What Are Industry Benchmarks? How Benchmarking Benefits Your Business

Where does your brand stand in the market? Is it setting the standard for others to follow, treading water, or being left behind by the competition? These are fundamental questions that both aspiring and established businesses need answers to in order to stay competitive. 

Industry benchmarking is how we get those answers.

• What is industry benchmarking?
• Important industry benchmarks
• Why benchmarking is essential to success
• Different benchmarking techniques
• How to make benchmarking effective
• Real-world application
• Benchmarking challenges
• Pissed Consumer’s benchmarking solutions

What is industry benchmarking?

First of all, what are industry benchmarks? Industry benchmarks are similar to key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide data with which companies can quantify relevant markers, such as customer satisfaction. Benchmarks differ, however, from KPIs in that they compare these indicators with those of the competition. A simplified way of looking at it is to imagine statistics on a sports league table.

Industry benchmarking demystifies by replacing assumptions with representative data, revealing the underlying truth of the situation. With this clarity, a fresh perspective on current business strategy can better determine whether existing processes and goals are working well, need refinement, or are wholly inadequate. Informed action can then be taken, with the knowledge that the right changes are being made exactly where they need to be.

Important industry benchmarks

What benchmarks matter most will depend on your industry and targets, but metrics such as average customer satisfaction score (CSAT) are relevant across the board.

The complaint resolution percentage is an insight into your customer service efficiency. As revealed in Pissed Consumer’s Consumer Insights and Analytics, after contacting a brand’s customer service, a mere 14% of surveyed consumers were satisfied with the proposed solution to their problem – identifying a real gap in performance that customer-focused businesses can take advantage of.

Benchmarking will also shed light on other key aspects of customer service provision, such as response and resolution timeframes. With 58.3% of responders to a customer service trends 2025 survey saying that they don’t even hear back from a company after reaching out, a lack of awareness here can be severely detrimental to your business.

Consumer sentiment towards your brand makes a big difference to public perception and overall reputation. What percentage of online reviews and social media mentions of your brand are positive, negative, or neutral? How the proportions shift over time can be indicative of how well product or process adjustments are performing in the eyes of the consumer.

Why benchmarking is essential to success

The consumer voice is centre stage these days, and with that, businesses are under increasing scrutiny and pressure to provide a top-notch customer experience. The customer experience is hence the new battleground for competitive differentiation, so a comprehensive picture of the whole scene is crucial to staying in the game.

Understanding your customer

Benchmarking has this covered by giving your brand the contextual tools that enable a clear understanding of where you are meeting customer expectations and where you are coming up short. By illustrating your strengths and weaknesses, as well as the context in which they have an impact, your brand can align its strategies with what customers value most. It’s not just a report on your own performance either; benchmarking can reveal where the competition is underperforming and leave gaps that you can exploit, inspiring the following growth strategy.

Staying competitive means staying relevant to consumer needs, and this calls for continuous adaptation and improvement. Benchmarking facilitates ongoing analysis and comprehension, enabling your brand to recognize and meet shifting expectations and consumer trends.

Mitigating crises

Every industry will generally have its common issues; therefore, standing out as the exception to the rule can be a big deal for your potential customers. Getting the jump on developing customer concerns and emerging reputational crises is a key benefit of benchmark analysis. 

Benchmarking enables organizations to get this advanced notice of upcoming hazards through access to and efficient interpretation of relevant data and market sentiment. If the data shows that a particular complaint is causing a competitor’s customers to walk, shutting down such an issue before it spills over into negative online reviews and reputational damage is clearly the most desirable solution.

Why is feedback-based benchmarking so helpful?

Often too generalized and unfocused, traditional market reports overlook a lot of key data and a relevant perspective. This is where consumer insight proves so helpful. Benchmarking that sources actual consumer opinion in real time returns the current trends and realities of the market, draws from all points of the customer journey, from marketing to after sales support, and pulls back the curtain on what consumers feel, what they consider important, and in which ways they think they are being let down.

With consumer feedback-based benchmarking, forming a comprehensive big picture of your target market, their wants, pain-points, and expectations is thus simplified and its usefulness optimized.

