Dos and don'ts of benchmarking

Are physicians rating your brand’s omnichannel engagement higher than your competitors’?
Understanding how your brand stacks up—and where it can improve—is essential to delivering a superior customer experience and driving business impact. But to know where you're going, you first need to know where you stand. That’s where benchmarking comes in.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing performance metrics to industry leaders and best practices from other industries. Done properly, benchmarking is an excellent tool for helping to drive mindset change and business excellence.

Dos of Effective Benchmarking

 Include KPIs with a proven business impact. This way, your organization can be assured that your benchmarking efforts are focused on the most important areas and that the results are meaningful.

Ensure you include head-to-head comparisons with relevant competitors. Improvement is always a worthwhile pursuit, but measuring your own improvement is only one piece of the puzzle – you need to understand how you measure up against others operating in the same market.

Use statistically significant samples of well-profiled respondents. Avoiding small samples consisting of “anonymous” respondents will ensure the results of the benchmarking process are robust and can be generalized to larger populations. 

Consider the holistic experience (NPS, CSAT, etc), and resist the temptation to focus only on benchmarking individual touchpoints or channels.

Don'ts Of Benchmarking

Don't limit to purely internal measurements. As Peter Drucker put it: “What a business needs most for its decisions — especially its strategic ones — are data about what goes on outside it. Only outside a business are there results, opportunities and threats.”

Don't limit the comparison to your local market, where you cannot be sure there is a world-class player. While it’s essential to cover your key local or regional competitors, comparing across markets may give you a better view of best-in-class. However, human judgment should still be used, as the industry may still be in its early days overall, and other B2B industries may provide additional perspectives...

Don't benchmark as a one-off. Benchmarking should be seen as another part of the continuous process improvement that the best organizations commit to if they want to stay competitive. Besides, the omnichannel world is in full flux, and a leadership position today may be a third position a year from now.

Ready to Benchmark Smarter?

In addition to the company- and channel-level benchmarking insights available in Navigator365™ Core, Navigator365™ Cx Benchmark allows for more in-depth benchmarking at the brand level.

To learn more about how robust benchmarking can support you in sound business planning, arrange a call with one of our omnichannel experts.