Profile

Alida (formerly Vision Critical) is the creator of the world’s first comprehensive Customer Experience Management (CXM) and insights platform. Based in Toronto and founded in 2000, Alida works with customer-centric enterprises around the world. The company’s Sparq platform replaces static data and cumbersome reports with real-time actionable customer intelligence. With these results, clients are able to improve their customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction.

For over 20 years, iconic brands like BuzzFeed, LinkedIn, and Red Bull have chosen Alida’s award-winning platform as their secret weapon. As a result, the company has won numerous awards, including being selected as a 2020 “Best Overall SaaS Award” winner by APPEALIE.

Lately, Alida has been on an aggressive growth path. In early 2020 the company was revitalized with a new executive leadership team, including SAP veteran Ross Wainwright as CEO. In June 2021 the company also announced that it was teaming up with Echo MR, a global market research firm, in order to expand Alida’s growth into Europe. Several days later, Alida revealed that it had also just secured a sizable debt facility from Comerica Bank. Looking forward, the company plans to use the new funds to continue along its ambitious roadmap into the CXM space.

Visit www.alida.com

Key Products

Alida created the Alida Total Experience Management (TXM) platform to enable brands to fuse the voice of customers and employees with the ability to deliver extraordinary customer, employee, product, and brand experiences. No other platform allows brands to manage, monitor, and optimize millions of experiences, as well as source meaningful insights from core advocates. 

The Alida TXM platform holds a variety of unique products which help brands better uncover, understand, and action their customer’s ultimate “truth”. This includes: 

Alida CXM is designed to enable brands to listen to direct & indirect sources of customer feedback, perform automated actions on collected feedback and have complete visibility into key customer experience metrics so brands can create exemplary experiences day after day. 

Alida Sparq enables brands to create a consistent flow of deep customer insights through a digital insight community. Through a relationship-based approach to progressively profile and segment customers at every interaction, Alida Sparq produces rich customer insights to help brands make decisions with their customers, not for them.

Alida Surveys offers brands a comprehensive and intuitive solution so that they can learn about their customers’ experiences in a way that uncovers undeniable truths that need action.

Alida Touchpoint offers a microsurvey solution that enables brands to interact with audiences wherever they are through short, timely, visually appealing interactions to collect context-rich feedback and infuse the voice of the customer into strategic business decisions.

Alida Analytics is designed to empower brands with access to real-time, role-based, mobile-friendly dashboards that are completely customizable. With the most up-to-date and holistic information about CX programs, including community and survey respondents, it’s never been easier to see and share CX program’s impact.

Alida Video integrates seamlessly with Alida TXM so customers can plan, execute, and manage all aspects of video feedback to collect qualitative insights.

Key Executives

Ross Wainwright – CEO

Corporate Responsibility

Alida IMPACT

In 2020, Alida launched Alida IMPACT, a Corporate Citizenship program that harnesses the power of their people and products as a force for good to build a positive impact in the communities where they work. The program has two pillars: to open doors for all in Technology; and to empower employee-led initiatives. Alida provides partner organizations with their TXM technology, corporate investments and matching initiatives, employee-led fundraising campaigns, mentorship opportunities, employee expertise and workshops, and possible internship and co-op opportunities.

As an example, Alida supported the Stemettes through their Outbox 2021 program. Stemettes is an award-winning social enterprise that has worked with 45,000 young girls across Europe. They focus on promoting more diversity and inclusivity in STEM-related industries. Another example is Alida’s participation in Ride to Conquer Cancer, where employees came together to put on a friendly competition between its Canadian offices to raise money for both regional charities (BCCancer Foundation & Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation).  Alida has implemented a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) Council, which has taken the lead on sharing resources, organizing all-staff unbiased training, spoken on all hands calls, conducted consulting with Alida executives, and partnered with their customer success team to support customers with special projects. Alida also hosts a quarterly Business Women’s Exchange where all employees can come together and discuss challenges, learnings and opportunities related to topics that women face in the workplace.

Toronto Vaccine Finder

In April of this year, a team of 4 Alida employees identified an opportunity to help the local Toronto community. With frequent changes to eligibility criteria and a surplus of COVID-19 vaccine information online, the existing system had been difficult for Toronto residents to navigate and caused increased confusion and anxiety. The team wanted to harness their expertise to simplify the navigation of these quickly evolving vaccine protocols by building a unified tool that is simple for Toronto residents to access. So, the idea of a Toronto Vaccine Finder was born.

Customer Insights

“Our Insiders keep it real for us. We get unique, color commentary we couldn’t get from other places. This is a goldmine for a marketer and helps us to make more patient centric strategic decisions. We feel confident using our Insiders to weigh in on major decisions that represent millions of dollars, we feel confident and have positive early feedback that we made the right decisions.” – Dani Slifka, Consumer Insights Manager (UnityPoint Health)

“I love the ability to quickly look at results as they are coming in and cutting the data instantly. Nobody can get answers, as quickly as I can from the community, from any of the tools across the organization.” Sarah Shain, Shopper Insights Manager (RedBull)

“Alida has changed the way our stakeholders view market research. We involve members in the entire product development cycle from idea generation to design to validation. This insight allows us to understand the ‘why behind the whats’ of Big Data. It provides intelligence at the speed required by the fast moving tech industry.”  Tony Tong, Senior Market Research Manager (LinkedIn)

Company Insights

“Alida has a very supportive environment where we appreciate everyone’s differences and celebrate them.”  – Review from Operations Dept

“Alida has an all inclusive culture. Your voice is heard no matter what level of the organization you are. Though I’ve only been on Zoom throughout my entire employment at Alida, the environment is inviting and fun but at the same time fast paced.” – Review from Business Development Dept

“Empathetic culture with a constant drumbeat around the importance of inclusion and teamwork.” – Review from Executive Dept