Tag: competitive intelligence

Competitive Reasons

1. Measure your competition’s phone skills.  You may know how well your employees handle incoming phone requests for information on your company, but do you know how effective the competition’s employees are during phone experiences? Gathering intelligence with competitive mystery shops allows you to measure how well your employees stack up against the competition.

2. Assess competitors’ in-person customer service.  It’s equally important to know how your employees rank against the competition in terms of in person customer service experiences. Are there areas where the competition is “wowing” the customers?  If so, is it enough to make customers want to buy from the competitor company rather than your company?

3. Learn about competitive product/service offerings.  Many times, it isn’t easy to gather information on competitor offers. With competitive mystery shops, mystery shoppers pose as regular customers and therefore can gather objective information on the latest competitor products and services.

Banks are thinking about imposing annual fees of $25 or $30 on debit cards, according to people familiar with bank strategies.  Other banks will increase fees on checking accounts. For example, during 2011, Bank of America will offer four basic checking accounts in some states, instead of three.  Three of the four will offer ways for customers to avoid fees, while the fourth, the Essentials account, has an unavoidable monthly fee between $6 and $9.  Chase Bank will charge a $6 monthly fee on one of their checking accounts, however, customers can avoid the fee with a $500 or more monthly deposit to the account, or when they use their debit cards five times during the month.

The holiday season brings out more examples of how competitive the retail landscape is in a sluggish economy.   For example, stores start well before the traditional start of the holiday season to advertise offers.  They hope that by starting earlier, they will entice customers to purchase from them, as opposed to the competition.  Another reason stores increase early efforts is the fear that customers will be more reluctant to spend as weeks go by.

Gathering competitive business intelligence is an important step in retaining and gaining new customers. To help businesses get the information they need, Confero often executes competitor studies on a large scale and over a considerable length of time. However, there are ways for individual stores to conduct competitive analysis locally and effectively. One way is to use your existing employees as mystery shoppers. Here are simple steps to put a competitor evaluation plan into action:

Confero is best known for mystery shop services , which report on specific performance observations made during on site visits or phone calls. Our other services can add vital elements to your company’s customer experience knowledge. Not all research methods will benefit every business, but for some, these can provide valuable knowledge and more in depth insight into the customer experience: