7 COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE In addition to providing insights into your organization’s performance, reviews help you stay one step ahead of larger market, product and vendor trends. Use reviews to: • Learn more about your competitors’ products and services. What products and services do your competitors offer? What do customers like and dislike about them? What features don’t they offer that you could add to capture market share? Understanding your competition’s weak spots can help you identify opportunities. • Assess your competitors’ customer service. Watching how competitors engage with user reviews gives you a window into their customer service. Are they responsive and helpful? What shortcomings can you capitalize on? What lessons can you learn from their interactions to improve your own customer experience? • Spot sales opportunities. If a competitor is receiving an influx of negative reviews, its customers may be in the market to switch vendors. Read reviews to identify what’s important to those buyers, so your marketing and sales teams can prepare a targeted approach to reach out to them. • Evaluate the marketplace. Which companies in your space are thriving and which are struggling? You can use reviews as a research tool to benchmark your business against others in the space. Share this information with prospective private equity investors, venture capitalists or other financing sources. Cloud event management software company etouches uses G2 Crowd to research the competition and identify what users think about product features, direction and pain points. They then use this information to create a “battle card” that compares their product to the competition. “The qualitative data we gather from reviews of our product and others has given us great competitive intelligence,” said Jake Diserio, Global Marketing Project Manager of eTouches. 9