Competitive Analysis For Retailers

I’m not asking my CSMs to resolve support tickets. I’m asking them to leverage them. Support tickets aren’t just a backlog of problems; they’re customer truth bombs waiting to explode. If you’re not mining them for insights, you’re flying blind—and that’s exactly how churn sneaks up on you. Every Customer Success team I’ve ever led has been trained to use Support tickets strategically. Why? Because they’re packed with insights that make us better at our jobs. ✅ We learn more about the product. ✅ We spot trends before they become problems. ✅ We understand our customers’ use cases more deeply. If you’re not tapping into support data, here’s what you’re missing: 🔥 Emerging Pain Points Recurring issues expose friction in the customer journey. Ignore them, and those minor frustrations turn into churn-worthy headaches. 🔥 Product Gaps Customers vote with their tickets. If the same feature requests or usability complaints keep surfacing, your roadmap is practically writing itself. 🔥 Engagement Risks A spike in tickets isn’t just noise—it’s a flare. Users don’t submit tickets when they’re thriving; they do it when they’re stuck, frustrated, or in need of more enablement. Here are a few ways my team and I are using these insights: ✅ Spot & Engage Struggling Users A surge in ticket volume? Proactively reach out before frustration turns into a cancellation. ✅ Create Targeted Content If the same questions keep coming up, turn those insights into help docs, webinars, or office hours. ✅ Surface Expansion Opportunities Seeing frequent feature requests? Build them—or better yet, use them to tee up expansion conversations. ✅ Map Out User Behavior Support tickets tell you who’s onboarding, who’s adopting new features, and who’s stuck. Use that data to drive deeper engagement. ✅ Collaborate with Product Your product team needs this intel. Share support trends regularly to influence meaningful fixes and features. High ticket volume isn’t necessarily a bad thing—but you need to know how to use it to your advantage. Bottom line? CSMs don’t need to fix support tickets. But the best ones know how to use them to drive retention, expansion, and adoption. _____________________________ 📣 If you liked my post, you’ll love my newsletter. Every week I share learnings, advice and strategies from my experience going from CSM to CCO. Join 12k+ subscribers of The Journey and turn insights into action. Sign up on my profile.

#lidl’s highest ever market share, and #aldi losing share for the first time since March 2021, are the highlights from Worldpanel by Kantar's UK market data for 12 weeks ending 17th March released this morning. 12-wk sales grew by 4.2%, down from the last 12-wk period figure of 5.1% as 4-wk grocery #inflation fell from 5.3% to 4.5%, its lowest since February 2022.   Of the £1.355 Bn. sales growth year-on-year, 77% has been driven by just three retailers – #tesco (with sales up 5.8%), #sainsburys (up 6.7%), and Lidl (up 8.8%). All three retailers have increased their market share by 0.4% points year-on-year.   Aldi, with sales up just 3.1%, has seen their share fall by 0.1% point from 9.9% this period in 2023 to 9.8%. They have contributed just 7% of the market value growth, with sales up £97M year-on-year. Store numbers have grown from around 985 last year to 1015 now – around 3% - suggesting that like-for-like store sales are flat. Quite a few empty spaces on shelf have been seen recently. Their roll-out of a new SAP system worldwide may be proving a challenge from a stock availability perspective.   Total discounter share has nevertheless rebounded from 16.9% in the 12 weeks to 18th February to 17.6% this period. One reason is that Christmas sales were included in the last 12-wk period, and these have now dropped out of the latest period – discounter share always falls over Christmas. Furthermore, Lidl continue to grow ahead of the market, at +8.8%, giving them their highest ever market share of 7.8%.  Kantar state that their baked goods are up a huge 24% YoY. Their impressive in-store bakery will be helping this, and Lidl are promoting many in-store bakery products through the Lidl Plus app. Oh, and Aldi doesn’t have an in-store bakery… or app... #morrisons and #waitrose are enjoying an upward trend in sales growth. Although they still lag behind the total market, their growth rates are now ahead of Aldi’s for the first time since the pandemic. Waitrose and Ocado are the only grocers to boost their number of shoppers in the last 12 weeks, according to Kantar. In the last 4 weeks #branded sales growth (6.1%) is ahead of #privatelabel (4.7%) – a significant shift considering the strong gains made by private label over the last 2 years. The increasing use of promotions (many through loyalty apps) and some very strong instore merchandising of some brands will have fuelled this. Within private label, the premium tier is flying with sales up 16.1%. Premium tier features strongly in Meal Deals which have been heavily promoted leading up to Easter. Kantar has revealed that #easter treats are up by £88M compared with the same period in 2023, although a major factor behind this will be that Easter falls one week earlier this year. With two weeks to go from this latest data date to Easter Sunday, the next data set should reveal who the real winners are this Easter - a key trading period for retailers to retain customer loyalty.