Different benchmarking techniques

Multiple benchmarking models exist to suit different situations, goals, and objectives. These include:

Competitive comparison

Competitive benchmarking gives a side-by-side appraisal of your brand’s performance against that of your industry competitors. Competitive insights give a clear view of the competitive field and reveal how each brand performs under key metrics. Customer complaint frequency, resolution rates, and consumer satisfaction levels can all be compared with those of your rivals.

Customer experience (CX) 

CX benchmarking works with data representing how consumers perceive and feel about your business. Tools such as complaint frequency dashboards and customer sentiment heat maps give graphical representations of the most common causes of complaints, their effect on consumer sentiment and customer satisfaction, and offer comparisons with industry front runners. 

Market position benchmarking

This method is used to gauge market visibility across several channels. Benchmarking SEO effectiveness, for example, will reveal how well your efforts are impacting the online visibility and search rankings of your brand.

Process benchmarking

Process benchmarking works by scrutinizing the internal workflows of your business and scoring them against industry best practices. How does this look in practice? For example, analysis reveals that your average response time to customer enquiries is around 72 hours. If the industry average response period (the average of your competition) is within 24 hours, then a clear path to optimization is revealed. 

Internal benchmarking

Looking inward, internal benchmarking gauges financial and operational metrics, as well as the output of departments, teams, and processes within your company. This method of benchmarking can evaluate costs and internal processes and identify optimum approaches that can then be replicated across other areas of business.

Strategic benchmarking

Looking at the big picture, focusing on large-scale changes and transformations, strategic benchmarking investigates the efficacy of serious overhauls or new launches. For example,e digital transformations or rebranding. It also helps your business to understand the efficiency of distribution relative to sales.

Product benchmarking

This method is self-explanatory. Here, product performance is compared with rival offerings, looking at price, product features, and, importantly, customer feedback to determine product performance.

How to make benchmarking effective

Getting the desired results from industry benchmarking takes dedication to a structured process – while benchmarking will return immediately actionable insights, there are no shortcuts here; it simply doesn’t work that way. Success will be achieved by consistency in adhering to the following steps:

1. Determine your goals

Identify the most important areas of focus. If you already know where you are losing ground, then you know where attention is needed. Are your customer service outcomes lagging behind the industry average? Then, a specific target may be to reduce call waiting times by 50%, or to double first contact resolutions.

2. Pick the correct metrics

Concentrate on working with the benchmarking data that matches your specific objectives. If looking to make strides in the customer experience department, prioritize CSAT and net promoter scores (NPS), resolution rate and customer satisfaction.

3. Gather the data 

This is the point where many struggle. Acquiring quality data at a scale that enables it to be useful can be a lengthy and time-consuming process, involving the use of third-party benchmarking tools to harvest online review data, public reports, media, surveys, and more. To be most effective, the data needs to be current, which is a significant challenge, as much publicly available information can be dispersed, outdated, or missing the detail that allows useful comparisons to be made.

4. Analyze and apply

With adequate data to make a usable analysis, the time comes to compare your scores with your industry peers. The results will aid you in determining the relative strengths and weaknesses of your brand, gaining awareness of frequent problems and common causes, and identifying how and why your competitors are performing better than you in a particular area.

From here, you are well-positioned to formulate a comprehensive action plan that is grounded in actual, current data that reflects the truth of the matter. Understand which changes will have the highest positive impact, set new, measurable targets, and track the efficacy of these changes as time progresses and circumstances evolve.

Case study

The theory is sound, but how does it work in practice? How can sentiment analysis be used to improve customer experience? Let’s take the example of a real-world application of benchmarking analysis to form a tangible picture of what it can do for a business.

The scenario

Struggling with diminishing retention rates and an increasing percentage of negative reviews, an insurance firm failed to figure out the cause of this drop-off, even after seeking out the culprit through internal audits.

The solution

Having tried to get to the bottom of the issue without success, the company contacted Pissed Consumer and requested an industry benchmarks report.

The report revealed that the firm’s complaint resolution rate was below the industry average, driving negative consumer sentiment, which was compounded by sluggish response times and dissatisfaction over denied claims.

Competitor analysis revealed that the firm’s peers were gaining ground through quicker and more efficient claim processing, as well as affirmative outreach, which translated to superior customer retention and satisfaction scores.

