|
Financial Benchmarking for Your Business
By Ray Shaw
June 2007
Over the past several years,
owners of telemessaging call centers have shown increasing interest in comparing
their call handling statistics, financial data, and agent ratios with their
peers. ATSI has responded to this need with two industry initiatives: industry
standards and financial benchmarking. The subject of this article will be
financial benchmarking.
The increased level of
competition in the marketplace and the strong desire of telemessaging call
center owners to remain competitive in their service pricing and performance has
been the driving force behind the ATSI financial benchmarking project.
Benchmarking is an essential management tool for the successful operation of any
business in a competitive marketplace. It can identify areas of a company's
operation in need of improvement, aid management with goal setting, and help a
company establish reasonable target areas for improvement.
Benchmarking is a process used in management -- particularly strategic management
-- in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation
to industry
best practices.
This allows organizations to develop plans for adopting such best practices,
usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of their performance.
Benchmarking studies can also help evaluate service effectiveness and
efficiency. It helps answers the questions: "Are we doing the right thing?" and
"Are we doing what we do right?"Key Elements of a Successful
Benchmarking Program
- Benchmarking is part of the total quality management
process.
- Benchmarking is focused on processes rather than on
outcomes.
- Benchmarking requires partners that are willing to
share information.
- Benchmarking implies a willingness to change and a
desire to excel.
- Benchmarking is a continuous process. Organizations
that use benchmarking as a ranking for their activities do not get any real
benefit.
The Phases of Benchmarking
- Planning
- Data collection
- Analysis
- Implementation
- Recalibration: best practices become outdated and need
to be reviewed and renewed.
By undertaking this project, ATSI
has begun establishing a database of information to address a critical need for
the telemessaging industry. To date, ATSI has collected general demographic and
financial data only, and future data collection surveys will deal with operating
statistics. The information that has been collected will facilitate financial
benchmarking by allowing the ATSI membership to compare their financial data
with their peers and learn from others' experience.
The benchmarking database will
also facilitate the identification of industry best practices by highlighting
top performing organizations so that the methods they used to achieve desired
results can be analyzed and shared. In order to provide meaningful results to
all participants and to maintain a company's confidentiality, the ATSI
benchmarking committee has elected to use common size income statement data in
its collection model. Common size data is expressed as a percentage of total
revenue and only the percentages are presented, not the actual results.
To find out more about the ATSI
financial benchmarking project, attend the benchmarking session at the ATSI
convention in Colorado Springs, on Saturday, June 23.
Ray Shaw is president of ATSI
(www.atsi.org),
an international trade association for the teleservices industry. Ray can be
reached at
rpshaw@bpeinc.com.
Return
to the List of Articles || Go to the Directory of
All Articles
|
