Benchmarking Examples:

2.0. Sports Direct International PLC

Sports Direct International PLC has been a renown British retailing organization established since 1982 by Mike
Ashley. The present state of the company is an encouraging one, as it has been listed as the United Kingdom’s
largest sports-goods retailer. The company operates about 670 stores worldwide. The company is in charge of a
large number of sporting brands and businesses predominantly under the brand of SportsDirect.com.
Additionally, the company owns other retailers, including Lillywhites and USC. Sports Direct also operates
under low margins. (“Sports Direct History”)
The major area that needs to be improved is the area of customer service and supports. According to The
Telegraph, Sports Direct ranks 77 in the list of the top best companies to provide great customer service which
is a very low rank in the industry. In order to achieve a perfect customer support or services, Sports Direct needs
to ensure that they continually provide the best service, ensuring the products they offer for sale to customers
meet or exceed their expectations, thereby giving them premium satisfaction. Also, Sports Direct has to develop
some customer satisfaction strategies such as a constant money back guarantee, best return policy or change of
items purchased, and improvement of employee skills. According to Trust Pilot (2016) reviews, the majority of
complaints given from customers are based on bad return policy and employee attention. Therefore, these are
issues to be considered.

2.1. Amazon Inc

Amazon is an American e-commerce and cloud computing organization, established in Seattle, Washington DC,
its headquarters. Amazon has consistently maintained its high reputation as the largest Internet-based retailer in
the world based on its total sales and market capitalization. (Jopson, 2011) In offering goods for sales, Amazon
takes its customer services as a top priority. Amazon believes in establishing and maintaining long-term
relationships with its customers in order to encourage repeat visits and buying, and even earning customer
referrals. Additionally, the Company constantly seeks to achieve steady communication with its customers and
also earn great feedback from them in order to continually improve their stores and services.
In order to achieve what they do, Amazon offers a number of e-mail addresses to ensure customers can request
for information that bothers them, and also to encourage suggestions and feedbacks. In addition to this, Amazon
provides customers with telephone services, therefore, users or customers can access the customer service
representatives through the telephone 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week. Moreover, to ensure the quality of
services provided by the customer service is prompt and professional enough to meet customer demands,
Amazon has automated some specific tools utilized by its customer support staff and also constantly planning
for future enhancements. (“Amazon Reports”)

3.0. The Benchmarking Level of Sports Direct

International PLC
Benchmarking is a systematic process that identifies how much a company like Sports Direct quest for
perfection. An analysis is shown below:

3.1. The Strength

Sports Direct recognizes the importance of benchmarking, and then takes it, based on the Company’s shares
which fell towards the end of last year through till March 2016. To analyze the difficulty they fell into, they had
to benchmark three key competitions in the same retail industry in the United Kingdom, and these include JD
sports, MandMDirect, and Decathlon. They were able to achieve each of their benchmarking process using
various systematic tools such as Visibility Index, Google Trends, Keyword Volumes, Index Pages, and
Takeaways. (Jarvis, 2016) Therefore, benchmarking for this organization is possible.
3.2. The Weaknesses
In all their strategies to improve customer services, they have not considered benchmarking their customer
services. Studies have shown that Sports Direct continuously works to improve their customer support and
services at all levels within the group, but there is a need for more emphasis on benchmarking this process.

3.3. Factors that Impact the Use of Benchmarking

Discovering the position in the best performance being achieved is important for every organization. This is in
fact a factor that impacts the use of benchmarking. According to Zailani et al., (2008) implementing or using
benchmarking is as a result of the need to consider where an organization is, how good they have to be, and
what is needed to be done to get to where they choose to be. Other factors include the need to share the
establishment and proven best practices by an organization as well as identifying and analyzing world-class
performance. In addition, utilizing tested and proven practices, convincing skeptics of those that have seen
benchmarking processes working, and overcoming related inertia and complacency as well as developing a
sense of urgency are what are revealed as factors that accelerates change and restructuring in the use of
benchmarking. (Kelessidis, 2000) Moreover, the need to think “outside the box” for ideas for the improvement
of an organization requires looking out or sourcing for information outside of the company in order to improve
the company. And since the owners of all the processes in an organization are involved, implementation or the
use of benchmarking is possible. (Kelessidis, 2000)

3.4. Limitations to the Use of Benchmarking

When using benchmarking to analyze the performance of an organization, it has been established that
benchmarking has its own virtues. The limitations that could be experienced by an organization are the
comparison of the production time or the cost of a particular process to that of the competitor companies. When
they consider the time or process required for their level of efficiency, they may find it difficult to carry out the
process of benchmarking. Additionally, when benchmarking, it is important not to ignore the differentiated
output that the shared services or internal support group provide, otherwise, the numeric comparisons or
straight-across cost spelt out will be meaningless. Therefore, when benchmarking, companies should take into
consideration more of commoditized processes or services. (Kaplan, 2006)

4.0. Solution
Successful organizations have been able to figure out the secret behind their success owing to customer
satisfaction. It is important that an environment which supports a quality culture is created and it requires a
systematic and structural process. Basically, Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management technique to
long-term success via customer satisfaction. Amongst the principles of TQM, focusing on customer is a major
principle that guarantees quality improvement. It is only customers that determine the level of quality an
organization attains. So whether foster quality improvement, the training of employees, and integrating quality
into the process management are considered, only the customers can determine whether the organization’s
efforts were worthwhile.

