Do you ever wonder if you’re doing as well as your competitors? Of course you do! This is the familiar exercise of external benchmarking, or comparing key metrics of your business against others in your space.

Business leaders use this all the time as a way to set standards for performance evaluation on metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or overall satisfaction; and many look to external benchmarking results as key indicators for how to improve customer experience.

External benchmarking is insightful, of course, but have you ever considered utilizing the power of internal benchmarking?

In this edition of CXSecrets, we will explain how you can use insights from internally benchmarking against yourself within your own organization to quickly enhance your customer experience program.

Why internal benchmarking?

We all agree that external benchmarking is important, but we find that looking inward can be even more important to increasing your company’s customer experience.

Start with the best

To start looking inward, you must identify the best locations, work groups or entities within your organization that are delivering a fantastic customer experience.

If you have a large organization, we can guarantee that you’re going to have variability in customer experience between your very best locations and your worst locations.

Exemplify best practices

Let’s say you’re a hotel. Take a look at your best five locations.

Don’t just look at the customer experience survey feedback or social review feedback that you’re receiving. Go to each location. Observe what they’re doing. Interview the people who are delivering those fantastic experiences. Now that you’ve observed and listened, figure out a way to create processes and procedures inspired by the practices of your best locations that you can apply across your entire organization. It’s really that simple.

Now get out there and do it!

Internal benchmarking is an incredibly effective, low-hanging-fruit way to enhance the customer experience across the enterprise, and you can be incredibly successful in improving your customer experience program if you take this approach.

The CX space has seen significant movement over the last few years – between multibillion-dollar acquisitions, advancement in AI, and continuously evolving core software, the industry is experiencing a renaissance.

Yet despite these technological advancements, it appears that many of those charged with leading these initiatives are too focused on polished, buzzword–laden tools, and are in turn losing focus of why these programs exist in the first place – to enhance the customer experience.

What do customers really want?

Customers want their interactions with your company to be as easy and friction less as possible.

They want to talk to empowered brand representatives who have the answers they’re looking for and the ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently the first time they call. They want your physical space to be welcoming with employees that are easy to find and identify.

Above all, customers want to feel empathy towards their buying experience. Using chat bots and employing staff without the authority or knowledge to solve problems, while scalable, is also the quickest away to erode customer loyalty.

Why are we measuring engagement but not resolution?

Almost every business has some sort of customer experience management (CEM) program. The majority are measuring transactions by using metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or CSAT.

However, these data points don’t always expose easy-to-action insights. If you want to marry CX feedback data with actionable insights, you’ll need to measure:

• What are you customers asking and how frequently?
• Are your customers getting the answers they need?
• When are your customers escalating issues or moving to another channel?
• Are your employees empathetic to customer challenges?

Uncovering the answers to these questions will lead your organization to improvement areas where specific and measurable actions can be taken.