Understanding Experience Management with Qualtrics

[former_member611468]

Introduction to Experience Management

Before we try and understand the Experience Management offerings by Qualtrics, and try and understand what might be the reason/agenda behind that acquisition decision; we need to understand the jargon, “Experience Management” and why it is suddenly so relevant. So, this blog-post addresses the concept of Experience Management or XM (As Defined by Qualtrics) and how Qualtrics & SAP is trying to offer solutions to address this need/opportunity.

Experience Management(XM) simply means managing experiences, and those experiences can be from various pillars of business like Products, Customers, Brand and Employees, each contributing towards the successful objective of the business itself.

Taking Customers as an example to understand about these experiences: The question arises that why are we thinking about managing experiences when we can manage other factors influencing a customer like costs, product offering etc. or the operational part of business. Well, there are numerous studies which have indicated that it is more important to know how customers and other stakeholders recognize/identify/relate to a product/offering rather than just assuming it by looking at the operational side of it.

The importance of Customer Experiences was later understood when the companies interacted with their customer directly and found out that there was a huge perception gap in the value they assumed to be delivering and what the customer actually perceived. Then came the question of capturing these experiences at these customer interaction points (Point of Sale, Feedback collected physically and online, Surveys conducted, Research done by Third Party etc.) and analyzing it to understand the customer sentiment towards the offering.

Once the customer experiences were recorded and analyzed to get the feel of how well the customers have liked/disliked the product/service and what areas were good and what can be definitely be improved. This gives the companies a clear direction on what they need to change/improve to get those experiences better, the next time they purchase. In order to have a satisfied customer as an end product, there is a definite key area of focus which is listening to what people say about it and how it could be made better, the companies can give them a way to voice their opinion, sentiment and experience.

It is true for the other pillars of business as well and thus we can associate a term here called Integrated Experience which matters because these pillars are inter-dependent and can cause chaos. If not acted upon, a faulty/dissociative branding would lead to damaging brand credibility which could further lead to dissatisfied customers and thus increased pressure on employees.

So, in order to capture, interpret and analyze the results and to manage these experiences, a platform was required, which does all this for us. There are many Experiences Management Platforms like Qualtrics, Medallia, InMoment and Clarabridge to name a few who manage experiences (Primarily Feedback) for their clients.

Experience Management Offerings by Qualtrics

Now, let’s move on to understand Experience Management(XM) Platform provided by Qualtrics, which facilitates its clients to forecast, convey, assess and reply to Customer(CX), brand(BX), product(PX) and employee experiences(EX). Qualtrics assists their clients by capturing the Experience data (X-Data) and help them integrate with the Operational Data (O-Data) in a single record system providing deep insights and at utmost convenience.

Let’s talk briefly on the product offerings by Qualtrics itself:

• Under Customer Experience(CX) they work with customer interactions. They ensure direct customer engagement and response in real time by specific frontline force knowing the customer experiences well enough to improve them. They later use these communications /interactions to turn into insightful intelligence which can be later referred/consulted to cater to same category of customers down the line. They even try and improve the way that communication happens at each customer interaction touchpoint. Predicting the next action of the customer is equally important where the technologies decipher knowledge/insight from the texts/feedbacks, perform statistical analysis like Natural Language Processing, Customer Sentiment Analysis etc. which help them Act on the gathered intelligence by predict the customer behavior and thus interact or respond accordingly.


• Under Brand Experience(BX), they have clear objectives to reinforce brand value, mend brand sensitivities and lead to a sustainable growth by tending to key indicators from Brand Health at a single platform and then comparing them with the competitors. It clearly guides the organizations with real time actionable insights with proper customizations.


• Under Employee Experience(EX), they aim to earn full trust of employees turning them into representatives for what the organization stands for enabling them to grow and as they grow, the organization grows with them. They believe and act on Engagement, Overall Development, Assessments etc. to nurture and keep employees satisfied as they are the ones catering the customers.


• Under Product Experience(PX), they want to know what is exactly wanted in a product by the customer (Even End Users are kept in Mind while designing the solutions) and provide them that. Cut-short product development time and increase product adoption, usage and allegiance/loyalty.