The outcome

Implementing a strategy based on the findings of the report, the insurance firm invested in achieving faster response times and training staff to have greater competency in resolving claims satisfactorily. These data-driven changes resulted in a 15% increase in resolution rates over a six-month period, a 20% reduction in negative online reviews, and a significant increase in renewal rates.

Benchmarking challenges

It is possible to attempt industry benchmarking unaided, but going solo means crossing a minefield of limitations and potential mistakes.

Limited data

It is rare that brands have access to competitor data. Readily available information is often outdated, incomplete, and lacks the comprehensive detail and context needed for a thorough analysis. With only part of the picture, only a partial solution will be achieved.

Adequate data acquisition is time-consuming

From knowing where to start to ensuring that there are no gaps, aggregating the relevant data from a multitude of sources is easily overwhelming and highly resource-intensive.

Lacking experience and expertise, structuring, categorizing, and sifting through the acquired data for useful indicators can be slow and lacking focus. Knowing what matters and where to find it is a key skill that determines the success of benchmarking outcomes.

Interpretation errors

Understanding how to do industry benchmarking involves knowing how to correctly read the gathered data – it's crucial to getting good results. It’s easy to make the mistake of hyper-focusing on one perceived cause at the expense of overlooking other equally important factors. Bias, misinterpretation, and misattribution will all hinder positive results and instead lead to further complications. 

Pissed Consumer’s benchmarking solutions

Benchmarking raises many serious questions about how to approach it. Pissed Consumer provides the answers. With access to an industry leading volume of real consumer insight, Pissed Consumer’s data driven insights will equip your brand with ready to use benchmarking reports that power informed decisions, transformational strategies, and compelling, customer-centric narratives.

What does a Pissed Consumer report give you?

Uniquely positioned to draw the most practical, pertinent, and actionable data from an enormous pool of consumer feedback and business data, Pissed Consumer is a full-service provider of industry benchmarking analysis.

What’s included in Pissed Consumer’s benchmarking reports?

Complaint frequency comparison

Professionally analyzed industry benchmark data that reveals how common certain issues, such as product failures, refund difficulties, etc., are in your own operation. Identify where you're falling short and compare your performance to that of your competitors.

Customer sentiment tracking

Follow periodic shifts in consumer feeling towards your brand. Our reports will identify how positive, negative, and neutral ratios are moving over time, enabling you to account for the efficacy of strategic changes and process adaptations.

CX heatmaps

Graphical representations of customer satisfaction levels across various markers, brand,s and topics, providing an effective, at-a-glance business benchmarking tool.

Industry ratings

Our industry benchmarks and competitors analysis enable you to see the top through bottom performers in your industry and instantly see your standing against the competition.

Root cause analysis

You’ll receive an in-depth interpretation of the data to gain a deep comprehension of the underlying causes of poor performance.

Detailed customer service data

All data relevant to your customer service operation is covered, from response times to accessibility and satisfaction levels with outcomes.

The heads-up on market risks and opportunities

Comprehensive and current market data will give you the jump on emerging industry-wide trends, risks, and differentiation opportunities.

Thoroughly analyzed reports

Pissed Consumer’s benchmarking reports are drawn from real, up-to-date multi-channel data consisting of:

• Millions of genuine online reviews 
• Transcribed support calls and chat sessions
• Customer service surveys
• Direct correspondence between the company and the consumer

Fully anonymized, structured, and comprehensively analyzed by experts. Your report will present straightforward, actionable guidelines that will immediately put you on the right course.

Check the available Industry Benchmarks reports.

Benchmarking: indispensable insight for every business

With consumer satisfaction being the metric that now makes or breaks a brand’s reputation, and by that success, industry benchmarking is more than best practice, its essential to staying on the same wavelength as those who have the greatest say over your success – your customers.

Benefit from quality benchmarking analysis now to:

Stay agile in the face of changing consumer trends. Stay ahead of the competition by being the first to spot performance gaps, and stay on top of the future by strategizing for growth with accurate, real-world data.

Start making the changes today that will bring success tomorrow. Contact us now to schedule a consultation and receive a customized report.