Your Frontline Hears the Competitive Market Before the Board Does

A guest mentions that another venue offered a different booking arrangement. A customer asks whether you provide something they experienced elsewhere. A sales colleague hears the same alternative named in several lost enquiries. The information exists inside the business, but it may never reach the meeting where the competitive strategy is discussed.

Frontline teams encounter the market through real customer decisions. Their observations can add context that public research misses. The challenge is to collect that evidence without creating another reporting burden or promoting every anecdote into a strategic fact.

Start with the question the business needs to answer. If leadership wants to understand lost group bookings, ask colleagues to note the alternatives customers mention and the reasons volunteered. Do not ask them to interrogate customers or collect unnecessary personal information. A short, relevant observation is more useful than an elaborate form nobody completes.

Preserve the customer's meaning

Record the circumstance and, where appropriate, the customer's wording without embellishment. “The organiser said the alternative had availability on the required date” is different from “We lost on value”. The first preserves evidence; the second may be the employee's interpretation.

Allow an unknown category. Staff should not have to invent a reason to complete a record. Many customers will not explain their decision, and some explanations will be incomplete. Honest gaps are preferable to a dataset that appears comprehensive because uncertainty was removed during collection.

Review observations alongside booking and enquiry data. Repeated mentions can justify investigation, but frequency depends on which customers speak to the team and which channels they use. A pattern from telephone enquiries may not describe online buyers.

Show the team what changed

A feedback channel loses credibility when information travels upwards and nothing returns. Tell colleagues which observations informed a decision, which remain uncertain and what the business is testing. They do not need a detailed board report; they need to see that reporting useful evidence has a purpose.

Bring frontline colleagues into the interpretation when practical. They can explain the circumstances surrounding an enquiry and identify whether a proposed response would help. Their role should extend beyond supplying raw material for someone else's conclusion.

Avoid turning the process into a competition to name the most rivals or collect the most complaints. The objective is a better understanding of customer choice. Reward accuracy, relevance and useful questions rather than volume.

For the next month, choose one competitive question and one simple route for relevant observations to reach its owner. Review what you learn, then decide whether the process deserves to continue or change. FUSIONscore can help examine whether your people have the information, authority and feedback loops needed to support the strategy they are expected to deliver.

Further reading: Why competitors are not your strategy.

Illustrative stock photograph. Photo: MART PRODUCTION via Pexels. Image licence.