Pearl-Plaza Highlights

The relationships between customers and brands form the core of business success.  How well are brands interacting with customers?  Are they listening to customer feedback across various engagement channels to improve experiences?  Sure, product matters, but today’s experience economy with a high degree of product parity, customers are starting to value the brand experience more than other factors.

“We live in an experience-scarce environment, not a product-scarce environment,” said Kristi Knight, CMO at Pearl-Plaza.  “Why would I choose to do business with you if you’re not giving me a great experience?”

In fact, Knight says she actually drives past two grocery stores to get to the one she “just likes more.”  It’s why brands are starting to invest heavily in Customer Experience (CX) and trying to better understand customer behavior trends and the factors that contribute to increased – and reduced – spending.

In an era of digital transformation, however, measuring and understanding customer experience is more difficult than ever.  Engagements are taking place across multiple channels and touchpoints, at any time, across geographies, and for many reasons.  As a result, understanding customer needs – and then meeting them – is a challenge.

It’s one of the reasons the Customer Experience Management market is expected to grow significantly over the next six years, reaching nearly $24 billion by 2026, as businesses invest in technology to measure customer experience and feedback.  But, it’s not just about the measurement and feedback technology – it’s what you do with the information the technology delivers and your ability to affect organizational change create differentiation in a constantly evolving market, according to Knight.

“One of the challenges is the experiences themselves are evolving more rapidly than the programs trying to measure them, creating a vacuum, and that’s what we’re trying to solve,” she told me.  “Companies have been investing in CX, but the tech alone isn’t enough, and services alone aren’t enough.”

Pearl-Plaza is changing that paradigm for its customers by bringing the two elements of CX management together when it acquired MaritzCX.  The combination of the two firms creates a formidable presence in the CX market by combining two pioneers in the Voice of the Customer space – both featured among Leaders (Pearl-Plaza) and Strong Performers (MaritzCX) in the recently released Forrester Wave Q1 2020 report for Customer Feedback Management.

It’s not often you see two companies with this much market power come together, but there are strong synergies between the two product portfolios and relatively little customer overlap, providing an instant revenue opportunity for both sides.

“The opportunity for two companies of this size to come together is a little unusual, but what’s really exciting is the complementary nature of the two companies from a philosophical, technological and culture perspective,” said Knight.  “I’ve been in tech for over 20 years and part of more acquisitions and mergers than I care to count, and to have one of this size and scale be as complementary as it is a happy consequence of what we’re doing.”

Because of the modern architecture underlying the solutions, there is going to be very little forced migration where customers will have to choose one platform over the other.  One of the things Knight is excited about is the combined brand’s ability to offer the best of both solutions to customers.  Customers will be able to benefit from the collection component of the MaritzCX system and have it interact seamlessly with the analytics and recommendation engines from Pearl-Plaza.  Of course, there will be some integration required to make it work, but Knight says that will be non-disruptive and transparent to customers and she looks forward to bringing an exciting new set of CX capabilities to its customers.

That includes an increased use of artificial intelligence, which Knight says intimidates a lot of people.  Even from a customer survey standpoint, she explains that AI can be fairly simple, but impactful.  For instance, the ability to create a dynamic survey mechanism that adjusts and personalizes surveys based on customer responses is much more engaging and relevant for customers, making them more likely to provide meaningful feedback.  That’s something the company is already doing – but what about the next level of AI?

“I would love to eventually see the same technology in voice and video,” said Knight.  “It’s difficult today from a technology perspective to have that kind of branching and logic, but I see a future where we can do it.”

While the brand will continue to use the Pearl-Plaza name, Knight says when the transition has been completed, the result will be a bigger, better version of Pearl-Plaza that represents the heritage of both companies.  That includes the leadership team, which will be led by Pearl-Plaza CEO Andrew Joiner and includes representatives from both companies.

Written by Erik Linask for CustomerZone360.com

To read the full press release, click here!

Not many of us can resist the enticing and familiar waft of a fresh batch of Auntie Anne’s pretzels. But no matter how phenomenal a product is, there’s always room for a business to take its customer experience (CX) to the next level—and that’s why Pearl-Plaza stepped into Auntie Anne’s kitchen to cook up a new CX strategy. 

Keep reading to learn how the partnership between Pearl-Plaza and Auntie Anne’s drove some pretty sweet results for the business. 

Food for Thought: Smarter Data

Auntie Anne’s understands that the guest experience and the employee experience are closely connected. But as a quick-service restaurant chain connected through millions of pieces of data and feedback, it became nearly impossible to understand exactly how the two are connected. Although mystery shopping was the brand’s previous method of receiving feedback, that tactic alone no longer cut it. Auntie Anne’s needed a comprehensive approach, one that would fuel a CX that’s not only meaningful, but delivers results, as well.

