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Best practices:
One client was looking for best practices in three
areas: business-to-business communication,
face-to-face internal communication and communication
measurement. For the first topic, we talked with
competitors in the company's own industry that had
moved up significantly in industry-wide customer
satisfaction studies. For the other two topics, we
identified companies that were celebrated for
excellence in each of those areas. With our results,
the client was able to take pride in how well they
were already doing in many of these areas and to
incorporate some new ideas that fit into their culture
as well. Justification to
management: At a client company, the corporate
communication department, along with other staff
functions, was being required to conduct some
benchmarking of staffing and budgeting efficiency. We
helped the client expand the study to compare measures
of effectiveness along with the efficiency to provide
a more meaningful comparison. We also selected
different companies to benchmark various aspects of
internal and external communication against since no
other company, even in their own industry, operated
the same way they did. The result was that they came
through their senior management review with an
increased appreciation for their work.
Benchmarking for
the future: A relatively new, smaller company in
an industry was growing fast and expected to more than
double its size in the next three years because of new
products in it pipeline. It wanted to compare itself
with industry competitors that had already passed
through this growth stage successfully. They wanted to
see how they should staff each of their communication
functions and how they should relate to each other to
be ready to meet its upcoming challenges. The result,
after the presentation to the new president, was a
completely restructured department, led for the first
time by a vice president who was part of the senior
leadership team. Staffing and budgets have also
increased.
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