Reputation announced a new product today that will take competitive understanding to a new level. Competitive Intelligence allows a brand to move from knowing that its location in Queens has an average rating of 4.6 and its competitor across the street has an average rating of 4.8 to understanding why the two scores are different.

We caught up with Phil Rapisardo, Reputation‘s director of product marketing, to learn more about the new product.

“Historically we offered competitive reporting. This would put you side by side and say ‘You’re a 4.8-star rating. And they are 4.6.’ What naturally happened was, customers would ask us ‘Why are we better than them? Why are they better than us?’ It’s a natural question to ask at that point,” Phil explained.

“So the move that we made was to overhaul our competitive reporting and launch what we’re calling competitive intelligence. This is everything you could do with your own publicly available review data, you can now do it with your competitor’s publicly available review data.”

Scalability Breakthrough

Reputation already had the ability to use natural language processing to do a deep analysis of its customer’s own review data. In other words, it could tell you the why behind a customer’s own reviews. Were the good reviews about the product, service, the decor? Were complaints about rude staff, or insufficient parking. What was missing was the ability to know these things about competitors’ reviews.

So we asked Phil why this was challenging and what the breakthrough was to offer this expanded competitive solution.

“Previously, we did not have a really good scalable way of accessing a lot of those verbatim reviews for competition. We could do it for your own reviews and your own data that was coming through,” Phil explained. “What we built was the ability to pull in all the verbatim reviews for competitors that you define, and then run it through that NLP that says, ‘Okay, here are their strengths, here are their weaknesses. If you want a side-by-side view, here’s their parking or affordability score versus your parking or affordability score.’ And then you can start to do some things with it.”

Practical Use Cases

Armed with deeper competitive insights, businesses can make more sophisticated decisions once armed with these deeper competitive insights. Phil offers one use case from auto dealers that were early Competitive Intelligence users.

“I’ll use automotive as an example. I know my dealership’s score is this. And my competitor’s is whatever score it is. But now I know a level deeper than they’re better at me at their service department, or I’m better than them at the way our finance team manages conversations when you go to buy a car,” Phil said.

“Well, that in and of itself is good. But you have to do something with that information. When you have a strength, meaning something you’re better at than your competitor, we actually have customers that are building content campaigns, paid search campaigns, billboard ads, that are promoting that they are above their direct competition in certain areas of their business.”

Reputation is selling Competitive Intelligence as a standalone product. On its website, the company pitches the new solution as a source for benchmarking and understanding sentiment about competitors. Reputation also positions it as a time and money saver for companies that previously hired consultants to scour for competitive intelligence.