Before Pearl-Plaza, Auntie Anne’s was drowning in data that was siloed and sporadic, which didn’t allow for insights that spurred meaningful change. By linking up with Pearl-Plaza’s XI Platform, they were able to compile and organize data and rank stores on key metrics, like friendliness and value. Not only did this provide personalized insights to individual stores, but also drummed up friendly competition between franchises. Through this, Auntie Anne’s was able to implement new, successful processes at underperforming stores. 

Don’t Glaze Over the Small Details

According to Forrester, customers who have great experiences are 3.6x times more likely to spend more money with the brand. Research also shows that 3% of total CX-fueled revenue is generated by word of mouth from happy customers. These highly engaged stores also helped achieve higher OSAT, or overall satisfaction,  year over year, which resulted in higher sales. In the three years after implementing Pearl-Plaza, Auntie Anne’s experienced a 6 point increase in their OSAT score.

The implementation of an intelligent tool such as the XI Platform directly increased Auntie Anne’s bottom line, more than justifying the technology investment for skeptical, higher-up business executives.

Roll the Guest and the Employee Experience into One 

With any company, the guest experience is only half the battle. Getting employees to champion a new CX strategy is key to a full experience transformation. 

That’s where Auntie Anne’s made it personal by implementing a “Guest Care Wall of Fame” to showcase how employees are being praised for their customer experience efforts. The company also inducted franchises into its “20/70 Club,” celebrating stores that receive 20 survey responses per month and achieve an OSAT score of 70 or above. 

These initiatives create HR benefits, too. According to industry research, it can cost up to $2,000 to onboard and train a new employee. When employees are more engaged, they perform better and stay longer, resulting in a cost reduction in employee turnover and training costs across all Auntie Anne’s franchises. 

With a robust CX-program in place and the right intelligent tools, companies like Auntie Anne’s can save dough and dip into new levels of success, ones that produce more business value and profit across the board. 

To read more about Auntie Anne’s sweet customer experience, check out this free webinar in which Chief of Operations Savannah Harper discussed how they leverage customer feedback across their entire organization!

Coming to Madison Dearborn Partners from Nielsen — one of the largest data companies in the world — I knew the future of data was really in analytics. It used to be that owning third-party market data gave companies a competitive edge. Today, most organizations are awash in data, and the real opportunity is integrating large and disparate types of data using advanced analytics techniques like artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems very differently.  

This is especially relevant in the fast-growing area of customer experience, where understanding customers and what you can do to drive increased loyalty is everything. Most vendors try to do this with traditional surveys. In light of the multidimensional relationship brands now have with their customers, that isn’t enough.  

Pearl-Plaza stands out among other vendors because of their approach to both the data and analytics side of customer understanding. In launching the XI Platform, the company made its vision of moving from basic insights to true intelligence, real — bringing valuable first-party data together with social and operational data, and then applying advanced analytics all in a single environment.  

The game of customer experience will ultimately change.  And it will not be toward more surveys, but beyond surveys.

We believe Pearl-Plaza has the right team, the right vision, and is at the right time in its development to become a positive, disruptive force and fundamentally change the way companies understand their customers.

As a strategic partner, Madison Dearborn Partners is here to help accelerate Pearl-Plaza’s path to scale, helping the company move even faster and take even bigger leaps toward this objective.

Today Pearl-Plaza announced its integration with the Adobe Experience Cloud, but what does it mean for marketers? The short answer is that integration presents an entirely new way to look at the customer experience (CX) and gain more intelligence than ever before.

Marketers have traditionally relied on acquisition, audience, behavioral, and conversion metrics to create customer segments and inform their efforts. While this tried-and-true method works to a point, the data provided from these sources is limited in what it can tell you.

The fact is that traditional marketing data can provide you with the “how,” “what,” and “where” customers are buying, but it can’t provide you with perhaps the most crucial piece of understanding: why your customers are—or aren’t—buying.

Our Chief Marketing Officer, Kristi Knight, elaborated on this point when she said, “What [traditional marketing] datasets don’t tell you is why your customers are acting the way they are—the golden thread for marketers—and you can only understand customer motivation through feedback from the customers themselves.”

The Pearl-Plaza integration with Adobe Experience Cloud provides the missing piece of the puzzle; it helps marketers understand the stories behind the numbers and move from metrics-based marketing to meaningful marketing.

By allowing them to tap into the data derived from customer feedback in tandem with their traditional marketing metrics, this integration through the Pearl-Plaza Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform enables marketers to create more targeted and personalized segments and online experiences.  

