Contemplation and Inspiration: A Year of CX Innovation

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.