RALEIGH – Stealz is rolling out a new enterprise product aiming to help customer-facing companies with multiple locations or independently owned franchises gather customer experience data quickly – and easily – through mobile surveys.

The product, Epifany, took nine months to develop and aims to streamline customer feedback collection and improve customer experience at specific locations where businesses are based, including McDonald’s, Chick-Fil-A, and Taco Bell.

“The world is transitioning to making these things easy,” said Jim Zidar, co-founder and CEO of Stealz, Inc. Companies are working to change the customer experience industry. Zidar believes that Stealz is uniquely positioned to take advantage of a renewed interest in customer experience, service, retention, and recovery.

The Epifany Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customer experience platform provides businesses a low-overhead solution to collect larger volumes of customer data with greater qualitative and actionable intelligence, said Zidar. It operates through the integration of the platform into a brand’s existing app infrastructure, yielding a seamless customer experience that takes a few seconds to complete prior to, at, or immediately after the point of sale.

“It’s a ready-made and high-demand solution for large brands that have their own mobile app but don’t currently have a great customer experience solution,” said Zidar, noting that almost every large quick-serve restaurant, service, home improvement, entertainment, and hospitality brand meets that description.

Epifany leverages existing technology to deploy sophisticated artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning algorithms capable of analyzing feedback and turning data points into actionable intelligence displayed on a brand dashboard. A brand’s customer experience team can view the dashboard or create reports to drill down on specific queries and information about the business as a whole or individual locations.

“It’s pretty straightforward,” said Zidar, “They’re looking at trends in menu items of the store, geographic level data, demographic level data, seeking to understand if they’re having real problems with customers in a particular store, and more.”


Product overview: Epifany

“Easily collect high quality data on every customer via mobile surveys.”

  • Step 1: Collect Smart Data

Easily collect high quality data on every customer via mobile surveys.

  • Step 2: Illuminate Key Insights Step 2

Identify the most important trends in your customer experience.

  • Step 3: Make Strategic Decisions

Leverage actionable data to resolve customer issues and drive retention

What it does:

Epifany provides a low-overhead solution for businesses that want to collect a higher quantity and quality of data/feedback from their customers. The platform enables clients to integrate modernized and user-friendly surveys into their existing mobile apps. Every survey is concise, personalized and only requires 60 seconds for a customer to complete.”

Source: Stealz


Stealz, which has grown to 30 employees and contractors, will continue to service the Stealz platform as well as support and expand the Epifany platform.

“Stealz has become self-sufficient within our key markets,” said Zidar. The Stealz platform is a loyalty platform, which lets consumers download the app and use it to accrue loyalty rewards over time. After the company closed a $2.4 million round in private equity in July 2017, Zidar and the board of directors decided to deploy resources to focus on customer experience and serve businesses as their primary clients.

Now, the company is deploying resources to focus on customer experience applications, said Jody Cumberpatch, director of business development for Stealz, Inc.

“Epifany does mark a new direction for the company,” said Cumberpatch, “We’re focusing most of our resources on becoming a juggernaut in the customer experience space.”

In the nine months it took to develop the new product, the company made additional hires and redirected resources, said Zidar. From the very beginning, current Stealz clients played a critical role in the design and features of the Epifany platform, including significant user testing and end-user interviews.

“What helps us is understanding our clients and our client’s needs,” said Zidar, “and how our company can serve them.” Zidar is currently working to finalize deals with a few other well-known brands, but declined to comment on which brands the company is in discussion with about coming on board the Epifany platform.

“The company is in a great position,” said Zidar. “It’s nice to be getting to the point where the organization feels very stable.”

Stealz, Inc. also raised $1 million in the first quarter of 2015, after raising $480,000 in an initial seed round. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, NC and won the North Carolina Technology Association’s “New Media/Digital Marketing Company” NC Tech Award in 2016, also being named one of the organization’s top ten startups to watch. Zidar and other co-founders launched the original Stealz platform in 2012.