If you would like to understand how the way you deal with Customers differs from others or if you would like a stake-in-the-ground measure prior to implementing a new initiative then Harding & Yorke are here to help.  We offer three options:

• A bespoke study (specific to your own needs) - design, operation, analysis, delivery

• Subscribe to the standard ERIC Benchmark Programme (see below)

• Use the existing ERIC format to find your own benchmark

ERIC Industry Benchmark Reports

The ERIC Programme^TM is the UK's most comprehensive Customer Experience syndicated research measuring:

• How it feels to be one of your Customers
• How it feels to be processed as one of your Customers
• Sales and Service Channels.

Overview

ERIC - the Empathy Rating Index Company. ERIC is a subscription programme that gives its members insights into what it feels like to be not only their own customer, but also their competitors'. It also provides cross-industry benchmarking data and current best practices so that an organisation can continually improve the customer experience it delivers.

Approach

The insight into the customer experience is provided though the semi-annual publication of 13 individual industry benchmark reports (over 400 company reports per annum). The on-line reporting structure means that you can access not only the overall industry figures, but also reports on each company in turn. As the format is common across all reports it also enables cross industry benchmarking in both the sales and service environments.

The individual company reports include the ERIC rating^TM - the actual empathy measure together with an insight as to how you perform across a set of common values; a Process rating; their overall Balanced Emotional Scorecard score and verbatim comments taken directly from our own researchers and customers. In practice this means that you can not only gauge how effectively your own operation is at engaging with your customers at an emotional level, but also how good your competitors are.

• In the summer of 2007 we had analysed over 2.5 million data points from the ERIC Programme. We decided to investigate if there was any correlation between the RIC findings and Profitability.
• Dr Yuksel Ekinci from the University of Surrey was supported by Prof. Merlin Stone in the research.

The purpose of the research was to investigate the relationship between ERIC, which is one of the key customer relationship benchmarks, and profitability in the call centre industry. The study included 1400 customers and 28 UK companies from the service and manufacturing industries.

The findings of the study suggest that ERIC has a statistically significant impact on profitability as measured by Return on Capital Employed (ROCE). The inter-correlation between the six dimensions of ERIC and profitability was very strong (85). The ERIC model explained 72 per cent of the total variance in profitability which was extremely good (p > .05). Five out of the 6 ERIC dimensions had a statistically significant impact on profitability. Importantly, the EMPATHY dimension had a positive impact on profitability. Two dimensions had negative impacts on profitability but had positive correlations with the Empathy dimension.

The study offers implications for developing successful customer relationships and managing profitability through ERIC.

We are happy to take interested parties through the findings of the research and discuss the implications for the Call Centre and other industries.  These are significant.