Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is a key area in Voice of the Customer programs in understanding your customers and empathising with them. As part of this exercise, you would conduct campaigns and send out surveys to monitor your customers' sentiments about your competitors and where you stand against them from their perspective. For example, if you learn that many of your customers feel that your fees are high, or your customer support initiatives are not as efficient as that of your competitors, knowing these sentiments and feedback gives you an opportunity to improve your efforts in these exact areas, thereby helping you retain your customers.

Therefore, in Zoho CRM, Competitor Analysis is a key category in Zia's Voice of the Customer dashboards. Zia presents a host of detailed, intelligent, and actionable insights around your customers' conversations about your competitors and the sentiments of those conversations. Some prominent insights include the following:

Keywords related to competitor mentions — that is, if a competitor is mentioned in an email, what is the context of that mention? Is it about pricing, user experience, escalations or congratulations. You will understand the context from the "keywords" highlighted by Zia.
A bird's eye view of the percentage of competitor mentions across communication channels. Example 25% of Competitor 1, 50% of Competitor 2 and so on.
Zia makes a connect between competitor mention by a customer and their deal stage. For example, if a customer mentions on an email that they are dropping out from your sales process because of a better price from a competitor, you'd certainly want to know about it. Zia presents exclusive dashboards on deals won and lost after competitor mentions , so that you can take necessary actions as required.

Therefore, there is quite of a lot of useful, crucial insights that could be discovered through customer conversations about your competitors, and Zia makes it easy for you to crack them.

Note: For the Competitor Analysis dashboard to populate data, you must have already configured Zia Competitor Alert in Zoho CRM. Using this information, Zia will begin to watch for important keywords mentioned in relation to your competitors across communication channels such as Zoho Survey, Desk, calls, and Email. (You need to have enabled these three integrations in the first place.)

1. Keywords Related to Competitor Mentions

Type of chart: Keyword cloud

A word cloud chart presents a set of keywords mentioned in relation to your competitors and their exact sentiment (positive, negative or neutral).

Hovering on a keyword would also give you further insights about it which will include the exact sentiment, sentiment ranking, the number of customers who mentioned it apart from a competitor-wise data split. For example, look at the following screenshot. You can see that the keyword called "Store manager" has been mentioned overall by 395 customers, out of which 320 mentions have been in positive light. However the keyword "Safety" has been mentioned overall by 419 customers, out of which 67 is in negative light. You can also see the competitor split to understand how the mentions are distributed among your competitors, so you have some more idea on who exactly you are up against.

2. All Keywords Related to Competitor Mentions Tabular View

Apart from a keyword cloud, you are presented with a keyword table on detailed insights related to competitor mentions. This table presents a particular keyword and associated details such as its sentiment, the customer count, the keyword ranking, the competitor split data, and the exact communication channels on which these mentions were discovered.

For example, consider the following example. When you consider the keyword Service, an overall count of 4000+ customers think that your service might be better when compared to three of your competitors but your prospect management process might be inefficient considering 3000+ customers have a negative sentiment towards it. You can see exactly which competitors they have referred to in comparison and take necessary actions.

Click View Keyword Drilldown to see a complete set of insights on each prominent keyword and related details. You may export these insights as a Zoho Sheet, CSV or PDF formats.

3. Competitor Overview

Type of chart: Pie chart

A pie chart presents insights on the distribution of competitor mentions across your communication channels. From the chart below you can see how many times each competitor was mentioned by your customers along with a percentage value. You can instantly infer that a total of 106 customers' mentions have been taken into account for this analysis. Out of the 106 unique mentions, Microsoft and SAP are at a tie with respect to number of times they are mentioned (17.29%) while Hubspot has been mentioned the least number of times. Further analysis of keywords related will tell you the exact sentiments which could lead to important actions. You can also edit the Chart settings to alter criteria or select specific communication channels of your interest.

4. Competitor Buzz

Type of chart: Line Graph

Here is a line graph from which you can get a quick idea of the upward or downward trend of mentions for each competitor plotted based on number of customers Vs VoC timeframe. From this chart you can see that on Day 23, 50 customers mentioned keywords related to Microsoft— the highest, as per this chart. This sudden spike of competitor mentions from Day 17 — Day 36, the highest being Microsoft, could tell you some important insights. Perhaps you had run a survey, or something went wrong with a campaign— this chart would be a good reason to start your investigation to find out more.