Commercial intelligence: automated competitor monitoring and sales audit
A competitor-intelligence platform with near real-time visibility of device, plan and travel-eSIM pricing, and an audit suite that checks every sale against 10+ business rules instead of a sample.
- Role
- Function lead — Data Science, AI & Analytics
- Where
- stc Bahrain
Some specifics are anonymised to respect commercially sensitive information.
Context
Commercial teams compete on price and offer every week, and every sale carries revenue and compliance risk. Both depend on seeing what is happening quickly — in the market, and in our own transactions.
Problem
Competitor plans, promotions and device prices were tracked by hand, which delayed the commercial response to market changes. Sales quality was reviewed manually on a sample, so violations and potential fraud took a long time to surface, increasing risk.
What I did
Competition Monitoring — a central competitor-intelligence platform with automated dashboards that continuously monitor and benchmark our pricing against the market: device prices and stock across competing operators and major electronics retailers, mobile plans across operators, and travel-eSIM plans against specialist providers. Collection runs automatically in the team’s pipelines and is served through the analytics super app.
Sales Audit Suite — a dashboard that automatically audits all sales against more than 10 business rules and criteria, with an analytical view of every audited sale for the audit team.
Result
Both tools are live and rolling out to users. Competition monitoring saves the products and devices teams more than 3 hours a week of manual tracking, and commercial decisions on pricing move faster. Sales quality assurance moved from a sample to full transaction coverage across every channel, with faster detection of exceptions. Next for competition monitoring: automated price-change alerts delivered in Microsoft Teams.
What I learned
Automation’s first win is coverage, not speed: auditing every sale instead of a sample changes what you can find. And monitoring only creates value when it reaches decision-makers where they already work — which is why alerts in Teams are the next step, not another dashboard.