How to Leverage Employee Engagement for Competitive Intelligence

Your employees are on your company’s front line. They understand all too well what your competitors are doing.

When you add this employee insight to your wider market research, you can get a deeper understanding of your market and even discover new opportunities.

Leverage What Your Employees Hear

From compliments to complaints, your employees hear it all. Ask your employees what customers (and even non-customers) are telling them

During the sales process
When calling in for support
During the returns process
In the company’s social-media pages and (if they’re willing to share openly) their own personal social-media streams
Outside of the office

Ask your employees pointed questions. Do they hear that one of your competitors is doing something better than your company is? What, specifically, is being done better by someone else? What are people complaining about in regard to your product or service – and what are they complaining about in regard to your competitors?

Use a consolidated feedback system to incorporate this feedback – regularly, consistently – into your overall competitive research. You might be surprised at what your employees are able to uncover when they simply listen in their day-to-day life.

Leverage What Your Employees Experience

Your employees’ experiences can lead you to more targeted research.

Talk to your sales teams, support teams and returns teams. Are they seeing a particular situation happen more and more frequently? What trends do they notice in their day-to-day jobs?

For example, if employees report that more people are switching to your product from competitor product X lately, then you can do targeted consumer research to see if this is a widespread trend. Or if your support team notices that more customers are comparing your product to a competitor product Y lately, you can spend more time understanding what it is that your competitor is doing better with that product.

The most important part of this lesson is that you ask employees directly what they are experiencing. Encourage an open dialogue and let those front-line folks share their unique experience with you.

Management’s Role

Once you have gathered employee insights about your competitors, make sure it is consolidated into one place for easy access, comprehension and reporting for your managers. Consolidating employee insights for better competitive intelligence is easy to do if you have a robust feedback system in place.

Once this information is gathered and consolidated, task managers to filter it further and add competitive intelligence of their own before submitting the key information.

Finally, encourage your managers to share with employees where their insight was used. This will help make employees feel heard and improve employee engagement at the same time you are gathering competitive intelligence. Two birds, one stone!