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How Good Is Good Enough? By Ed Romson, CEO, Rocair Corporation Many management articles come to the conclusion that an organization will get what it measures. That is to say, that when a leader decides to measure a particular activity and set goals, he is probably going to see improvement in that area. This leads to the caution that you should be careful what you measure, you may get it. One of the best ways to determine what area to focus on is to use a process called benchmarking. This process compares the performance of your team to similar teams in your industry, your competitors and the companies that are industry leaders. It looks at a broad range of activities and identifies where your team's performance is better, or worse, than that of other similar organizations. By doing this you can identify and concentrate on change in those areas that will give you the greatest return on your investment, and help you gain a competitive advantage. My specialty is the Customer Care industry and I will be using that as an example, but you could benchmark performance in many areas; finance, operations and sales. There are many reasons to engage in a benchmark process. As I mentioned at the beginning or this article, you must be able to identify those areas of change that will allow you to narrow in on cost reduction opportunities and convert those performance gaps to cost figures. By focusing on the cost of what you are doing now compared to the best practice in your industry, it will become evident which areas you should address. You already have some thoughts about what needs to be changed in your organization. By benchmarking, you will be able to validate those targets. Once you make the changes, benchmarking will help you to track your progress toward higher efficiency, cost savings, and greater revenue. If you decide to conduct a benchmark, there are several companies that can help you. BenchmarkPortal maintains an up-to-date database of over 6,000 contact centers in partnership with Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality. Their process can be done by your staff or with the help of consultants. Customer Operations Performance Center (COPC) sends their consultants to your site and uses the COPC-2000 standard they developed as a certification tool. The International Contact Center Benchmarking Consortium (ICCBC) conducts benchmarks in specific industries including insurance, healthcare, finance and utilities.. The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) works in a wide area of specialties, not just contact centers, and in a wide range of industries. They can provide a comprehensive assessment of your entire organization. Once you have made the decision to benchmark, the keys to success are involvement, accuracy, understanding, planning and checking. It is very important to the success of this process that you get all levels of your staff involved in the effort. Make sure to bring other departments into the discussion. What you do in the contact center affects them. The reverse is also true. During the gathering of data, complete and accurate data is a must for success. Benchmarking is a good way to find out what data is critical to evaluate your business and to be able to fill in the gaps in your system of data collection. Good data will result in a good picture of your operation and a good comparison. When the results of the benchmark process are available, a through evaluation of those results will lead you to develop effective action plans. This is the time to think beyond your current procedures. You will be able to identify the gaps between your performance and the performance of the companies you benchmark against. You now need to turn those gaps into money. How much will it cost you to continue your present activities? Will the cost and effort to move your performance up to the benchmark level pay off? These are complex questions, and thinking beyond your current way of doing things is difficult. It may be worthwhile to consider hiring a consultant to help with this stage of the benchmarking. The consultant will be a neutral party and be able to help expand your vision to find solid action plans for decreasing costs and increasing revenue. Implementing those action plans is the next step. But don't stop there and think you work is done. Remember the Total Quality Management concept of Plan, Do, Check Act. When you have made the changes, let them work for a while and then redo the benchmark to see if the effect you expected has happened. If it has...wonderful, continue to improve! If not, then reset your action plans and enter the cycle again. By doing this, you engage in continuous improvement and your effects are multiplied. Does this benchmark process apply to Argentina and MercoSur? After all, conditions here are different than in the E.E.U.U. and Europe where most of the companies that you will be benchmarked against are working. I believe that the quality of work produced here can be compared very favorably to companies throughout the world. The level of education, strength of the work ethic, and quality of management that exists in Argentina establishes this country as the business leader in all of Latin America. You should set your targets high and work to bring your quality up to European and E.E.U.U. standards. Your customers will reward you. © Copyright Rocair Corporation. All rights reserved. |
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