Operational benchmarking has a long history in business: It’s natural for companies to want to compare themselves to other businesses to give context and meaning to their own performance—and to understand where opportunities for growth and improvement exist. But frequently, similarities among companies in the same industry are merely superficial and don’t offer a meaningful point of comparison for benchmarking customer service performance.
In this Zendesk Research report, we address this shortfall through a cluster analysis that reveals four types of customer service operations— and within those, 12 distinct clusters, each characterized by a unique operational pattern. Each cluster is defined by workload, strategy, and resources, as well as a typical level of support performance that the component companies can be expected to achieve.
The four types are:
- Relationship Builders: These small teams provide a personal customer experience that customers love.
- Masters of Complexity: Driven by detailed support requests, these companies have sophisticated customer service operations.
- Late Bloomers: With an unbalanced approach to support, these companies have yet to realize their full potential.
- Captains of Scale: These teams set the gold standard of customer support operations.
Read the full report to find out where you fit and what you need to focus on to improve
If you’re a fan of metrics, analytics, and other things with numbers in them, visit the Zendesk Benchmark page to see how your customer support stacks up against the competition.