Surveys can serve an important purpose. We should use them to fill holes in our understanding of the customer experience or build better models with the customer data we have. As surveys tell you what customers explicitly choose to share, you should not be using them to measure the experience. Surveys are also inherently reactive, surface level, and increasingly ignored by customers who are overwhelmed by feedback requests. This is fact. There’s a different way. Some CX leaders understand that the most critical insights come from sources customers don’t even realize they’re providing from the “exhaust” of every day life with your brand. Real-time digital behavior, social listening, conversational analytics, and predictive modeling deliver insights that surveys alone never will. Voice and sentiment analytics, for example, go beyond simply reading customer comments. They reveal how customers genuinely feel by analyzing tone, frustration, or intent embedded within interactions. Behavioral analytics, meanwhile, uncover friction points by tracking real customer actions across websites or apps, highlighting issues users might never explicitly complain about. Predictive analytics are also becoming essential for modern CX strategies. They anticipate customer needs, allowing businesses to proactively address potential churn, rather than merely reacting after the fact. The capability can also help you maximize revenue in the experiences you are delivering (a use case not discussed often enough). The most forward-looking CX teams today are blending traditional feedback with these deeper, proactive techniques, creating a comprehensive view of their customers. If you’re just beginning to move beyond a survey-only approach, prioritizing these more advanced methods will help ensure your insights are not only deeper but actionable in real time. Surveys aren’t dead (much to my chagrin), but relying solely on them means leaving crucial insights behind. While many enterprises have moved beyond surveys, the majority are still overly reliant on them. And when you get to mid-market or small businesses? The survey slapping gets exponentially worse. Now is the time to start looking beyond the questionnaire and your Likert scales. The email survey is slowly becoming digital dust. And the capabilities to get you there are readily available. How are you evolving your customer listening strategy beyond traditional surveys? #customerexperience #cxstrategy #customerinsights #surveys

Every PMM knows customer interviews matter. But most ask the wrong questions. Here’s the exact set I use to get buyer insights, not just user feedback: 👇 ✅ Background --> Tell me a bit about yourself and what you do. --> What is the goal of your [job, role, business]?  --> What does your day-to-day look like?  --> How do you keep up with industry trends in your field? --> What content do you consume, and what channel do you mostly use? ✅ Jobs-To-Be-Done --> What are some key challenges you have encountered in your job? --> What have you tried first to overcome the challenges?  --> What was the first time you thought: I need a new solution? --> What made you think that? [Probe here] --> What were you hoping to solve? What was the end game? ✅ Purchase decision --> How did you find out about our solution?  --> How long did it take for you to make a decision? At what point did you decide to purchase our solution? [try to understand the trigger event]  --> What were you looking to accomplish with the product? --> What pain were you looking to solve? --> What was the impression you had about the solution when you came across it?  --> Did you evaluate any other product or solution? --> Why did you choose our solution? --> Who is involved in the buying process? Who would you say is the final decision maker?  --> What were the most important factors you considered when purchasing a solution? ✅ Brand Perception --> Please describe the brand in 3 words - whatever comes to mind! --> If you were in charge of our company, what is one thing you'd change about the brand? --> Have you recommended our solution to anyone? If so, how and what did you say about us? ✅ Product --> Describe our solution in your own words - what is it? --> How would you feel if our solution went away tomorrow? --> What would you do if our solution went away tomorrow? --> Paint me a picture: how are you using our solution? Think of a recent specific time or two: what were you doing?   --> What specific functionalities do you find the most valuable/use the most often? --> What do you love about our solution?  --> What impact has our solution had on your work? --> Who would you say uses our solution the most in your team? How often do you use it?  --> What functionalities are not working well for you?  --> What is missing from our solution if anything? --> What other tools or platforms do you use alongside our solution to run or otherwise support you and your business? --> Under what circumstances, if any, would you switch to a different solution? ---- In summary, Great customer interviews start with open-ended questions, follow up on what’s interesting, and save talking about your product for last. That’s how you get the insights that help you refine your personas, shape messaging, and potentially help guide product direction. ❓ I am curious, what's your go-to question? #productmarketing #customer #interviews #coaching

