California headquartered Reputation, a company known for offering a massive suite of products for reputation experience management (RXM), has launched a new AI-driven product to help enterprises better track their competitors and understand what they need to do to improve their business and market positioning. 

Today, companies of all sizes have this need to keep an eye on the entire competitive landscape, including their rivals’ latest steps and what is moving the needle for them. However, doing this successfully is close to impossible, as there’s too much data to look at. One can track official announcements, maybe major Twitter trends, but continually sifting through what the public is saying about the competitors and their products, services is quite a task in itself.

Competitive Intelligence mobilizes unstructured data

To solve this challenge, Reputation has come up with Competitive Intelligence. The platform mobilizes a large chunk of unstructured data in the public domain to provide relevant insights into the market and the active competition.

“Every company today has vast amounts of unstructured customer feedback living on public forums — from reviews and ratings about their customer service (or lack thereof) to the employee or brand performance, even valuable details about their competitors. It’s all left out in the open for consumers to see and base their purchasing decisions on,” Pranav Desai, chief product officer (CPO) at Reputation, told Venturebeat.

Competitive Intelligence ingests this information and makes sense of it in one place with deep machine learning and natural language processing. This gives companies a wide variety of information on their competitors, starting with customer feedback, overall reputation score and comments to category and sentiment trends as well as impact indicators by location.

“A brand will be able to better understand its strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of its competitors, to further identify opportunities in the market. For example, a business can proactively uncover threats and opportunities and use those “golden nuggets” to run promotional or competitor marketing campaigns, improve business operations across departments and locations and make better-informed leadership decisions,” Desai explained.

The solution provides a customizable user interface to make sure that people at all levels of an organization – from the operations team to key decision-makers – are able to access the insights. Plus, it suggests the best action to take next.

Competition for Competitive Intelligence

While the offering sounds interesting and can help companies gain market share, it already appears to have some ‘competition’ in the market. This includes competitive reporting and intelligence solutions such as Klue, Crayon and BrandWatch.

However, Desai notes that their product is more robust in the sense that it uses AI to answer “why” a particular company is outperforming. 

“By utilizing our Reputation Score X, we are able to provide industry benchmarks and a deep understanding of an enterprise’s competitive landscape across multiple segments. It also allows businesses to look at competitors’ reputation scores, reviews and ranking factors, getting prescriptive recommendations for location-level improvements,” he said. 

The platform even brings the ability to review competitors’ verbatim customer reviews and easy-to-understand analyses and reporting capabilities that can be automated and shared with leaders to help shape decisions across the organization. It is currently being used by multiple enterprises in beta, the CPO noted.

Unstructured data opportunity

The product from Reputation comes as the demand for unstructured data continues to grow in the enterprise segment. A large chunk of global companies is already relying on unstructured information for regulatory, analytic, and decision-making purposes, and as the volume of data surges, the trend is only expected to accelerate.

According to ITC, the volume of unstructured data is set to grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes, or 175 billion terabytes, by 2025.