Additionally, since customer service is within management control, there is more emphasis on the role of
customers or clients in TQM. This emphasis, according to Charintimath (2003), requires the use of TQM tools
to measure and effectively put a solution to customer satisfaction within the management to avert the
organization from losing its customers or clients. (Al-Ibrahim, 2014) Fundamentally, the premise of TQM
theories is based on the fact that if the needs and wants of customers are kept in focus, controlling customer
satisfaction is attainable. (Al-Ibrahim, 2014)

Furthermore, achieving the analysis of TQM philosophy for organizational change, it is necessary to consider
the fact that Edward Deming discovered his 14 Points of Quality Management. These ideas have been modified
over the years and it was done for the sake of improving the quality of service for customers for their
satisfaction. According to Anderson et al., (1994), organizations employ the 14 Points of Quality for
management to be able to regularly and continuously determine the objectives their organization should achieve
and the strategies put in place for them to achieve these ideas. Moreover, organizations have implemented newer
ways, approaches, and strategies to ensure that the implementation of quality products and services is achieved.
These strategies have been enlisted from various authors. According to Joseph M. Juran, an important
contributor to the development of TQM, the quality trilogy was introduced, these include quality control, quality
planning, and quality management. Others include Crosby’s step to improving quality, Kaoru Ishikawa’s
contributions to TQM philosophy, and many others. Therefore, to assist “Sports Direct International Limited”
on the improvement of their customer care a new tool has to be used. Hence, the Six Sigma tools.

4.1. The Six Sigma Tools

Six Sigma is a simple measure or evaluation of the quality that tries to near perfection. In a simpler term it
defines, measures, analyze, improve, and control. It is dependent on disciplined, and data-driven approach as
well as the methodology for getting rid of any defects that is driving close to the six standard deviations relating
to the mean and the closest specification limit in any kind of process, ranging from products to services sand
manufacturing to transactional. The process of Six Sigma is targeted at the customer. Based on some key
elements of quality, such as the customer, process, and employee, Six Sigma seeks to delight customers with
defined quality products and services (customer supports and services, included). Customers expect reliability,
performance, competitive prices, clear and correct transaction processing, on-time delivery, service, and more.
In the event all these tries to fail, there is need for the involvement of a readily available customer support
service to take every step to ensure the customer is made to realize the reasons for the pending problem, and the
next available solution. The process of Six Sigma also requires the sight of a business from the customers’
perspective, and not the organization’s. The delivery of service or products should be looked from the outside-
in. And lastly, since people are the developers of results, involving employees is very necessary to an
organization quality approach. It is also necessary that organizations are trained in the techniques, statistical
tools, and strategies of Six Sigma to ensure the continuous performance of great services. (General Electric,
1999)
Six Sigma offers some benefits. Basically, Six Sigma depends wholly on statistical and scientific techniques to
ensure there is a dramatic reduction in the outlined defect rates of customers. (Linderman et al, 2003, Fursule et
al., 2012) Using explicit, difficult goals in any kind of Six Sigma projects have the capacity to enhance the
magnitude of improvements, reduction of performance irregularity of the projects, and the enhancement of the
efforts of employees’ improvement as well as the quality commitment. (Linderman et al., 2003, p. 194; Fursule
et al., 2012) Additionally, Six Sigma supplements for the barriers of Benchmarking through helping quality
control based on the fact that Six Sigma is customer driven. Six Sigma is so strong that any defect to a product
or service processes that is not acceptable to the end customer is considered a defect and wouldn’t be allowed in
the organization for the improvement of quality. This is because Six Sigma takes into consideration the
processes involved in the production of a product as well as the finishing of a service, not just its final outcome.
And since the major problem Sports Direct is facing is its customer support process, employing Six Sigma will
help the organization promote and improve its return policy and also the approach in which customers answer
customers.

Some limitations to Six Sigma are based on the metric associated with the tool. According to Fursule et al.,
2012, Six Sigma is targeted at metric, which hence, directly impacts the design and process management of
products/services. In addition, top management involvement is crucial to Six Sigma implementation. This is
because they have the final decision to make in providing the required resources to increase customer
satisfaction. (Lee & Choi, 2006)

5.0. Conclusion
Achieving a successful customer satisfaction is based on Total Quality Management in any organization.
Benchmarking is an active process in this regard. It defines the comparison of a default in an organization to its
thriving competitors’ process. Statistics have shown that Sports Direct has a poor customer service; however,
Sports Direct keeps trying to ensure these issues are averted. Employing the Six Sigma tool will help take the
problem from the top management to the least employee in making sure the company’s strategic goals are fully
evaluated. However, this will be done to an extent, but in order to keep the entire organisation running at a high
standard Sports direct need to implore a continuous improvement strategy which is attainable by employing
Total quality system. An excellent example of this would be Toyota who don’t just use a singular tool but rather
a variety of tools based around their Total quality system. Toyota use Jidoka which is essentially automation
with a human touch, This will define the gap between the set goals to achieve a better customer service and the
current performance in the organization.

Another concept which is implored is Just in time, which prevents wastage. It follows a concept based on
everything manufactured will be used, thus, saving the organisation a huge sum of money and increases
customer satisfaction. If Sports Direct is determined to achieve complete organisational efficiency, a TQM
system is a concrete recommendation as it is evidential in the case of Toyota and also Amazon where they have
also incorporated Kaizen amongst other tools for continuous improvement of the organisation. Conclusively, by
incorporating a set of tools to create a TQM system will define the gap between the set goals to achieve a better
customer service and the current performance in the organization.