Qualtrics, a popular customer experience management platform, is spruiking various new AI features in 2024.
Leveraging what the firm says is “the world’s largest database of human sentiment,” backed by a commitment to invest $500 million in AI, Qualtrics has been turning the advances of generative AI into new capabilities for improving customer and employee experiences.
Brad Anderson, Qualtrics’ president of products, user experience, and engineering, said at a conference in Sydney in July 2024 that he expects AI to radically change the value its software provides for customers. Anderson said the software will do this through a range of new AI features that accelerate access to insights from an organisation’s customer data.
Qualtrics is releasing several new AI features across its product suites in 2024.
The new AI features include:
Qualtrics Assist: Qualtrics’ own version of a “Copilot,” the Qualtrics Assist feature allows an organisation to query specialised AI models trained on customer data with natural language questions. It is backed by Qualtrics’ customer and employee data set. Qualtrics Assist capabilities will be embedded across all Qualtrics product suites.
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Conversational feedback: Adding a new dimension to customer surveys, the conversational feedback feature will allow analysis of survey responses in real time and prompt customers with more questions. This will help organisations get more specific customer feedback.
Intelligent summaries: Qualtrics is offering customers the ability to turn large amounts of customer data or employee feedback into concise, simple overviews for teams or managers, which analyse data, offer insights, and provide recommendations.
Automated workflows: Users can automatically trigger GPT-powered actions in the systems their teams are using, enabling further automation of customer service workflows.
In March 2024, Qualtrics announced it would rationalise its legacy product packaging and pricing. The firm has come to market in 2024 with just three suites — customer experience, employer experience, and strategy and research — with each comprising three products.
Qualtrics’ customer experience suite aims to help clients deliver better experiences across physical and digital customer touch points, including contact centres, websites and mobile apps, and physical stores. Features include online reputation management and omni-channel customer experience analytics.
The employee experience suite is designed to assist with workforce engagement, manager effectiveness, and HR decision-making. Features include employee engagement surveys, employee lifecycle improvement tools, and people analytics, including workforce attrition drivers and prediction.
The strategy and research suite allows customers to conduct qualitative and quantitative research to support product design, growth in market share, and brand health. Features include research and analytics tools, product usability and concept testing, and brand-health tracking.
Customers who purchase access to one of Qualtrics’ product suites will have access to all products and capabilities within that suite for unlimited users — after a shift to consumption-based pricing. This will enable customers to “dial up or dial down” platform usage as required. The amount a customer pays is based on the number of interactions it has with the platform.
Qualtrics expects customers to focus on adopting new AI features for internal use cases first. This allows them to build confidence in generative AI outputs before rolling out use cases for external customers, where the brand risk is perceived by customers to be higher.
Conversational surveys that can extract more specific, useful, and actionable data from customers using generative AI are likely to be adopted widely. Anderson said many organisations are already conducting surveys. But they also want better data, making the new feature practical and useful to customers.
“When customers fill out surveys, they need to click the ‘Next’ button,” he said. “On average, that’s clicked 50,000 times every minute on Qualtrics, and at peak is being clicked 300,000 times a minute. Every single one of those is a roundtrip iteration with our AI to understand if the response should be clarified.”
Customers will be able to turn the rich data dashboards they have created with Qualtrics data into natural language anyone in an organisation can understand. This helps to democratise data beyond data teams and removes the need for creating summaries manually.
“Our generative AI automatically creates those [manual summaries],” Anderson said. “You can output it as a PDF, as a Word document, and it has all the recommendations, all the insights, all the excerpts on the voice of the customer. It will be broadly adopted because it is internally facing and putting the AI to work.”
A manager assist feature will allow managers to query Qualtrics’ AI to find information such as how their team is feeling or what direct reports want a manager to improve upon. Managers can ask the AI for recommendations on what to prioritise to improve their management.
“A CEO can be looking at it, the data analytics team can be looking at it, or a frontline manager can be looking at it,” Anderson explained. “Frontline managers are often new managers; they are trying to figure out what it means to be a good leader and manager. This is like having a full-time coach sitting with you.”
Singapore telecommunications company StarHub and Australian travel agency Flight Centre both announced new use cases for the Qualtrics platform in 2024.
StarHub, a provider of telecommunications, entertainment, and digital services in Singapore, has tapped Qualtrics to help it identify and bring to market new, optimised products, services, and experiences. This effort is part of StarHub’s strategic transformation initiative, which is targeting $500 million in cost savings and revenue growth by FY 2026.
Use cases for StarHub include using real-time, multi-channel insights to understand customers better, improve customer service experiences, and be more precise and efficient with decisions. StarHub says it plans to use Qualtrics to adapt to new consumer behaviours and launch new product offerings.
Flight Centre is one of the first organisations in Asia Pacific to go live with Qualtrics’ AI-powered conversational analytics and natural language-processing updates, helping it to analyse and respond to millions of pieces of structured and unstructured customer feedback.
Using Qualtrics, Flight Centre is listening to and analysing customer feedback across channels including emails, chat, messaging, social and online reviews, traditional surveys, and more. It can also understand the emotion, intent, preference, and effort behind engagements with the brand.
Qualtrics aims to use its AI strategy and new features to vastly increase value for customers. Brad Anderson said AI has the potential to “fundamentally change the value experience management produces,” helping to introduce transformational change to the market.
Any new value will be based on the data Qualtrics can use to build generative AI models. The firm has 20,000 customers, including 91 Fortune 100 companies. Its data pool includes 10.4 billion conversations — most commonly call centre phone calls — as well as 7.8 billion surveys.
“We believe we will 10X the value we bring to organisations over the next couple of years,” Anderson said.
