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Category: B2B Mystery Shopping

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.

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5 Steps to Gain Competitive Intelligence For Your Business

Gaining insight through competitive intelligence

Competitive intelligence for B2B companies is an overlooked method of research because of its complexity. It all begins with questions.

What are your competitors up to? For most small to medium sized businesses, this is difficult to keep up with. It may be something you think about only when you learn you lost a sale to a competitor. Or, when you take a look at their website to see what is new. That easily leads to questions about pricing, etc. Most B2B companies do not post pricing on their website. You either need to sign up for a demo or submit a request for a meeting through their site. There are many ways to gain this kind of B2B competitor intelligence covertly. B2B Mystery Shopping is a great way to begin.

B2B Mystery Shopping

You may be wondering what in the world is B2B mystery shopping? Traditionally, mystery shopping is used for restaurants, retail, banks and even medical offices. Business to Business or B2B mystery shopping is an excellent way to gain market intelligence for your business as well as get a good snapshot at your internal customer experience.

B2B Mystery Shopping Case Study

Let me explain by giving you some details of a recent B2B competitive intelligence study we did for a client. We were hired to reach out to our client’s competitor and initiate interest in their services. The very first step in this process is to find an evaluator in our data base that closely matches an actual customer. We interview the evaluator to be sure they are not involved with the client or the client’s competitor in any way.

Once selected, the evaluator gets briefed on the objective of the shop with exact requirements of what marketing collateral we require they capture. If a demo is needed, screen shots may be part of the report, so the client can see a step by step process.

B2B Mystery Shopping
Narrative from the report

From the narrative example above you can see that it took from November 7th – November 13th to receive an answer. It took so long that our evaluator asked if he should abandon the initiative altogether. We pressed on, and finally received the information the client was looking for.

Steps to Begin

  • Test your own process first. Mystery shop your company to evaluate any internal issues you may have that you were unaware of. This gives you a fair point of reference and you are better able to benchmark against your competitors.
  • Price is important but so is marketing. What type of information are they including in their marketing materials that are better than yours?
  • Take it a further step and conduct an audit on their Google keywords and their social media reach.
  • Listen to the buzz around your competitors in social media. Check out the review sites.
Social Media Competitive Intelligence
Example of an Ongoing Social Media Competitive Intelligence Report

One bad review online, one lost email, or an unreturned phone call message that was never returned can break any business. It gets a little trickier when you are a B2B company.

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