Practicing What We Preach: How Customers Shaped the New Pearl-Plaza Dashboards

Listen. Understand. Share. As customer experience continues to gain momentum and becomes the new competitive battleground for businesses around the world, these three principles remain consistent.

In the same way Pearl-Plaza supports brands in their efforts to give customers a voice at the decision-making table, we strive to practice what we preach, ensuring our own customers are collaborators in improving the products and the services we offer.

In just a couple weeks, Pearl-Plaza will release an updated Dashboards product. These user-centered Dashboards help brands easily view and configure real-time customer data. Dashboards are effortlessly configured to uncover relevant insights for each role in the organization.

But we could not have gotten here without input from our current clients. These new Dashboards are the result of several months of Pearl-Plaza product managers, UX designers, and software developers working directly with brands who participated in a beta program to help us better understand their business needs.

How We’ve Listened

Pearl-Plaza collects feedback from our clients across many touchpoints throughout the product development life cycle.

Some of these channels include:

• Weekly phone calls with Customer Success Managers
• Interviews and surveys from a multifaceted customer listening program
• Ideas and discussions on the client-exclusive pearl-plaza.rumunity
• In-person conversations with members of our product and leadership teams

One brand that played an integral role in the development of the new Dashboards is maurices, a leading women’s fashion retailer.

“We view Dashboards as a critical component in telling our brand story consistently to everyone, adding other data to create deeper insight, and piecing together the puzzle to enable different departments to get the most out of our experience data,” said Kristin Anderson, AVP of Customer Insights at maurices.

Anderson met with Pearl-Plaza weekly to help a cross-functional team understand how Dashboards could better meet maurices’ business needs. “At every meeting, the team at Pearl-Plaza listened, asked intelligent questions, and sought to understand what they could do differently. Their enthusiasm—both for their own product and for the use cases we were presenting—was always contagious.”

How We’ve Acted

Improving customer experience requires more than just listening to what customers are saying. It is understanding and acting on data that truly sets CX leaders apart from the rest.

Creating the new Dashboards was a team project—both externally and internally. Multiple teams at Pearl-Plaza played a part in bringing our customers’ vision to life. At times, this was difficult, as each employee wanted to make sure that even competing client ideas were fairly heard and considered.

• The UX designers gathered early feedback that the design felt clunky and jarring . They responded to this perspective by creating a modern design where each button, dropdown list, swipe, and scroll felt as natural as possible.
• Our QA Engineer carefully recorded and investigated each bug and broken feature that was submitted. Dashboards went through hundreds of revisions as developers worked hard to earn that quality assurance “stamp of approval.” The final result is one of the largest and cleanest product releases we’ve ever seen.
• Developers wanted to improve upon past complaints that legacy dashboards were slow. This required the development team to find new and better ways to do its work. It required balancing short-term obstacles with long-term vision while also keeping the end user at the front of mind.

This past March, the entire Dashboards team attended our CX Elevated conference together to watch as the product was first introduced on the main stage. The positive reception from customers and industry leaders helped reinforce enthusiasm for the product. With that being said, we know that we still have more work to do.

A Commitment to Innovation

Listening isn’t a one-time action—it’s a continual process. While we are excited to share the new Dashboards product, we are committed to keep building and refining features to better meet our clients’ business objectives.

How are you taking action on feedback from your customers?