It took me 2 years as a Brand Manager to learn how brands measure Market Share. What I can teach you in 3 minutes if you're just starting out: Let's take a simple example. Assume the deodorant category in India is worth ₹1,000 crore annually. If my deodorant brand sells ₹150 crore worth of products in a year, my Value Market Share would be 15%. In simple terms, for every ₹100 spent on deodorants, ₹15 is spent on my brand. But that's only half the story. Brands also track Volume Market Share. Let's say the category sells 10 crore deodorant cans every year and my brand sells 2 crore cans. That means my Volume Market Share is 20%. Now here's where it gets interesting. A brand can have a 20% Volume Share but only a 15% Value Share. This usually happens when the brand sells more units but at a lower average price than competitors. That's why brand managers track both metrics. One tells you how much revenue you're capturing. The other tells you how many products you're selling. And market share isn't just a scorecard. It's a measure of competitive performance. For example, if my brand grows by 10% this year while the category grows by 5%, my market share will increase. But if my brand grows by 10% and the category grows by 20%, my market share will actually decline, even though my sales increased. That's why market share is one of the most important metrics in marketing. Because brands don't compete against their past performance. They compete against the market. #Marketing #BrandManagement #MarketShare #Business

“Sales didn’t grow much. But profits did — from ₹5 Cr to ₹8 Cr.” That’s the story of a ₹70 Cr engineering company. They were stuck. 👉 Sales had been hovering around ₹68–70 Cr for 3 years 👉 PBT was stable at ₹5 Cr 👉 The MD was frustrated: “We are working so hard... but not growing.” He wanted a profit roadmap. That’s when we applied my 5 Profitability Levers Framework. We didn’t chase more orders. Instead, we worked on tightening the engine — the business model, plant efficiency, and cash cycle. Here’s what we did over 12 months: 🔧 1. Reduce COPO (Cost of Poor Operations) – Identified hidden leakages: rejections, rework, premium freight, missed dispatches – Plugged top 6 loss points across QC, dispatch, and breakdowns 💥 Impact: ₹1.1 Cr added to bottom line 📉 2. Improve Contribution Margin – Removed 4 low-margin SKUs and introduced new High margin SKUs – Renegotiated pricing with 3 legacy customers – Reduced RM wastage by 1.3% through tighter process control 💥 Impact: ₹0.6 Cr additional contribution ⚙️ 3. Optimize Capacity Utilization – Reduced unplanned breakdowns by 18% – Increased hourly production by reducing fluctuations – Reduced cycle times 💥 Impact: ₹0.7 Cr improvement 💼 4. Free Up Working Capital – Reduced receivables >60 days from ₹6 Cr to ₹3.5 Cr – Cleared slow-moving inventory worth ₹1.2 Cr – Negotiated better payment terms with key suppliers 💥 Impact: ₹0.4 Cr saved in interest + cash cushion for growth 🧾 5. Eliminate Operational Waste – Did value stream mapping to find where flow is getting stuck – Introduced visual controls, operator-level skilling – Reduced manpower cost by 7% without layoffs 💥 Impact: ₹0.3 Cr reduction in overheads The MD told me: “We thought we had to grow sales to grow profits. You showed us how to grow profits to fund future growth.” Your factory has far more profit potential than you think.

Drawing from years of my experience designing surveys for my academic projects, clients, along with teaching research methods and Human-Computer Interaction, I've consolidated these insights into this comprehensive guideline. Introducing the Layered Survey Framework, designed to unlock richer, more actionable insights by respecting the nuances of human cognition. This framework (https://lnkd.in/enQCXXnb) re-imagines survey design as a therapeutic session: you don't start with profound truths, but gently guide the respondent through layers of their experience. This isn't just an analogy; it's a functional design model where each phase maps to a known stage of emotional readiness, mirroring how people naturally recall and articulate complex experiences. The journey begins by establishing context, grounding users in their specific experience with simple, memory-activating questions, recognizing that asking "why were you frustrated?" prematurely, without cognitive preparation, yields only vague or speculative responses. Next, the framework moves to surfacing emotions, gently probing feelings tied to those activated memories, tapping into emotional salience. Following that, it focuses on uncovering mental models, guiding users to interpret "what happened and why" and revealing their underlying assumptions. Only after this structured progression does it proceed to capturing actionable insights, where satisfaction ratings and prioritization tasks, asked at the right cognitive moment, yield data that's far more specific, grounded, and truly valuable. This holistic approach ensures you ask the right questions at the right cognitive moment, fundamentally transforming your ability to understand customer minds. Remember, even the most advanced analytics tools can't compensate for fundamentally misaligned questions. Ready to transform your survey design and unlock deeper customer understanding? Read the full guide here: https://lnkd.in/enQCXXnb #UXResearch #SurveyDesign #CognitivePsychology #CustomerInsights #UserExperience #DataQuality

