I met with a CEO last week who was only interested in one metric: how his company performed in terms of customer satisfaction when compared to their nearest competitor.
Comparing yourself to your can be an important reality check (and every company should monitor their performance relative to competitors as part of a dashboard of metrics), but it shouldn’t be a guiding principal or sole metric. Let’s not lose the forest for the trees.
Let’s say your competition has a score of 75 for navigation and yours is a 71. Does that mean yours needs to be better? Maybe. But more important is to see if improving that score of 71 in navigation will impact their behavior. Will they buy more, return more frequently or recommend to more people? The impact of changing is what should drive your decision, not just the comparison of the scores. It is about impacting the behavior of your customers and prospects, not keeping up with the Joneses? Is there another area you could improve (product descriptions, search, etc.) that would have a bigger impact on your customers’ likelihood to buy, recommend, and return?
Don’t spend too much time chasing your competitor; spend your time chasing your customers and prospects! Improving their satisfaction will yield significant improvements to your bottom line.. Satisfy your own customers in the ways that are most important to them, and use competitive benchmarks as one piece of the puzzle.
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