Project Background
A prominent player in the U.S. benefits industry operates within a fast-paced and competitive environment. To maintain its competitive edge, the company required a scalable, digital-first intelligence solution to monitor market changes, analyze competitor strategies, and proactively uncover potential opportunities and risks.
The Challenge
The client faced three core challenges:
1. Disjointed intelligence streams – Competitive insights, regulatory updates, and pricing trends were scattered across sources and formats, leading to inconsistent strategic visibility.
2. Limited stakeholder access – Intelligence was not democratized across functions like Product, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing, reducing cross-functional alignment.
3. Manual and unsystematic tracking – Tracking key competitors and industry trends relied heavily on ad hoc efforts, resulting in gaps in foresight and slow response times.
The Solution
To transform fragmented and reactive intelligence gathering into a centralized strategic asset, Evalueserve implemented a customized version of its Insightsfirst platform, designed to deliver continuous, curated, and decision-ready insights.
The approach was not merely a technology deployment — it was a capability buildout that included three interlocking layers:
1. Strategic Intelligence Blueprinting:
Evalueserve collaborated with the client’s leadership to define what intelligence actually mattered — prioritizing 10 key competitors, relevant product categories, and high-impact themes like pricing moves, M&A activity, and evolving messaging strategies. This ensured the platform tracked what was truly relevant to business decisions, not just headlines.
2. Human-augmented Intelligence Engine:
A dedicated CI team worked behind the scenes to interpret noisy data into actionable insights. Instead of just surfacing news, analysts highlighted implications — e.g., what a competitor’s rebate strategy might mean for employer retention or how a formulary shift could ripple across customer segments.
3. Platform-led Democratization:
Insightsfirst was not confined to a few power users. With robust onboarding, intuitive dashboards, “Ask the Analyst” features, and bi-weekly alerts, intelligence became embedded in the workflows of over 500 cross-functional stakeholders. Marketing tracked brand messaging shifts. Sales used competitor deal insights. Strategy teams aligned product bets to industry trends.
This three-layered integration — relevance, interpretation, and access — ensured that competitive intelligence moved from siloed files to a live strategic capability embedded across the organization.
Partnering with Evalueserve has been instrumental in launching our internal market intelligence dashboard. Their team brought the right mix of strategic insight and operational expertise to help us centralize and scale our efforts. The collaboration helped enhance visibility across the organization and provided internal stakeholder teams easy access to timely, actionable insights.
Business Impact
- Strategic Enablement: The platform equipped decision-makers with continuous intelligence to refine positioning, tailor value propositions, and anticipate competitor actions.
- Speed to Insight: The automation of competitor tracking cut down manual research time by over 60%, enabling faster responses to market shifts.
- Organizational Alignment: With ~500 active users across functions, the platform became a central source of truth, fostering alignment between Strategy, Sales, and Product teams.
- Data to Action: Insightsfirst enabled the company to proactively counter pricing tactics, identify whitespace for product innovation, and support C-suite presentations with live intelligence.
Overview & Impact
To compete in a fast-moving landscape, a leading company in the benefits industry partnered with Evalueserve to centralize and scale its competitive intelligence. By leveraging the Insightsfirst platform, the company transformed scattered insights into an integrated, decision-ready capability.
