Getting closer to customers with supercharged competitive intelligence

This technology giant was already doing a great job of predicting global market trends and anticipating customer needs. But the process wasn't an easy one. Its marketing team would conduct extensive – and highly time-consuming – market research to identify new prospects and uncover upsell opportunities.

The market research process was largely manual and, on average, took up to 72 hours to complete, which put huge pressure on employees.

Worse still, the company struggled with inconsistent and disparate data. This made it difficult for employees to discover competitor insights, track customer satisfaction, and identify upselling opportunities within its customer base.

So, the company set out to transform its competitive intelligence process. The aim? To establish a 'golden record' – or a single source of truth – of the customer lifecycle, simplify its marketing and sales efforts, and enhance its competitive edge.

The IT leader partnered with Enquero, a Genpact company, for this transformation. The main goal was to automate competitive intelligence. In other words, the way it monitors, gathers, and analyzes data in a legal and ethical way to track market trends and evaluate the competition.

After spending time to fully understand the challenge, our team built an automated workflow on the Google Cloud Platform, speeding up data ingestion into a centralized data lake. We added analytics and artificial intelligence into this data to deliver actionable market and customer insights using an advanced machine learning algorithm.

The competitive intelligence platform delivered:

• Consolidated market research reports for visibility into product and customer ecosystems
• Valuable insights into customer satisfaction, competitor positioning, and business growth indicators
• Customer predictions – for example, how likely a particular prospect is to turn into a customer
• Sales renewal projections, fully integrated into the company's customer relationship management system

The company now has a powerful platform that provides a single source of truth for data-driven collaboration between sales and marketing.

An automated data pipeline that has cut the 72-hour research process down to just 3 hours fueled the streamlined market research and sales process. The platform has also reduced manual effort by 96%, drastically improving employee productivity and satisfaction.

With data-driven insights into the customer lifecycle at their fingertips, the marketing team can easily identify customer groups to secure the best and most relevant upselling opportunities. The sales team uses these lifecycle insights to improve the end-to-end sales process and deliver more relevant service and greater value to customers.

What used to take days now takes hours thanks to automation, analytics, and cloud. Looking to the future, the company can continue to strengthen its marketing and sales strategy, uncover new opportunities for growth, and stay many steps ahead of the competition.