Recently, the TM forum held a Business Process Benchmarking Summit in London. This well attended event explored a number of timely topics from practical advice on How to apply benchmarking to process improvement? to Using KPIs in your business. One of the long-term benefits of the event was the opportunity for those involved in operator business benchmarking to dialog with like-minded individuals. By the end of the event many of the participants were voicing the desire to stay in touch with each other.  So to address that desire, let’s use this thread to start a dialog on top-of-mind benchmarking topics.

Here are three of the topics that were getting considerable energy in the Summit workshops:

Cross-industry Performance Comparisons.  We all know that comparative data is critical to establishing goals and setting new directions. However world class performance on a specific business area may be set by companies outside traditional communications providers –for example leaders may be in financial services, hospitality, health care, retail, and manufacturing. To really see the breakthrough performance we must look outside the box or we can get lulled into complacency. During the Summit, one of the work shop groups explored this concept and generated a number of interesting ideas.  I would like to grab this and run with it, so let’s figure out the top 3 or 4 metrics we would like to pursue from a cross-industry perspective and which industries (or better yet) which companies do we want to approach? Obviously, we can make a long list of metrics that would be interesting, but let’s focus on the critical few that would be most useful now-as a starting point.

 

Time- to- Market Getting new services to market is more critical than ever before. We all know the importance of new services to customer retention and revenue growth. However while important , Time-to-Market  is not easily benchmarked. One of the issues is capturing the level of complexity of the new service. For example, is the target service a small evolution of an existing service or is this a really new service requiring significant changes to the entire service deliver and billing infrastructure? Obviously, measuring Time-To-market without differentiating on the complexity of the service would not provide meaningful results. A related issue is the source of the service. Most operators are developing relationships to facilitate sale of 3^rd party services. Time-To-Market for 3^rd party services would likely start with the point at which the operator has access to the new 3^rd party service. This would focus the metric on the end of the process, making comparisons with internally developed services problematic.

To get started on this metric, I suggest that we start by identifying the type of service for which improvement in delivery time will have the most impact on business results.  Which type of service (Complex or simple; internal or 3^rd party) is most important to track from a Time-to-market perspective? What do you think?

 

The Business Case for Benchmarking. The idea behind this topic is to help each other make compelling business cases for the application of business benchmarking as a tool to address critical issues inside your companies. As benchmarking experts you can see opportunities for using benchmarking to support business change; however it can be challenging to express these benefits to someone who is not familiar with benchmarking. Let’s use our shared expertise to help each other here. We should be able to do this without exposing competitive information. As we saw in the workshops, it really comes down to looking at the issues from the decision maker’s perspective.

Your Hot Topic: If you are most interested in another aspect of business benchmarking, by all means start a thread on it. This web-environment is a great way to stay in touch with the larger benchmarking community.

Sincerely,

Toni Graham

TM Forum Business Benchmarking Program Manager

ToniaG:

The Business Case for Benchmarking. The idea behind this topic is to help each other make compelling business cases for the application of business benchmarking as a tool to address critical issues inside your companies. As benchmarking experts you can see opportunities for using benchmarking to support business change; however it can be challenging to express these benefits to someone who is not familiar with benchmarking. Let’s use our shared expertise to help each other here. We should be able to do this without exposing competitive information. As we saw in the workshops, it really comes down to looking at the issues from the decision maker’s perspective.

This is quite an interesting topic. It strikes me that there are two (possibly more) distinct aspects to this:

1. Benchmarking highlighting potential areas of focus

2. Necessity to address these areas

Given that each organisation is different in many respects and is the sum of all of its processes (and metrics) and not singled out KPI's for a benchmarking exercise it is incumbent upon each organisation to look at the outcome of the benchmarking study in light of "the bigger picture". This includes:

1. Its own strengths that counter weaknesses identified in the benchmarking study

2. Customer behaviour in spite of weaknesses identified

3. Relative size of organisation that achieved the benchmark in question

etc...

On the specific topic of business cases, I believe that benchmarking is indeed useful in that gives a clear method of highlighting the potential cost savings/revenue increases as a result of achieving the desired target. However, this is where it gets tricky!

The organisation must then ensure that it creates a project (or programme of work) that can guarantee delivery of said target - the benchmark cannot tell an organisation how another company achieved that target! This relates well to point 3 above in that whilst a benchmarking study can highlight what other organisations are achieving, it cannot reveal what the organisation did to reach that level. This is particularly important when it comes to customer service metrics whereby a company may sacrifice operational efficiency (and cost) to favour, for example, faster delivery times.

Therefore, to return to my point above, each organisation must determine independently the value in achieving the level in question.

Stephen

Re. cross industry metrics, has anyone views on which on-line 'e' measures best represent customer service excellence?  

Good points. The TM Forum benchmark does let the user correlate leading behaviors across metrics. so for example operators who make the business decision to spend more than average on customer management  to improve the customer experience would show up in a correlation between the cost of running the the customer management process and high scores on problems fixed on first call.

But your point is correct the benchmark only paints half ot the picture, you must understand your internal business situation to putthe benchmarking results into context. So let's move the conversation on to a hypothetical case. Let's say that your company is considering launching a change and you think that benchmarking information would be useful to guiding this effort, how would you position this to the management team?

ToniaG:

Good points. The TM Forum benchmark does let the user correlate leading behaviors across metrics. so for example operators who make the business decision to spend more than average on customer management  to improve the customer experience would show up in a correlation between the cost of running the the customer management process and high scores on problems fixed on first call.

But your point is correct the benchmark only paints half ot the picture, you must understand your internal business situation to putthe benchmarking results into context. So let's move the conversation on to a hypothetical case. Let's say that your company is considering launching a change and you think that benchmarking information would be useful to guiding this effort, how would you position this to the management team?

I think this is the scenario where Benchmarking makes a lot of sense. For the benchmark to really add value it has to be uncharted territory, as I believe that initiatives should be focused around existing KPIs and Metrics, for example a mapping of a customer lifecycle against customer satisfaction.

Regardless of source, the benchmark ostensibly forms the business case - it is the goal that any financial benefits (direct or indirect) should based upon. Furthermore, depending on the source of the benchmark, it gives the organisation the ability to position itself against its competitors. This is where it's vital that benchmarking is against direct competitors that pose a challenge.

Stephen