Competitive benchmarking

Competitive intelligence is the structured collection and analysis of information about rival products, pricing, service levels, and customer sentiment. Good competitive intelligence draws only from legitimate sources, such as reviews, published pricing pages, and customer conversations. It never relies on confidential or improperly obtained material. In a contact center, customers often name competitors directly in tickets, calls, and reviews, usually without being asked. OnClarity’s Voice of Customer aggregates feedback from 100+ sources and classifies it by topic and sentiment. That means a company can tag every competitor mention automatically. For example, a retailer notices a recurring theme: customers who mention a competitor by name almost always cite one missing integration. That single, specific feature gap turns out to be the real reason customers switch, not price or service quality in general.

Share of voice (SOV) measures a brand’s portion of total category conversation, advertising spend, or mentions over a defined period: SOV = (brand’s spend, impressions, or mentions ÷ total category spend, impressions, or mentions) × 100. The media-spend version, used in advertising planning, compares ad budgets or impressions against competitors. The social-mention version tracks a brand’s share of online conversation instead. Researchers Les Binet and Peter Field popularized excess share of voice (ESOV), the gap between a brand’s share of voice and its share of market, as a predictor of future growth, since brands with SOV above their market share tend to gain ground. One caveat for brand health tracking: raw mention-based SOV can spike during negative coverage, so it should be paired with sentiment data rather than read as a standalone positive signal.

A service level agreement sets the committed response and resolution targets for a customer, tier, or contract, often with financial penalties attached. Support operations design queues, routing, and escalation around SLA thresholds, which makes the agreement a structural constraint rather than a reporting line.

CSAT, or customer satisfaction score, is a post-contact rating averaged across responses and usually collected with a single question immediately after an interaction closes. Because only a small fraction of customers respond, CSAT reflects the experience of people motivated to answer rather than the whole contact population.