BestMark's extremely unique and actionable competitive intelligence solutions will arm your organization with strategic advantages over your rivals.

Winning Requires a Competitive Advantage

With little room left for differentiation on product or price, companies have turned their focus to the customer experience. The business case is clear. The ability to consistently deliver a superior customer experience leads to loyalty, advocacy, long-term growth and increased market share.

Actionable Competitive Intelligence is Imperative

Customer-focused companies that are consistently at the top of their industry embrace competitive intelligence as a critical tool in planning and decision-making. They understand that a superior system for gathering and utilizing competitive intelligence allows them to:

• Understand the most important elements in the customer experience
• Anticipate, pre-empt, and react to competitors' actions
• Strategically focus training and resources on areas that have relatively strong impacts on customer loyalty and where they underperform compared to the competition
• Identify innovative best practices

The BestMark Advantage - Competitive Mystery Shops

BestMark manages a field force of over 200,000 mystery shoppers in more than 10,000 cities throughout the US, Canada and Europe. Our shoppers are extensively trained to engage front-line sales personnel with specific sales scenarios and objectively assess performance on key customer experience attributes.

Comprehensive Program Design

The success of any competitive intelligence program is largely dependent on the quality of the work done before program implementation. At this critical time, what makes BestMark an ideal partner is our steadfast commitment to thoroughly understand each client's unique needs—and our ability to draw on proprietary methodologies based on over 27 years of measuring the customer-experience with Fortune 500 and Global 50 clients. Among other objectives, the program design stage seeks to:

• Identify and model the key components of the customer experience in your industry.
• Determine what the delight-driving behaviors that create loyalty and advocacy look and sound like.
• Develop a sophisticated, behavior-based survey.
• Identify which competitors should be targeted for intelligence-gathering, such as industry leaders, top rivals, new entrants, growing rivals, etc.

What is Measured During Competitive Mystery Shops (Examples)

Dimensions of Service Quality Relationship Building Behaviors Sales Techniques / Approaches Cross Selling / Up-Selling

Phone Skills Internal Atmosphere External Physical Environment Sales / Product Promotions

Staffing Levels Customer Traffic Pricing Information Comments about your company

 

 

Program Implementation – Gather Competitive Intelligence

Before we execute a single competitive mystery shop, we select the right shoppers for your program and train and certify these shoppers to fully understand the scenarios they will be using and the customer experience dimensions they will be scoring.

As shops are executed, we leverage our staff of Quality Editors who are trained and certified on a client-by-client basis and scrutinize every score and every word our shoppers provide. We require more in-depth narrative from our shoppers than do most companies, and this allows us to understand unique aspects of a visit that cannot be captured with survey questions alone. If there is ever a question about content, we contact the shoppers to clarify. If we discover the shop was not performed correctly, we throw it out and resend another shopper at no cost to you.

Actionable Competitive Intelligence

The final product of BestMark's competitive mystery shops is company-wide access to actionable intelligence. With a suite of powerful reporting and analytics tools and 24/7 web access to anyone in the organization, BestMark's cutting-edge GuestLink™ reporting and analytics solution provides all stakeholders with a rapid, clear and deep understanding of what customers are experiencing in your competitors' locations.

GuestLink™ Competitive Intelligence Features

• Interactive Dashboards
• Performance Scorecards
• Dynamic Query Drill-Down
• Individual Customer Experience Reports
• Strengths & Opportunities Reports
• Key Performance Indicator (KPIs) Tracking
• High-Impact Standard Reports