Seeing Round Corners – Beyond Benchmarking

Someone once said  “ If you walk in the footsteps of others you will never get to the front” and another similar quote about The Husky dogs who pull sledges states that “If you are not the lead dog the view ahead never changes”.  So if benchmarking is an organisation’s principal way of developing service quality performance improvement is it axiomatic that they will never achieve a true leadership position?

A look at the international leaders shows that their innovation and improvement are achieved not by benchmarking but from a leadership desire to be the best at what they do for their customers. That raises a couple of questions - How do they do that....? And what is their driver for using benchmarking, is to check up or to catch up?

Leadership desire can be described as a function of an internal motivation not just to be among the best (in the so called upper quartile) but to actually be the best because it will make a key contribution to the organisation being successful. Substantive to that is the belief that they actually can be the best and that is expressed in the Values of the leadership of the organisation and it is such values that communicate things it takes to be important and drives the way the organisation behaves.

However, belief without some realistic sense of what can be achieved actually can descend easily into the realm of day dreaming but with realistically expected results as a guideline the leading organisations create policies (a means of bringing resources to bear on an issue) that guide the organisation to develop and implement the strategic and tactical activities that their management and staff can implement. The best  to be never comfortable with mediocrity and that is why they look everywhere in their organisations and beyond to examine every dimension of every process to learn, improve  and apply in a process that never stops, is never satisfied and never gives up. They also never use clichés (Service with a smile / Our customers are our greatest asset) unless there is a real delivery structure behind the words.

What role has benchmarking to them? Perhaps it is to do with learning rather that copying? To copy   exactly is difficult as no two organisations are the same but learning how principals and techniques may be applied can be very useful. For instance if an organisation has multiple outlets discovering a process for how they can develop best practice from the observed successful behaviours of their individual outlets rather than from the centre may be a useful lesson to learn. Or seeing how an organisation obsessed with service quality engages its entire supply chain in the endeavour. I recently came across a Turkish drinks company whose relentless pursuance of service excellence throughout every step of their supply chain’s processes had given them huge market and price advantage.

The leading organisations use benchmarking in a way rather similar to the way the scientific community uses peer interaction as a dimension of their research structure to test their theories and process ideas as well as to listen and share thoughts and experiences with others but always in pursuit of advancement or improvement. There is a trend towards the use of Big Data mining techniques to uncover customer preferences, priorities and propensities to purchase.

While understanding WHAT customers really want is always the primary step but knowing HOW best to deliver it now and in the future is the real key to success. How can benchmarking help not only to better understand these key points but also anticipate service expectations in the future? But if  the leaders of an organisation do not have the desire, courage and confidence to create a new service quality paradigm will they implement what they see around the corner?

One key observation is that the most successful service organisation really do understand the value of being the best, know where they stand in the pecking order and are never really satisfied until they are at the top. As an award winning CEO remarked to me recently “If you don’t really and truly believe in the value of customer service then don’t do it, but remember that survival is not compulsory”.

So will others walk in your footsteps or will your view never change?

 

Philip Forrest