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Benchmarking Program
Make Better Decisions by Benchmarking What Matters
The First Quartile Benchmarking Program provides electric utilities – including munis, co-ops, and investor-owned companies – with an objective, third-party lens to determine if they are measuring the right metrics and how their performance stacks up within a competitive peer band.
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By leveraging proprietary, peer-validated data unavailable through public filings, the program helps utilities across North America understand where they stand, identify performance gaps, and uncover opportunities for improvement.
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Beyond the data, our Benchmarking Program connects utilities with industry peers to exchange proven practices, explore operational challenges, and learn from one another. This combination of meaningful insights and collaborative learning delivers lasting value. Our program boasts a 90% member retention rate, with long-standing participants remaining engaged for more than a decade.
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Because better decisions begin with understanding what matters most. Our approach helps utility leaders move beyond measuring performance to identifying priorities, making confident decisions, and pursuing practical improvements that deliver lasting results.
Discover What to Improve, What to Defend, and Where to Invest Next
As a utility leader, you don’t need yet another performance report. You need to know whether your operating decisions are sound, whether peer utilities are solving similar challenges in better or more cost-effective ways, what tradeoffs they are making, and which questions your leadership team should be asking before committing capital, changing service levels, or defending a strategic direction.
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The First Quartile Benchmarking Program gives you the peer context, credible evidence, and executive-level insight you need to make those decisions with confidence, and to stand behind them with your board, regulators, customers, and employees.
Two Specialized Benchmarking Programs
We offer two distinct programs designed to cover the critical functions of utility operations:
Electric Transmission &
Distribution Benchmarking
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Focuses on pipes and wires and the operational backbone of your utility.
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Benchmarks your utility against your industry peers on System Reliability (SAIDI, SAIFI, CAIDI), Vegetation Management, OSHA Safety, Grid Resilience, Capital Investment levels and plenty more.
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Helps you make better decisions about reliability, workforce management, asset management, and cost.
Customer Service
Benchmarking
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Focuses on customer-facing operational activities that shape the overall customer experience and influence affordability.
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Benchmarks your utility against your industry peers on Average Speed of Answer (ASA), Abandoned Rate, Billing Accuracy, eBill/ePay penetration, and Write-Offs as a percentage of revenue, and plenty more.
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Helps you make better decisions about call center, billing, payment processing, and AMI operations success.
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Independent Benchmarking
identifies exactly where
organizations perform
differently.
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The First Quartile Peer
Community explains why those differences exist by exploring the operating decisions and tradeoffs other leaders made.
The Annual First Quartile Benchmarking Program Cycle
The First Quartile Benchmarking Program operates on a 12-month cycle, providing continuous value through four distinct phases:
PHASE 1
Questionnaire
Development (Winter)
The community
fingerprints the process by updating 10% of the questions annually to address emerging trends.
PHASE 2
Tiered Data Collection (Spring)
We use a structured
four-tier approach:
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Tier 1: High-level KPIs and outcomes
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Tier 2: Volumes and influencers to KPIs
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Tier 3: Specific management practices
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Tier 4: Emerging issues (e.g., wildfires or large data center loads)
PHASE 3
Insights Conference
(Summer)
An exclusive, members-
only event (both in person and virtual) to discuss trends and share peer learnings.
PHASE 4
Custom Strategic
Readouts (Fall)
A personalized, one-
on-one session where
we interpret your results
against the peer panel
and recommend specific
actions to improve your
performance and help you make better decisions.
The First Quartile Advantage
PROPRIETARY UTILITY PERFORMANCE DATABASE
Our proprietary database contains 25 years of detailed utility performance and operating practices data unavailable through public sources. This depth of information allows us to benchmark performance, identify trends, and compare utilities across a broad range of operating conditions.
INDUSTRY-DEVELOPED, PEER-VALIDATED QUESTIONNAIRES
Our questionnaires have been refined over decades in collaboration with participating utilities. Industry input, consistent definitions, and rigorous data validation produce meaningful, credible comparisons across utilities of different sizes, regions, and operating environments.
INSIGHTS BEYOND THE NUMBERS
We go beyond reporting performance differences to investigate what drives them. By connecting costs, staffing, operating practices, and outcomes across utility functions, we identify relationships, explain performance gaps, and uncover opportunities that traditional benchmarking may miss.
ACTIONABLE OPERATIONAL IMPROVEMENTS
Our utility leadership experience and independent analysis help clients translate benchmarking insights into practical operating decisions. We work with utility teams to evaluate alternatives, prioritize opportunities, and develop improvements that fit their operating environment and deliver sustainable results.
Strategic Value & ROI
Customer Service
If you feel the need for more staff in the contact center, we help you define
the customer experience you want to create.
We determine if your current operating model and work design naturally
produce that experience.
The conversation shifts from improving a department to improving the
model that supports it.
The First Quartile Benchmarking Program takes your operational performance to new levels by delivering tangible, strategic value that goes far beyond simple data aggregation. By leveraging peer-validated insights, your utility secures regulatory defensibility for rate cases, uncovers O&M savings to self-fund critical improvements, and instills a mindset that drives internal accountability across your organization.
This way, you connect your benchmark data to decisions and results rather than simply report on your performance. You understand cause-and-effect relationships across functions and how one decision influences another. And your leadership
team gains the confidence, validation, defensibility, and context they need.
You distinguish between structural realities and
controllable choices, understand why performance differs, and identify where the next opportunity may exist. Once you choose your new direction, our broader capabilities help you move faster, avoid common missteps, and achieve stronger results with less cost, less risk, and greater confidence. After all, your leadership team wants to know two things. First, is their view of performance accurate? And second, can they confidently support the decisions they are making?
Regulatory
Defensibility
Use our third-party validated
data as evidence for rate cases.
It proves to your Public Utility
Commission (PUC) that you are
performing due diligence and
managing costs responsibly in an era of high affordability pressure.
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Self-Funding
Improvements
Many members use O&M cost savings identified through our benchmarks to self-fund their next round of improvement initiatives.
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Actionable
Results
One utility used community benchmarking to inform storm-response improvements, completing restoration in two days versus an earlier five-day estimate and reporting lower costs.
Another utility used leading indicators from the Customer Service Benchmark to reduce write-offs from 4% to 0.5%.
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Discover If You are Measuring the Right Things, the Right Way, and
How You Compare with Peer Utilities Across North America.
If your utility is typical, you find yourself asking,
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“Is our view of performance accurate?”
“Are we improving at the same rate as the rest of the industry?”
“What opportunities are we missing?”
“What deserves leadership attention next?”
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What you require is context, a proven way to move from uncertainty to confident progress by benchmarking your performance against peers. So that you translate the results into clearer priorities, better decisions, and a clearer path forward.
Addressing Common Concerns
Is the Data Collection Too Much Effort?
While the questionnaire is comprehensive, it is scalable. Because 90% of the questions stay the same year-over-year, the effort reduces significantly after the first year.
Is this Just for Large Utilities?
No. Our network includes members with as few as 100,000 customers and those with over six million. Small utilities often provide the most innovative transferable knowledge because they can pivot and pilot new ideas faster than industry giants.
Ready to Make Better-Informed Decisions?
Validation. Opportunity identification. Better decision-making. These are the outcomes you get from participating in the First Quartile Benchmarking Program. This is why we invite you to join a North American peer community that boasts a 90% member retention rate. Validate your internal performance views against proprietary, peer-validated data that isn’t available through public filings. So that you understand your performance and make better decisions.
Contact us today to gain the objective peer context you need to identify your next meaningful opportunity for improvement, prioritize your resources, and drive better decision-making.
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