From Win/Loss Analysis to Enterprise Intelligence: Building a Smarter Way to Win and Retain Business

This approach was becoming a strategic risk to sustained growth and competitiveness. Even as individual anecdotes sometimes provided directional signals, senior leadership consistently lacked insight into:

• The true drivers of wins, losses, renewals, and terminations
• The relative influence of price versus non-price decision factors
• How consultants and brokers shaped employer decisions
• Where competitive performance gaps existed
• What actions would increase win rates and protect at-risk accounts

The carrier sought to replace periodic feedback with a disciplined, ongoing intelligence capability informing pricing, network strategy, service design, pharmacy strategy, and consultant engagement. The objective was not simply to collect feedback, but to institutionalize a structured mechanism to capture, synthesize, and activate competitive insight across the commercial lifecycle.

The Solution

To elevate the candor and consistency of competitive feedback, The DRG designed and led an independent research program spanning the full commercial lifecycle. By serving as an objective third party, The DRG removed internal bias and created space for employers and consultants to speak openly about decision drivers, tradeoffs, and perceptions.

Rather than focusing only on lost accounts, the program captured insight across four critical pathways: wins, losses, renewals, and terminated or lapsed accounts. This broader lens ensured the carrier could understand not only why business was lost, but also what sustained relationships, and what differentiated the organization in competitive evaluations.

A standardized core framework enabled longitudinal measurement across accounts and segments, while smart branching ensured questions adapted to each employer’s experience. This balance preserved both comparability and contextual relevance, allowing the organization to track trends without losing nuance.

The program systematically captured:

• Primary win, loss, and renewal drivers
• Importance–performance gaps across key decision criteria
• Competitive benchmarking across pricing, network, service, and pharmacy
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) and future consideration
• Ease of doing business and consultant influence dynamics

Insights were synthesized into executive-ready reporting that translated findings into quantifiable themes, competitive positioning patterns, and emerging risk signals. Findings were shared with leadership and account teams, enabling both strategic recalibration and targeted frontline action.

The Wins

Although the program is ongoing, early findings are already driving impact at both the account and enterprise levels:

1. Distinctive market advantages clarified. The program surfaced consistent themes around the organization’s strongest competitive differentiators, particularly those tied to core value proposition and market positioning. For example, broader in-network access was a true differentiator, including for remote employee members. These strengths emerged as meaningful drivers in competitive wins and reinforced where the organization’s story resonates most with decision makers.
2. Relationship equity validated as a strategic asset. Across employers and consultants, relationship continuity and service partnership surfaced as powerful retention drivers. In several cases, these factors helped mitigate pricing pressure, underscoring the tangible value of trust, responsiveness, and long-term account stewardship. In fact, insights showed certain key accounts were willing to pay higher admin fees to retain the carrier’s superior service rather than risk reduced support with lower-cost competitors.
3. Emerging competitive pressure points identified early. The research revealed areas where competitor offerings are gaining traction or where expectations are evolving. Some competitors offer more flexible plan designs—allowing employers to use outside vendors—while this carrier’s all-in-one model was viewed as less adaptable. By identifying these types of themes across accounts rather than relying on isolated anecdotes, the organization can proactively refine messaging, product positioning, and operations before vulnerabilities become systemic.
4. Even wins surfaced forward-looking opportunities. Accounts the carrier won still revealed process pain points and future purchase decisions and milestones, giving sales teams the opportunity to proactively address issues and protect the business before competitors gained traction. This underscored the importance of gaining insights on wins just as much as losses.

Organizational Impact

The program establishes the carrier’s first structured competitive intelligence feedback loop across the full customer lifecycle. What began as a need for consistent win/loss insight evolved into an enterprise intelligence capability informing both strategy and frontline execution.

Account-level insights now inform targeted retention and sales strategies, while quarterly aggregate reporting highlights systemic performance gaps and strategic opportunities. The dual-audience framework has proven particularly valuable, revealing meaningful differences in how employers and consultants evaluate performance and value.

Most importantly, leadership gained clarity around defensible advantages, emerging vulnerabilities, and consultant-driven decision dynamics. By institutionalizing structured, independent feedback capture, the carrier shifted from episodic insight to sustained competitive visibility—enabling more confident growth decisions in an increasingly pressured market.