Want to know more about how do we do it? Check out the market release to get the specifics on this first-of-its-kind integration!

We recently celebrated the first anniversary of the release of “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2017,” where Pearl-Plaza was named a leader; and the second anniversary for Pearl-Plaza Chief Product Officer JD Nyland. JD looks back on the past year and the work Pearl-Plaza has done to honor our ranking, and continue to earn the respect of our industry and the business of some of the world’s leading CX brands.

A little over a year ago, our team was deep in the details of preparing for our annual CX Elevated conference when we received the news that the final results of The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2017, were in: Not only had we been named a Leader (the top category) for our current offering, we’d also received the top ranking in Strategy.

We were, and are incredibly proud of being a Leader. Pearl-Plaza has taken a bit of a different journey to where we are today. We’ve grown organically, choosing not to take large outside investments. We’ve been profitable for all 15 years in business. As a result, we’ve been able to grow on our own terms, and stay accountable only to our clients and our employees. For a tech company today, that’s pretty rare. But it’s worked well for us, enabling Pearl-Plaza to compete toe-to-toe with other Leaders in our space, and stay true to our core.

Being a Leader is awesome. However, being top-ranked in Strategy has been something special. In evaluating Strategy for each of the 10 “vendors that matter” in our space, Forrester looked at the following:

• Our ability to engage clients in its strategy, design, and development process to ensure product enhancements are in line with their needs
• How aligned each vendor’s product vision and roadmap are with Forrester’s CFM vision
• How well planned enhancements will allow each vendor to leap ahead of the market

For us, our top ranking in Strategy reinforced our commitment to relentless innovation. It also reminded us that, “with great power (in this case, ranking), comes great responsibility (thanks, Spiderman). Over the past year, we’ve really taken that to heart, doubling down on making sure our vision and roadmap aren’t just different, but different in ways that deliver completely unique and significant business benefits to our clients.

The most obvious evidence of what we’ve been up to is our newly announced CX Intelligence (CXI) Cloud™. This next-evolution of our platform is built on a robust and modernized technology stack, instantly boosting our ability to innovate on a global scale. Our proprietary data science underlies all aspects of the platform, supporting more intelligent conversations, curating feedback whenever, wherever and however it is shared, and ultimately, transforming simple metrics into meaning. Oriented around a “jobs to be done” or “actions to be taken” approach, the CXI Cloud provides a clear framework for our clients to access fast, differentiated solutions that go beyond listening and responding to customer feedback, to powering intelligent automation and human action.

Inside Pearl-Plaza, we refer to the CXI Cloud as the Sexy Cloud, and it’s not just because we’re technology nerds. Platforms don’t normally earn that adjective, but we think ours has. It’s not just a matter of being in the Cloud. It’s not just that it makes our technology faster, more reliable and globally available. The underlying data science is completely unique to Pearl-Plaza—and super sexy. This “secret sauce” supports every aspect—from the types of data we can collect, to giving customers the ability to engage with clients on their own terms, to powering AI-driven, real-time conversations, to applying in-flight predictive and prescriptive analytics, to delivering instant alerts and timely intelligence across the enterprise. This complex, powerful and, yes, sexy platform is in a class by itself. And with it as a foundation, our team is having a really, really good time.

We gave the world a peek at the kind of new thinking and creating the CXI Cloud is allowing us to do at our conference earlier this spring. We announced our Creative Toolkit, Digital Intercept, Next-gen Discover, and Coach Pro. And that was only the beginning. In the coming months, look for new products and capabilities from Pearl-Plaza that will fundamentally change the CFM/VoC landscape, and bring our clients completely new value.

The relationship between brands and their customers is at a new tipping point (see Facebook)—one that presents an incredible opportunity for companies that choose to use technology to help build new kinds of relationships. It’s no longer about surveys; it’s about having ongoing, intelligent conversations. It is no longer about metrics; it’s about meaning. The old ways of doing things just aren’t enough anymore. We’re inspired, and prepared to be part of what comes next.

The entire premise of customer experience (CX) is based on the idea that brands want their customers to have positive interactions with them and their products. In other words, brands who focus on customer experience want to leave a positive mark.

When my team and I were putting together the content for CX Elevated 2018, I started thinking a lot about how the mark we want to leave can define not just our CX efforts, but our lives.

Our lives are made up of moments that create a certain kind of impact. Our choice is not if we will leave a mark, but rather what kind of mark we leave. Previously, our company referred to this stand-out way of affecting the people around us as “Red Shoes” living, but with the most recent evolution in company vision, we figured it was time for a new take on an old classic.

