Operations: Two industry veterans share their insights on using Benchmarks & Best Practices

Barry: I agree that some of those studies I see put out by other consultants or by publishers are really not helpful, because they use averaged or summarized data. Data need to be detail-specific by company, so you can compare them to your company.

We publish detailed data in our studies by company name, so you’re able to see which companies answered the questions, and get behind the numbers. That’s the key to benchmarking. If you’re an apparel company, you shouldn’t compare yourself with just any other apparel company. You have to look at AOV [average order value], number of calls answered, number of contact center seats, length of call, number of line items per order, etc. These and other factors are the key drivers to those benchmarks.