• They also offer Research Core, where they drive end to end research for the clients leading information/insights into a customized offering to cater to segmented customers at one go. They have brought down the complexity under the research with flexibility ensuring to personalize every customer interaction though almost all customer engagement channels available.


• Qualtrics iQ, it is the predictive analytics instrument which is being driven by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning even much advanced concepts of Deep Learning and Neural Network is being used to ensure that the intelligence gathered is analyzed accurately and discover deep and hidden understandings behind a customer actions and words.

These all offerings work in tandem to provide clients with a way to collect, analyze and bring impact in the customer behavior thus benefitting them.

According to a report by Forrester (The Data - Numbers have been referred from the report -he Total Economic Impact of Experience Management with Qualtrics) the quantitative & economic benefits received by companies after using Qualtrics have been mentioned below:

• Cost of staff required for the similar work saw a reduction of $470,015.
  This clearly indicate that using the platform has helped organizations reduce the staff used for employed for work, which earlier required more employees and had reported increased efficiency thus cost reduction.


• Cost of customer engagement and support saw a reduction of $358,107.
  The platform also helped the organization address the issue of delayed response to customer needs which was ideally due to incapability and inoperability to address the issue in a short time frame.


• Cost of failed product launches were avoided of $219,557
  Understanding the customer expectations via XM and real time analytics using the platform ensures that the decision are taken on data rather than assumptions or opinions which are more likely to produce results.


• Cost of previously purchased tools were avoided of $102,307
  Due to the competencies of the platform by Qualtrics ensured that the cost of renewing licenses of the other tools was saved and they could all rely of a single platform for their entire XM area.

There are other benefits like, the platform created a culture of responsibility as the data and insights provided can motivate teams and individuals and they can be rewarded for their contribution towards the increased customer satisfaction. It has also helped companies understand Customer’s entire Life Cycle (Journey). Using such intelligence, companies are able to know the exact taste of each customer and their likelihood of future purchase and churn probability. It has also led to increased capability and trust for the Customer Relations & research teams as they can vouch for the evolving choices of the customer thorough their own voices/experiences/feedbacks.

Conclusion

In Conclusion we can't highlight enough on the unprecedented growth which is expected in the market size of Customer Experience Management, estimated to reach ~Over USD 30 Billion by 2025. Gartner reported that, customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software market grew by 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018, which has been one of the reasons for SAP to get associated with it. SAP capturing over 70% of the world’s transactions need a support of customer experience entity to accomplish their operational strategies.

As Andrew Frank from Gartner had said “The combination of experience data with operational data is fundamental to the future of effective data-driven marketing”; SAP desired to take a lead from the competition by embodying Experience Management in their Operations with the help of Qualtrics.

SAP & Qualtrics, recently in SAPPHIRE’2019 announced various CustomerXM Solutions to SAP C/4HANA, namely SAP Qualtrics CX for Commerce, SAP Qualtrics CX for Sales, SAP Qualtrics CX for Customer Service and SAP Qualtrics CX for Marketing. These Qualtrics solutions in collaboration with SAP C/4HANA is intended to make intelligent customer-centric solutions so that SAP can cater to the ever changing customer expectations.

 

References Used :

Document Referred :

1. Forrester Report: The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q4 2018


2. Forrester Report: The Total Economic Impact of Experience Management with Qualtrics

Other References:

• https://www.qualtrics.com/au/experience-management/


• https://www.sap.com/india/products/experience-management-xm.html


• https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2019/01/31/why-ceos-should-care-about-experience-management/#dc3c47...


• https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/sap-x-o-data-integration-cx/


• https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-customer-experience-management-cem-market

[VL1]

Nice Blog Rahul. Clear & Crisp.

Regards,

Vinay.

[former_member611468]

Thanks vinaypotdar

[former_member750378]

This is an important topic.

SAP has updated information on Employee Experience Management within the SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite (HXM). Visit the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Experience Management page to learn more.