It was this line of thinking that lead me to create the Leave Your Mark award and share it with our pearl-plaza.rumunity on the last day of conference. It was an absolute pleasure to present the first of these awards to Sean Rausch, a local high school student who chose to leave a legacy of sportsmanship and camaraderie that serves as an inspiration to everyone.

In a cross country state championship race, Sean chose to forgo personal victory when his teammate snapped his tibia mid-race, falling to the ground. Sean stopped, picked his teammate up and carried him on his back—stopping only to set his teammate down so he could hop across the finish line and finish the race.

Both boys were disqualified, but it wasn’t the podium that mattered here or the winners that exemplified true sportsmanship. It was the young man who gave up his chance for a medal because he wanted to do the right thing. Sean chose to leave a mark, and in my mind his choice is more meaningful than a thousand first place titles.

The award presented to this remarkable athlete was a plaque impressed with a sneaker-sole footprint. This print represented the mark that Sean chose to leave. We also presented all attendees and Pearl-Plaza employees with a similar plaque, instructing them to write on the sole a description of the mark they want to leave. This mark could be personal or professional, family or customer experience-oriented, big-picture or in the moment.

Being intentional about the mark you want to leave makes a huge difference in how you live every day. Our hope with this new movement is to inspire our community so that in moments of reflection, we will all be able to look back and be able to say that we left the mark we wanted to leave.

How are you leaving your mark?

The theme of this year’s CX Elevated conference, From Insights to Intelligence, represented  our long-term vision for customer experience.

This vision includes the imperative all organizations have: moving from achieving insights into what customers think about their experiences toward a more comprehensive understanding of their conversations, emotions, and actions, and how that intelligence can impact the brand.

As we began planning our annual conference, our CEO, Andrew Joiner, left no doubt as to his pick for the primary keynote: Malcolm Gladwell, one of today’s brightest thought leaders and a New York Times bestselling author. . Previously, Andrew had seen Gladwell give a presentation on two fundamentally different approaches to “solving”: puzzles and mysteries.

In the case of a puzzle, you’re working with a lack of information. To solve for a puzzle situation you gather more data until you have all of the pieces and thus, the answer. In the case of  mysteries, however, you have lots of data—too much, sometimes—and need special tools to locate the right signals amidst all of that noise. Mysteries don’t have a single right answer, but rather require creativity, curiosity, and discernment to solve.

When it comes to CX, we’re most definitely dealing with the latter paradigm. As Gladwell put it:

“In the collision of human beings and all of their complexities with data, you are surrounded by mysteries.”

To help us understand the way to approach mysteries, Gladwell provided three examples of challenges that would benefit from a mystery approach. My favorite example concerns professional basketball players and the way their value is measured.

It used to be that a pro basketball player’s value was determined simply by the number of points they scored. However this changed with the introduction of win share analysis. This new way of valuing players took into account other aspects that contribute to overall skill and performance. The new lense yielded entirely different results, enabling analysts to determine that most players peaked in their fourth year in the league. While this was more interesting, and probably helpful to teams and coaches, Gladwell observed that this process didn’t take into account the other “noise” or characteristics that sometimes contribute to a later, even greater personal best. When he approached this mystery differently, he found that variables such as player happiness and work ethic caused players like Gordon Hayward to play their personal best later in their careers than the league average. In this case, bringing in specific types of data and analyzing it in new ways kept players with great potential from being overlooked.

In this example, Gladwell was able to expertly describe to us the dangers of addressing human behavior as if it were a puzzle, which can lead to misinformation, bad answers, and missed opportunities.

So what does this have to do with customer experience? In a post-CX Elevated note to Pearl-Plaza staff, Andrew made the explicit connections:

“We hosted one of the great geniuses of our time — Malcolm Gladwell. His keynote at CXE was about how the world, especially in customer experience, is shifting away from traditional analytical constructs (a puzzle-based approach). His take is that they simply don’t work anymore. Asking more questions and producing more metrics won’t help our clients solve complex customer experiences. They need the right data and more intelligent technology — and that’s where Pearl-Plaza is helping.”

Together with our clients, we are trying to understand what their customers think of their experiences. We aren’t just trying to solve for what they do well what they
could do better, we are attempting to understand and give intelligence on how the myriad of digital and physical interactions with people, products, environments, etc. impacts the relationship between customer and brand. And more importantly, why. With those answers, we can help build brands in prioritizing their efforts, introducing new offerings, and forging high-value, lasting bonds with customers.

Throughout the rest of 2018 we’ll be introducing even more tools brands can use to successfully pursue the great mystery of customer experience. And while the mystery vs. puzzle approach is infinitely more complex, the business and human impact hold a positive potential that is both perplexing and incredibly exciting.