If wireless carriers were operating in a void without competition or market-changing factors such as convergence, while measuring business performance in areas such as revenue and margin, then customer experience and operational efficiency would be as easy as glancing at the bottom line of their earnings reports every quarter. However, competition is increasing in most markets around the world, and convergence is a very real, very imminent technology evolution that will change the way customers use telecom services.

Still, many carriers haven’t attempted to benchmark their own business performance as compared to the rest of the wireless industry. “I’ve talked to service providers who are ready to start business transformation projects, and the first thing I ask them is, ‘Have you benchmarked where you are now?’” said Tonia Graham, director of the TeleManagement Forum’s Business Benchmarking Group. “You’d be surprised how many of them haven’t done it. But, if you’re measuring yourself against yourself, you could improve your performance by 100% and still fail. What you’re missing is the big picture.”

To fill that need, the TMF’s Business Benchmarking Group last year added wireless carriers to the list of service providers from which it is collecting business performance data that will be used to create industrywide benchmarks to help carriers improve their performance in those three critical areas of revenue and margin, customer experience and operational efficiency.

The TMF has been developing the benchmarking initiative since 2004. Its first data collection round involving wireless carriers was held last year, and its second round is just finishing, with results likely available in a few weeks. Six wireless carriers from around the world participated, Graham said. Several more wanted to but will have to wait to be involved in the next data collection round.

What Graham and her team members were looking for from these carriers was basic information they already have on hand about customer acquisition, retention and attrition, as well as revenue, profitability and other categories with the intent to compile online reports that could then be filtered into a handful of “executive care about” comparison metrics and informational nuggets. The reports can be accessed at the TMF Web site, and to protect the contributors, attribution is withheld, and all numbers are presented in ratios.

Graham gave a few examples of the types of business performance observations that are delivered in the reports. For instance, one observation drawn from earlier data collections suggested a correlation between retention of postpaid customers and retention of prepaid customers. “It suggests that wireless carriers doing well retaining one group are also doing well retaining both groups,” Graham said. The correlation is interesting in that many carriers view postpaid and prepaid customers as very different demographics, and if they are more involved with one of these market segments, they sometimes have fears about competing effectively in the other. The data suggests, perhaps, that they have nothing to fear and can rely on proven methods for customer retention across these segments.

Another benchmark showed that DSL and postpaid mobile service had nearly identical customer attrition rates. Though there is no obvious correlation, the data suggests that competition in the wireline broadband market could be a good indicator of what service providers can expect from competition in the postpaid mobile market.

“There has been a lot of interest from service providers in seeing results from wireless industry data collection in direct comparison to wireline,” Graham said. She added that the correlation and metrics are not intended to be foundations for entirely new business strategies—only indicators that wrap some context around traditional business performance data.

In a market environment of increasing convergence and competition, wireless carriers would do well to remember to have an industry context for business performance. “The expectation of customers for what they can do and where they are connected is increasing,” Graham said. “The whole telecom industry is shifting very fast, and there are multiple pressures to get to that marketplace early and be successful.”