What’s your competitors character?
What’s the character of your competitors? Are they Guardians or Idealists? What about the temperament of their leaders?
Understanding the character of a company and it’s leaders is a useful way of distinguishing between what a competitor could do, versus what it is likely to do. For the CI practitioner, this is an extremely valuable distinction. A shopping list of possibilities isn’t really actionable as there are too many ‘possibilities’ for any manager to plan for. What’s needed is a way to screen the ‘possible’ actions and create a short list of what’s actually likely to happen. This is where understanding the culture of a company and the character of it’s leaders provides a useful sorting mechanism. And this is why the Mindshift’s course on competitor profiling is probably one of my favourite courses.
So how does it work?
Tags: competitor analysis, Factiva, Mindshifts, Myers-Briggs, Porter, profiling
Time for TIO Complaint Rankings
I’d like to make a complaint. It’s about the way the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsmen (TIO) reports its complaint statistics.
Around October each year, the TIO publishes it’s annual report that almost invariably reports a rise in complaints. For instance in the latest reporting year (2009) we’re informed “the highest increase in complaints was among mobile phone users (79% rise), followed by internet (57%), landline (40%) and mobile premium services (13%).” (TIO 23/10/2009).
The report also provides a detailed breakdown of complaint data by service provider. This tends to be popular with the IT media, who use it produce headlines such as “Telstra records highest telco complaints“.
My concern is that by using complaint volumes as it’s key metric, the TIO may be creating inaccurate perceptions about the performance of particular product categories or service providers. This in turn impacts public policy and regulatory behaviour(1), as well consumer choice.
Tags: complaints, customer satisfaction, Dodo, telco, Telstra, TIO
