One of the challenges in making a technology investment is how unpredictable the tech industry is. Driven by the need for constant innovation, tech developers embrace change—and fast. This can be destabilizing for customers, who want to benefit from their solutions, but who also require reassurance that they will be supported not only during purchasing and deployment, but for the duration of their relationship with their provider. As that provider grows, will support dwindle?

That depends on a few things:

• Does the company have an established history of remaining true to its founding principles?
• Has it demonstrated a strong commitment to customer support?
• Is it transparent with its clients?

If the answer to all three questions is “yes,” chances are you have nothing to worry about.

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A Rich History of Innovating User Experience

Born in 1997, Carousel Digital Signage will be celebrating its 30^th birthday in just under two years. In the early days, the term “digital signage” had yet to be coined. When it officially became an industry, our platform was already a mature product.

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JJ Parker, our CEO and co-founder, recalls that the Carousel platform was born out of the desire to develop a collaborative tool that everyone in an organization could use—not just the technical staff. These principles are just as important to us today as they were nearly 30 years ago. He puts it this way: “I am proud of how we’ve evolved the Carousel product to meet the needs of the modern digital signage market while staying true to our founding lessons.”

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Over the last three decades, our team has worked together to develop practical, hassle-free, valuable solutions that enable customers to easily create and manage content for their digital signage networks.

Straight away, we identified that system access was the most important feature we could offer, so we engineered the first web-based digital signage software product. In recognizing that media player integration was one of the trickiest aspects of digital signage installations, we built the first small form-factor media players.

We knew that people couldn’t spend hours watching the same digital signage display, so we provided multi-zone capability so that our customers’ messaging could be viewed in different places throughout their facilities, increasing information density. Acknowledging how difficult it is to keep content fresh, we were the first to introduce integrations with industry standard data sources like RSS, iCal, and Exchange.

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Media Players

When purpose-built media players began gaining popularity, we started supporting the best players on the market, such as BrightSign.

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We were the first to support Apple TV as a media player; since then we added several other multi-use media players to our support portfolio, including Mersive Solstice and Zoom Rooms.

With the introduction of Carousel Cloud, we enabled customers to take advantage of a digital signage Content Management System (CMS) as a hosted, Software-as-a-Service solution. Our integrations with Canva, Geckoboard, Google Slides, as well as Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word allow customers to leverage familiar tools to create digital signage messaging. With The Daily, customers can now push messaging beyond static displays to their target audience’s mobile devices—a crucial feature for reaching people where they’re at.

Through all of this, we’ve constantly challenged ourselves to stay true to our founding principle: to develop features and solutions that are easy to learn, easy to manage, and easy to use.

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Yes, It Is All About Relationships

People like working with Carousel because we take the time to build relationships with our customers. This isn’t marketing-speak, it’s at the core of our culture. Our team members aren’t instructed to gloss over issues or give customers the runaround. They’re empowered to earn the customer’s trust through clarity, compassion, empathy, and transparency. They’re in it for the long haul, not just a one-time sale. In other words: when you have a question, you will receive a timely, truthful answer.

And when there is a problem, we won’t stop until we arrive at a solution that works for you.

Our mission is to help our customers succeed—if it wasn’t, we’d hardly be a success ourselves. This requires us to build relationships with our customers by, first and foremost, listening to what they have to say. In doing this, we can further drive innovation for everyone’s benefit.

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