A Short History of Customer Retention — The TRI*M Benchmarking Database as an Experience Database

Abstract

The History of Benchmarking is said to go back into the 70s. At that time Xerox Cooperation was facing difficulties in business, competitors were introducing copiers to the market with a price below the production costs of Xerox. Xerox decided to learn from its competitors, find out how their processes have been set up in order to improve their own production. Originally mainly focused on production processes, benchmarking has been more and more widely used also for service-related processes. There are many ways for companies to do benchmarking, one can compare industry norms of key performance indicators or look at best practice examples, focus on products or processes, conduct benchmarking internally or externally. All these different approaches have one aspect in common: the overall objective of conducting benchmarking is the willingness of a company to learn and improve itself.