This case study describes how collective market intelligence informs strategic decisions at Exceldor, a major Canadian food brand.
We now have a corporate library of relevant and structured knowledge, built using our collective intelligence.
About Exceldor
Since 1945, Exceldor cooperative, based in Canada, has specialized in poultry—and nothing but poultry— working to promote local producers and the high quality of their products. We prepare our poultry in a variety of ways so our customers can serve it as they wish. Quality comes first in everything we produce for both the grocery and restaurant trade, from marinated breasts to Freezer-to-Oven turkey. Our quality focus has made Exceldor one of the best-selling brand in Quebec—the chicken of choice at major BBQ restaurants.
A need for building synergies
Our world is changing quickly: businesses need to understand their wider context in order to thrive. Before we adopted Cronycle, many colleagues collected external news in their own informal ways. As a result, our information monitoring was unstructured and not shared across departments: the company’s knowledge was fragmented, and not used to its full potential. We wanted to build a global and shared perspective over external evolutions, empower the different organizational units, make new connections and, ultimately, build synergies and collaboration.
Because content is increasingly unstructured, abundant and accessed in many ways, curation was extremely time consuming.
At the individual level, it was also a painful experience to use different tools for collecting, storing and sharing content. Let alone as teams and business units! Because content is increasingly unstructured, abundant and accessed in many ways (websites, RSS feeds, email newsletters, Tweets, subscription news sites, etc), curation was extremely time consuming.
Another issue we faced was traceability. When an insight was discovered and seen as important, it was difficult to track back where it came from and get to the bottom of it. Usually, there were emails sent, and content seen or bookmarked. But finding that information again was so difficult and tedious, that decisions often had to be taken based on impressions rather than facts. This had to be fixed.
As a Canadian company, we also have the particularity of working in two languages, French and English. This made organizing content a challenge in itself.
A single home for our information watch cycle
So, we looked at several tools that could help us. When we discovered Cronycle, we thought that it was a great match for us: it was the only curation platform that would allow us to collect, store and publish in one place, in a collaborative manner. There are many good tools around for individual steps within the watch cycle, but only Cronycle covered the full cycle. We were particularly happy to have the newsletter tool built-in which we use to publish internally.
There are many good tools around for individual steps within the watch cycle, but only Cronycle covered the full cycle.
For our envisioned shared watch to become a reality, we had to find a tool that would be widely adopted by our colleagues. It had to be easy to use, intuitive and fit in the daily flow of work. We noticed that our colleagues were very quickly comfortable with its visual interface, reminiscent of Pinterest. This really boosted the adoption – a necessity for our success. The mobile application was also a key contributor to this success as many of our colleagues travel regularly. It enables us all to check and curate relevant news while having a short amount of free time.
We have deployed Cronycle in a structured collaborative way that helps different colleagues have specific roles, so that collectively, we build, review and give meaning to our watch.
There were a few features we were looking for that were missing in Cronycle when we started testing. When we shared these needs, the Cronycle team was truly listening to us and very reactive. Their roadmap was already covering a few points we raised and some were added. We are really happy to help them scope out and test new Enterprise features, such as the list to manage tags at the level of an organization (and make it work with French peculiarities).
A great momentum
We have been very impressed about how our 50 colleagues remain excited about using Cronycle in their daily work. Each department has adopted Cronycle and adapted it to its own needs, while fitting within the broader approach and structure, and collaborating. We are now able to keep track of changes related to our macro-environment, as well as to specific areas such as finance or HR. We now have curated a corporate library of relevant and structured knowledge, built using our collective market intelligence. These backed-up insights really help our organization make better decisions.
These backed-up insights really help our organization make better decisions.
Everything is in one place, where content can be searched, filtered and grouped. We are more efficient and better at collecting content because Cronycle is incredibly fast for safekeeping unstructured and diverse content, whether from the web, email newsletters, phone or feeds. Also, we don’t lose important content anymore and we collaborate more.
Read more about collaborative market intelligence from our case studies.
