Benchmarking your Service Offering

The crocodile Dundee school of management says that you just have to move fast enough to outrun your competitors.

How do you know how you and your competitors are doing in offering a good service experience? One easy way is use a customer service maturity model, and benchmark you and your adversaries against it.

Maturity models are industry-standard models that focus on organizational and process maturity instead of actual technology used.

They let you rank your service offering on many different dimensions which include the efficacy of communication channels used, the self-service experience, the agent experience, the management of content across channels, and governance programs in place that allow you to coordinate and roll out new initiatives. Each of these dimensions has a list of capabilities that you use to benchmark yourself against a scale of 1 (ad-hoc capabilities) to 5 (mature, adaptive).

Here’s a snapshot of part of a maturity model. The green boxes indicate the maturity of the customer service organization.

 

If you benchmark yourself against this maturity model, you will see your points of failure, and will give you a very clear list of projects that will help you improve your service experience

You should also do this with your competitors. You will only be able to benchmark them on visible dimensions (for example their self service offering vs their agent experience). Yet, you will be able to easily see if and how you are outrunning your competition.