Listening Methods - Collecting `Hard to Get' Customer Interaction Data


Listening Methods Consultants delivering Business Intelligence through Customer Interaction Analytics

Understand and Monitor Your Competition Day by Day

Every day, customers make comments about your competitors to your call center agents, your retail sales reps and to your branch office personnel. They compare product alternatives and wonder whether they should buy from you or your competitor. These comments are free form; they reflect what the person is thinking, especially when the comments are tied to a decision point - a new purchase or customer churn event. Currently, this information is rarely captured and presented to the decision-makers who need it.

Listening Methods enables you to capture and trend the reasons for net wins and losses, by competitor. The data is gleaned from customers and prospects as they interact with a variety of customer channels. Capturing this information can be expensive, so the design focuses on effective ways to gather and process the data. This usually is a combination of technology and very select manual audits.

competitive mention competitive position competitor Some Examples

The chart on the right presents customer comments about a company's pricing when one of four competitors is also mentioned. It also identifies when price is not mentioned in conjunction with this competitor, so that one can judge the importance of price for each competitor.

Here it shows that Competitor A obviously offers a better price. For Competitor D, the chart shows that price is rarely mentioned. Lastly, it shows that the company has a significant price advantage compared to Competitor C, perhaps something that may be taken advantage of to obtain more market share.

Spotting Changes in Competitors Prices

The trend chart shows this information over a two month period. One can see that Competitor A probably increased its prices seven weeks earlier. The number of comments on the price difference declined. It is likely that the competitor realized they were giving away revenues and had room to raise their prices in this market.

When price is mentioned in conjunction with specific competitors and is also associated with major events, such as new sales closures or customer churn, it has high value since it is linked to a change in behavior. Listening Methods searches for this type of information, becuase it has flagship value for evaluating a company's market position and helps prioritize the issues to address.

Capturing Your Market Position

The table captures a company’s position against each of its competitors. The supporting data is captured via a combination of tactics such as speech analytics, manual audits of calls and training select personnel to ask additional questions. It is then placed in a database and viewed via a dashboards and reports to make it highly accessible across the business.