I've found a pattern for why some agencies are crushing it right now and others are barely making payroll. I did some qualitative research over the past two months in prep for a recent webinar. Combining that with the quantitative research from our friends at Promethean Research, here's what I found. Margin squeeze is real: roughly 73% of agencies have felt the pinch over the past two years, and avg margins have slipped from ~16% down to about 14%. At the same time, the top shops are pulling in profit margins of 38%+. In the past I've able to see external factors that caused the discrepancy, but this time it's mostly internal factors on how they operate. They’re crystal clear about who they serve, what they do, and why they rock. Agencies with strong positioning attract the right clients without having to chase them. Pricing is dynamic, not default. They mix value-based, performance-based, time-and-materials (T&M), and hybrid pricing models based on what is best for the project, most comfortable for the client, and appropriately distributes the risk. They sell outcomes, not time or process. Conversations focus on results and new capabilities, not deliverables or time to ship. AI is woven into everything. These agencies integrate AI into marketing, delivery, and operations for efficiency and scale. And they started years ago. They track key metrics and take action accordingly. Like net profit margin, utilization rate, client retention, revenue per employee, and more. The bottom line is that your focus on verticals or service offerings is less important than your mindset and openness to change. Treat clients as partners, price based on outcomes, and lean into AI and automation. That combination is how the top 20% are beating the average margin by 2–3 times. If your agency’s margins are stuck, don’t look to external factors as the reason. Instead, look inside where you can have an impact. Clarify your positioning, rethink who your best clients are, price accordingly, deliver bold results, and promote the hell out of them. Oh, and weave AI into your DNA. Or don't and let me know how it goes...

Most CSMs think they understand their customers. But do they really? Too often, we rely on surface-level insights (ie. NPS scores, product usage data, or the occasional check-in call) to build a picture of our customers. But that's not enough to understand them. If you want to be an elite CSM, you need to think like a detective. 🕵️♂️ Here are 5 powerful ways to truly understand your customers: 1️⃣ Ask: "What’s keeping you up at night?" Forget generic "How’s everything going?" questions. Instead, dig into real pain points. When a customer opens up about their struggles, that’s your golden ticket to proactive problem-solving. 2️⃣ Analyse their most important KPIs Your product is just a tool—what business outcomes do your customers care about? Understand how your solution ties to their goals. If they’re measuring success in terms of cost savings, but you’re pitching growth—you’re missing the mark. 3️⃣ Get to know their customers Your customer’s biggest priority? Their customers. Ask: ❓ Who are your ideal customers? ❓ What challenges are they facing? ❓ How does our solution help them win? By understanding their customer’s pain points, you position yourself as a strategic partner—not just a vendor. 4️⃣ Research their competitors 🔍 The only thing customers are more obsessed with than their customers is their competitive landscape. Come prepared with insights on their competition: ✅ What tools are they using? ✅ What’s their market positioning? ✅ Are they growing or struggling? When you bring competitive insights to the table, you become a trusted advisor, not just an account manager. 5️⃣ Ask: "What would make this partnership a 10/10?" This one is a game-changer. You might think everything’s great—meanwhile, your customer has unmet expectations they’ve never voiced. Don’t assume. Ask. With these 5 tools on your pocket, you can completely transform your customer relationships and maximise the value you deliver to customers. CSMs who master customer understanding = CSMs who drive retention. Leaders who codify these into insights and processes win at scale. 💡 📩 Want more tips on how to build an incredible CS team ? Join 14.5K professionals and sign up to Unconventional Growth [link in the comments]. #CustomerSuccess #CSM #CustomerRetention #RevOps #CX

38.2%. This is the market share of "The Rest" - the independent and regional grocers in the US. It is bigger than Walmart (19.9%) and Kroger (8.3%) combined. Yet, most FMCG brands ignore them. They think big chains are the only way to sell. This is a mistake. The real growth and innovation is in this 38.2%. Why? Because they focus on basic goods, fast implementation, and regional needs. Take John. He runs a regional 10-store network in Ohio. If a local supplier brings him a new basic product - like local flour or regional sausage - John can have it on the shelf in 48 hours. No corporate committees. No 6-month wait times. This fast implementation is why local grocers are winning. They adapt to local tastes instantly. Consumers in different regions want different things, even for basic goods. A shopper in Texas wants different regional brands than a shopper in Ohio. Giant chains cannot handle this detail at 100%. Regional grocers thrive on it. My conclusions for FMCG and retail leaders: Prioritize regional needs. Do not treat every state the same. Basic goods must fit local tastes. Use speed. Regional networks can launch a product in days. Test your innovations here first. Respect "The Rest." That 38.2% is not a leftover. It is a highly flexible, profitable market. Are you still waiting six months for a giant chain to approve your product, or are you winning with "The Rest"? #retail #USGrocery #Strategy