Customer experience benchmarks: local vs industry

The trouble with industry benchmarks

Teams often ask for customer experience benchmarks from their industry. Published figures are hard to find, use different definitions and samples, and say little about what to change. A national average rating for jewellery stores tells a jeweller almost nothing about which of their stores needs help.

Why internal benchmarks work

• Same products, prices, policies and systems.
• Same definitions and categories.
• Differences point to local practice, which can be changed.
• Every store gets a fair comparison.

When industry figures help

• Context for leadership: are we broadly in line?
• Entering a new market or format with no internal history.
• Checking whether a problem is sector-wide, such as delivery delays during a city-wide event.

Building a local benchmark

• Group comparable stores.
• Use a recent window and enough reviews.
• Take the typical range for each topic, such as the middle half of stores.
• Compare each store with the range, with counts and trend.

An example

A restaurant group looked for an industry benchmark for delivery complaints and found nothing comparable. Its own 40 delivery kitchens showed a typical range of 8% to 14% of reviews mentioning late delivery; five kitchens above 20% became the focus, and two below 6% shared what they did differently.

Common mistakes

• Chasing industry numbers with different definitions.
• Benchmarking against your single best store.
• Comparing stores of different formats.
• Benchmarks without sample sizes.

Common questions

Checklist

• Peer groups defined.
• Typical ranges, not best stores.
• Counts and trend shown.
• Industry figures as context only.

In short

Use your own comparable stores as the benchmark for decisions, with typical ranges, counts and trends; keep industry figures for context.

Competitor reviews as context

Public reviews of competitors can add context that industry reports lack. Analysed with your own categories, they show whether a complaint is common in your category or specific to you. Keep this as context: competitors' customers, formats and locations differ, so their figures are not a benchmark for your stores.

Explaining benchmarks to stores

Store managers accept benchmarks they recognise as fair. Name the peer group, show the range and the store's position with its review count, and attach the reviews. When managers can see that the comparison is with stores like theirs, the conversation moves from disputing the number to fixing the issue.

Why ranges beat single numbers

A single benchmark number invites arguments about whether a store is slightly above or below it. A typical range, such as the middle half of comparable stores, separates stores that are genuinely unusual from those within normal variation, which is what managers need to decide where to spend time.

Doing this with Falcon

Falcon shows negative share by topic, location and month on one heatmap, flags locations with too few reviews to compare, and lets you compare any period with the one before or the same weeks last year, so a location's problem can be told apart from a network-wide one. Every number opens the reviews behind it, in customers' own words, so a comparison can always be checked.