Competitive Intelligence Archives

Gaining the Competitive Edge: Unveiling the Power of Competitive Intelligence and Mystery Shopping

Competitive intelligence and mystery shopping are two related concepts that can provide valuable insights into a company’s competitive landscape and customer experience. Let’s explore each concept in more detail:

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence (CI) involves gathering and analyzing information about competitors, their products, strategies, and market positioning. The goal is to gain a competitive edge by understanding the market dynamics and making informed decisions. CI encompasses various techniques such as market research, data analysis, and information gathering from public sources, industry reports, competitor websites, and social media.

Key benefits of competitive intelligence include:

a. Identifying market trends and opportunities: CI helps identify emerging trends, customer preferences, and market gaps, allowing companies to adapt and innovate accordingly.

b. Understanding competitor strategies: By monitoring competitors’ activities, pricing, marketing campaigns, and product launches, companies can gain insights into their strengths, weaknesses, and future plans.

c. Benchmarking performance: CI enables companies to compare their performance with that of competitors, identify areas for improvement, and set realistic goals.

d. Mitigating risks: CI helps identify potential threats, such as new market entrants, regulatory changes, or disruptive technologies, allowing companies to take proactive measures.

The Role Mystery Shopping Plays in Competitive Intelligence

Mystery shopping involves hiring individuals or agencies to pose as regular customers and assess the quality of service, compliance with standards, and overall customer experience at a company’s physical or online locations. Mystery shoppers provide detailed reports about their observations, which can help companies evaluate and improve their operations.

Key aspects of mystery shopping include:

a. Evaluation of customer experience: Mystery shoppers assess factors like employee behavior, product knowledge, store cleanliness, waiting times, and overall satisfaction. This feedback helps companies identify gaps in customer service and make improvements.

b. Performance measurement: Mystery shopping provides objective data on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sales techniques, upselling, cross-selling, adherence to protocols, and compliance with regulations. This information helps companies assess and incentivize employee performance.

c. Competitive benchmarking: Mystery shopping can compare a company’s performance against its competitors. By conducting similar evaluations across multiple companies, businesses can identify relative strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace.

d. Training and development: Feedback from mystery shopping exercises can guide training programs to enhance employee skills, improve service delivery, and align with customer expectations.

Combining Competitive Intelligence and Mystery Shopping: Competitive intelligence and mystery shopping can be complementary techniques. Competitive intelligence provides a broader understanding of the competitive landscape, while mystery shopping offers specific insights into customer experiences. By integrating the findings from both approaches, companies can make more informed decisions, develop effective strategies, and differentiate themselves in the market.

3 Steps to Improve Customer Service

Customer Service during the pandemic was something that was not on most people’s radar. For many small businesses, hospitality especially, they did all they could just to stay afloat. As we begin to vaccinate more and more people, businesses are beginning to open up again. With this new reopening comes some challenges. Some previous employees are not returning to work. Good help is becoming harder to find for some industries. As a business owner, you may find yourself in any or all of these challenging situations.

As crazy as it may sound, I believe this is the very best time to create a way to gather customer insights and to evaluate the customer experience. One silver lining for a reset it that it allows a business reinvent themselves. No longer should you just do the status quo. Stepping up your internal measurements by starting with how your customers see you and what they feel can be improved upon.

1. Evaluate Customer Service Levels Before You Get Busy

Unless your business allows you to be present 100% of the time, you need mystery shopping. Mystery shopping measures what you train. Training employees takes a lot of time and resources. Isn’t it worth the time to evaluate its effectiveness? This allows your employees an opportunity to learn. It can do wonders to improve your business by increasing customer service.

Sending in evaluators to measure things like initial greeting, rapport building, listening skills, cross sell or up sell, follow up, etc. can be very eye opening. Most owners believe they know what is happening in their place of business. Once you mystery shop your locations, you may find an entirely different situation. One that can cost you a lot of money.

Beginning a program now is smart because it allows you to see areas that may need improvement before you are back up to 100% capacity. Fixing those areas can be well worth the investment!

2. Gain Customer Service Insights

This may be the best time to gather customer feedback on services, programs, products, etc.. that your business sells. Most people have had to change their way of life for the past year. They are working remotely, teaching their kids at home, shopping differently, etc.. In other words, your customers have changed. How have they changed and how will it impact your business? What can you do now to insure they think of you when they do start going out more regularly again?

Listening to your customers will improve your business by tapping into what is most important to them. Once you have a good understanding of what they are looking for, you can update or add items that may influence their purchases.

3. Competitive Intelligence

Researching your competition is always a good idea and now is no different. Do you have the same competitors as you did a year ago? What are they doing differently? How do their service offerings compare to yours?

What about their pricing? Have they increased or decreased? Gaining these insights now can be of great value in positioning your business down the road.

How do their service levels compare to yours? A great idea is to send your employees in to your competition and use the same evaluation form you currently use for mystery shopping. This not only shows your employees the importance of this type of measurement, they will come away with the differences between your business and the competition; good and bad.

Just taking some proactive measure now will increase sales and profitability down the road.

Digital Competitive Intelligence Strategy

Competitive Intelligence is something that business has done for decades in one form or another. From mystery shopping to market research using various methodologies, everyone seems to be spying on everyone else. However, many businesses have been slow to consider using social media and online research, for competitive intelligence, as a way to increase market share and to gain an overall competitive edge.

For the purpose of this blog post, we will zero in on the aspects of using online resources as a way to gain digital competitive intelligence. As artificial intelligence and algorithms continue to perfect, so does the need for good software. Social listening and analytic software options are plentiful and the financial commitment for using them can be huge.

According to Forrester, vendors that can provide advanced analytics, brand measurement in visualizations, and broad tech integrations, position themselves to successfully deliver enterprise-wide consumer and social intelligence to their customers (Digimond reports from the study and is named as one of the top software providers).

In 2020, a Forrester’s customer survey found that 59% of respondents incorporate social data into market research data sets, 57% into voice of the customer (VoC) data, and 48% into audience segmentation.

It is important to mention that while social data plays a significant role, data collection from non-social media data can be equally important.

Social Media data for competitive intelligence was something we covered in a previous blog.

According to Hootesuite, social media competitive analysis, includes the following:

Identify who your competitors are on social media
Know which social platforms they’re on
Know how they’re using those platforms
Understand how well their social strategy is working
Benchmark your social results against the competition
Identify social threats to your business
Find gaps in your own social media strategy

Online Research Strategy Steps

The Importance of Media Monitoring for Businesses on a regular basis with ongoing detailed reporting. Select your brand with at least two top competitors and gather intelligence on a regular basis.

A Competitor Website is home to a great deal of information that can be used for competitive intelligence. From product and pricing information to new product launches to press releases.

Review and support sites should be monitored as well. Customers are very vocal online, providing a good deal of detail of product reviews.