At the beginning of 2020, Vision Critical made the strategic decision, guided by new leadership, to continue to help brands deeply understand their customers AND make it easier for them to manage the end-to-end customer experience. As part of this vision, our new brand, Alida, was unveiled to the world in September. By that time, we had successfully executed 3 on-time, compelling product releases, and unveiled our fourth product release the next month.
At Alida, we strive to help customer-centric brands ensure that their customers are front and center in all facets of decision making. In 2020, the feedback we received from our own insight community, Sparq Next, early access program feedback, and hundreds of customer votes for product enhancements were ultimately released into Alida’s CXM & Insights platform. Today we are excited to highlight our top 10 Alida innovations of the year.
New Ways to Collect & Action Broad Feedback and Deep Insights
In 2020, Alida was on an exponential innovation trajectory and launched 4 new products - Alida CXM, Alida Analytics, Alida Touchpoint, and Alida Surveys. Our team also added to our solution offerings with new industry solutions and NPS® Accelerator.
Alida CXM: Our team launched Alida CXM, our customer experience management solution that is the world’s first CXM and insights platform rolled into one. Alida CXM allows organizations to rely on one platform to not just listen to your customers but closely manage, monitor and optimize your customers experience by automating and centralizing essential CXM activities.
Alida Touchpoint: With Alida Touchpoint, brands easily connect with current and potential customers to collect feedback or other preference data, drive calls-to-action, and engage through their customers’ preferred social and digital channels. Since its launch in June 2020, some of the world’s largest brands have used Alida Touchpoint to achieve unparalleled levels of engagement with completion rates of over 88%.
Alida Surveys: To further amplify the voice of the customer, we launched Alida Surveys to offer brands a comprehensive and intuitive ad hoc survey solution that has over 25 question types, and the ability to support all kinds of research with features like MaxDiff, QR Code Surveys, and Ad Hoc Survey Trackers. In 2020, over 50,000 surveys were sent out by our customers that received more than 36 million responses.
Alida NPS® Accelerator: In less than 60 days, our team launched the NPS® Accelerator solution to help organizations calculate their NPS score by asking “The Ultimate Question” and analyze feedback in a real-time dashboard to enable brands to collect feedback and then close the loop for meaningful impact.
Alida Analytics: Alida Analytics marks the launch of our most requested product capability and empowers our customers with end-to-end visibility into key customer experience metrics in the form of real-time, mobile dashboards that are completely customizable. During our early access program, over 20 customers provided input and over 70 custom dashboards have been created since the product launched in October.
Industry Solutions: This year we launched packaged solutions for the healthcare and technology industries, and for Voice of Employee (VoE). These solutions empower our customers in their respective industries to inject customer insights and feedback through pre-defined survey templates and related dashboards that enable customers to quickly start gathering and actioning insights. Our VoE solution enables organizations to elevate the employee experience and learn from employees to attract, retain, and engage the best people.
Heightened Admin & Member Experience for Alida Sparq
As always, we kept the needs of our Alida Sparq customers at the forefront with half of all features released being enhancements to this application. Our product teams were busy delivering enhancements to give greater ease and efficiency to Alida Sparq administrators in order to manage their customer expectations better and in real time and to also elevate the member experience.
Enterprise Controls & Advanced Data Privacy: We’ve made it easier than ever to secure access to the data and personally identifiable information (PII) that’s collected through Alida Sparq with additions to the platform including new user types, sensitive data permissions, and activity tagging. Multiple customers provided feedback into the creation of this highly requested feature and over 200 new tags to govern activity access have been created.
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has been a core focus of our innovation agenda in 2020 with AI/ML functionality included throughout Alida Sparq with functionality such as open rate prediction, response rates benchmarks, and post moderation. These enhancements have been widely adopted and have been used over 2,000 times since released.
Mobile App for Admins: Our mobile app allows Alida Sparq admins to monitor survey progress directly from their mobile device within an activity progress dashboard and mobile push notifications to keep track of key metrics on-the-go and is currently being utilized by 1-in-4 customers.
Quick Polls on Hubs: As one of our most highly requested features enabled in Hubs and powered by Touchpoint, Quick Polls enables organizations to engage their members with short and compelling activities and provide a more engaging member experience. Twenty-two customers participated in the development of this feature.
And We’re Just Getting Started…
While no one could have predicted 2020 and all the challenges we’ve faced and continue to face, we’ve learned and adapted, and know that no matter what’s coming our way in 2021, we’re better together. It’s been a year like no other as teams across our organization came together in new ways, including our full staff working remotely for the majority, to deliver value to our customers through exciting new features and innovative new products. And we have been amazed at the empathy and genuine care that our clients have shown to their customers in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, which was exhibited during our global Alida Activate CXM conferences.
It’s exciting to see Alida establish itself as the leading platform for collecting and managing customer experience data with our CXM & Insights platform. And the cherry on top is that while everything we do is for our customers, the market is taking notice and the culmination for Alida in 2020 was our inclusion in Gartner's inaugural Voice of the Customer Magic Quadrant.
It’s been a milestone year for Alida - and we’re just getting started. We are making significant investments, and we look forward to collaborating with our customers and communicating more product enhancements to you in 2021.
