How effective is your company’s CI program? Take the quiz!

How effective is your company’s Competitive Intelligence (CI) program? Does your business have the tools to understand the competitive landscape and anticipate potentially costly moves by your industry rivals? To see how your company’s market research and CI program stands, take five minutes to answer “Yes” or “No” to this simple 15-point quiz. At the end, add up your points to determine your CI program rating:

1. Does your company have a department – or group of employees – dedicated full or part-time to market research and competitive intelligence?
2. Is your CI team able to consistently gather useful information from industry analysts, outside research firms, and business news to track customer/market/technology/industry trends as well as competitor activity?
3. Does your organization have a robust, easy-to-use central access point for third-party published market intelligence and competitive intelligence?
4. Does your organization have a robust, easy-to-use central repository and access point for housing consumer insights and market research generated by all business units?
5. Does your organization have a robust, easy-to-use central repository and access point for competitive intelligence produced by your company as well as by third parties?
6. Can all the business units in your organization share the research (market research, analytics, market intelligence, competitive intelligence) listed in the above questions with each other?
7. Does your organization have market research workflow systems in place to ensure compliance with established processes and applications regulations?
8. Does your organization curate market research and competitive intelligence (“What We Know”) into topical collections that can be browsed and accessed by anyone with a need?
9. Does your organization publish regular newsletters on a variety of topical issues of interest to your staff across all departments using the combined content resources discussed above?
10. Do the people who need consumer, market, and competitive information know how to find it?
11. Does your organization use machine-learning to help users understand the strategic business information contained in their textual reports and new feeds?
12. Are you using social media to inform product marketing decisions and market research?
13. Is your KM platform mobile-first and fully responsive? Does it work as well on a smartphone held in portrait mode as it does on a desktop?
14. Does your KM platform provide comprehensive, real-time information that allows you to track usage of the platform features, search topics, content downloaded, and content used by each internal and external source?
15. Do you have a “thinking partner” that you can bring your hardest problems in content aggregation, search, analytics, and machine learning for unstructured content to help brainstorm new and innovative solutions?

THE RESULTS

0-5 “YES” Responses – BEGINNER

Your organization is not taking full advantage of its knowledge assets to improve its products and services.  As a result, you are at risk for falling behind evolving consumer tastes, industry trends, new technologies, and competitors. The KM infrastructure of your company, and perhaps its culture, discourages knowledge sharing and does not reward staff members trying to breakdown the silos. You are probably limiting the impact of your market research while simultaneously spending millions of dollars more on research than necessary. You may be running the risk of regulatory sanctions relating to market research which can lead to fines, product withdrawals, and/or worse.

6-10 “YES” Responses: INTERMEDIATE

You ARE on the right path to take advantage of what knowledge management has to offer, but you have many areas yet to explore. Individual problems and lost opportunities are your call-to-action, and based on your “No” answers, you can pick from the list of problems outlined in the “Beginner” description above to know what risks you are running. Your next step is to identify areas in which your organization is weakest to focus your efforts. (You may already be a Northern Light SinglePoint customer, but you are not taking full advantage of the platform.)

11-15 “YES” Responses: ADVANCED

You’re well on your way to demonstrating best practices in knowledge management. Your “No” answers indicate the areas in which your organization needs to improve. If you answered “Yes” to all 15 questions, you are most certainly already a Northern Light SinglePoint customer and you should come to the next Customer Summit to share your expertise and experiences with our others!

For More Information

You can score a perfect 100% on your next CI quiz when you use SinglePoint, the advanced, enterprise-wide knowledge portal powered by machine learning. With SinglePoint, you can uncover key market and competitive intelligence, and then share it with every member of your organization so you can immediately seize the high ground. Contact us today to schedule a demo.