the approach taken by AMDEA through its register my appliance website.
As a result, we designed and implemented an online registration portal powered by the company’s own product information database to enable consumers to quickly and easily register their products and receive instant confirmation of their guarantee T&C’s.
For more information, please see this case study.
Interested in learning more about benchmarking?
Want to discuss how I could help you?
Simply, book your free business consultation.