Qualtrics, a leading global Voice of Customer (VoC) provider, held its annual X4 conference in May, at the ICC in Sydney. The event included an exclusive media lunch and focused on Qualtrics’ latest announcements and product enhancements, many of which were first unveiled at its US event in March.
The conference combined insights into the company’s technology roadmap with real-world customer success stories, featuring organisations such as KFC, ServiceNow, David Jones, Hilton, and others.
In a world dominated by AI agents, the opportunity lies in building real human connections. The challenge, however, is to do this at scale. Empowering people with AI agents, rather than replacing them, can improve efficiency while also creating space for more empathetic, human-centred interactions, the vendor argues. The theme of building connections and making every connection count came through loud and clear and was weaved through the product announcements.
Here are my key takeaways from attending the conference.
Culture is Key
It was refreshing to see culture take centre stage at a vendor briefing – a critical pillar for CX success that’s too often overlooked in technology conversations.
While technology is critical to enable a successful CX practice and continuously improve customer experience, building a culture of customer centricity must be the foundation for technology to be successful.
It’s critical to break down internal silos to unify data across the organisation and democratise insights. With customer feedback now coming into the organisation through various channels (surveys, calls, emails, social media, etc.), GenAI enables organisations to create a holistic understanding of experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Likewise, that data needs to be shared with the right internal teams to enable continuous improvement opportunities. For that to happen, organisations need to develop a culture of customer centricity and break out of their silo-centric mindset.
Qualtrics Experience Agents
No surprise, Agentic AI has made it into the world of customer feedback with Brad Anderson, President – Products, User Experience, and Engineering, introducing Qualtrics Experience Agents.
Qualtrics has started to develop AI agents and is slowly embedding this capability into the platform. Think about closing the loop with customers, automating small tasks, and proactively identifying issues before we hear about them.
The Experience Agents can respond to customers during the survey process or can be embedded into the digital experience to address problems in real time. Closing the loop with customers, across surveys and other service requests, can be a timely and resource intense undertaking. Qualtrics’ autonomous agents can close the loop with 100% of customers, automatically responding in real time, building empathy and making your customers feel heard.
It’s still early days for Qualtrics’ Experience Agents and I look forward to seeing tangible outcomes of customer implementations. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this over the coming months!
Surveys Just Got Smarter
Qualtrics introduced “agentified” surveys, a new way to respond to verbatim survey feedback, adjust follow up questions accordingly, and turn surveys into conversations.
This is an evolution of what’s referred to as verbatim probing. They represent a new way of getting actionable feedback from customers through AI enabled and adaptive questioning during a survey.
The new technology enhances the insight quality and aims to build empathy with customers. Verbatim responses become richer in value and Qualtrics reports a slight increase in survey completion rates. The aim is to turn surveys into conversations, leaving customers feeling heard and building stronger connections.
Despite the adoption of unsolicited feedback as a source of customer insights, surveys still represent the foundation for any VoC program, and they’re not going to go away any time soon. Enhancing survey capabilities while adding operational and unsolicited feedback to the mix will be key to establishing a deeper understating of customer experience and identifying improvement opportunities.
Show Me the Money
Qualtrics highlights the importance of linking CX initiatives to business outcomes and results to demonstrate ROI and gain buy-in and continued support from key stakeholders.
When VoC programs were first introduced, the main challenge for most organisations was gathering customer feedback. Once that hurdle was overcome – thanks to technology – the next challenge became converting raw data into meaningful insights, especially with the addition of unstructured data sources.
The focus then shifted from insights to identifying and driving action. Mature organisations are now at the stage of tangibly linking CX results to business outcomes and showcasing ROI. Quantifying business impact is an essential step in enabling CX success, yet it is often neglected.
Most organisations are still working on building robust Insights-to-Action frameworks and translating insights into tangible action; efforts often hindered by limited collaboration and a lack of customer-centric culture. For more mature organisations, the challenge now lies in clearly demonstrating the business outcomes and ROI of their CX programs.
Other Announcements
Qualtrics Assist. Alongside other technology giants, Qualtrics’ ‘Assist’ solution is an easy way to query the data in a natural language style, i.e. asking data questions to find insights. This is particularly important for larger data sets that comprise survey and unsolicited feedback, as it significantly speeds up the insight generation process. Analysis that used to take days or weeks, can now be completed in minutes or seconds.
Qualtrics Edge. Qualtrics has started to introduce synthetic data to its Research product suit. It’s a niche market at this stage but certainly growing in popularity as utilising synthetic data, panels and personas not only significantly speeds up the research process but also reduces cost. I’m interested to see market uptake for this. While it’s not new per se, organisations still need to overcome the “trust” hurdle to fully embrace synthetic data and research.
Customer Service and VoC: Boundaries Blur Further
While AI agents have dominated contact centre conversations in recent months, Qualtrics is one of the few VoC vendors now introducing Agentic AI with its Experience Agents.
This is particularly relevant for the digital experience space, where a variety of vendors are offering solutions. Qualtrics’ Experience Agents can detect signs of frustration and rage clicking during digital sessions and proactively engage to close the loop in real time.
It will be interesting to see how the growing number of agents from different vendors ultimately work together in a coordinated way to enhance experiences, rather than introduce new points of friction.
The contact centre has long been a goldmine for customer experience data and insights. Today, tapping into conversational data has become an open field for vendors across VoC, contact centre, and conversational intelligence categories. While this brings innovation, it also complicates decision-making for technology buyers. With vendors from different backgrounds offering overlapping capabilities, often to different internal stakeholders, organisations risk ending up with complex, costly tech stacks.
That said, it’s encouraging to see Qualtrics continue to develop and embed GenAI and Agentic AI into its platform. As a leader in the CX space, it’s setting a high bar for the rest of the market.
Customer feedback is at the heart of Customer Experience (CX). But it’s changing. What we consider customer feedback, how we collect and analyse it, and how we act on it is changing. Today, an estimated 80-90% of customer data is unstructured. Are you able and ready to leverage insights from that vast amount of customer feedback data?
Let’s begin with the basics: What is VoC and why is there so much buzz around it now?
Voice of the Customer (VoC) traditionally refers to customer feedback programs. In its most basic form that means organisations are sending surveys to customers to ask for feedback. And for a long time that really was the only way for organisations to understand what their customers thought about their brand, products, and services.
But that was way back then. Over the last few years, we’ve seen the market (organisations and vendors) dipping their toes into the world of unsolicited feedback.
What’s unsolicited feedback, you ask?
Unsolicited feedback simply means organisations didn’t actually ask for it and they’re often not in control over it, but the customer provides feedback in some way, shape, or form. That’s quite a change to the traditional survey approach, where they got answers to questions they specifically asked (solicited feedback).
Unsolicited feedback is important for many reasons:
- Organisations can tap into a much wider range of feedback sources, from surveys to contact centre phone calls, chats, emails, complaints, social media conversations, online reviews, CRM notes – the list is long.
- Surveys have many advantages, but also many disadvantages. From only hearing from a very specific customer type (those who respond and are typically at the extreme ends of the feedback sentiment), getting feedback on the questions they ask, and hearing from a very small portion of the customer base (think email open rates and survey fatigue).
- With unsolicited feedback organisations hear from 100% of the customers who interact with the brand. They hear what customers have to say, and not just how they answer predefined questions.
It is a huge step up, especially from the traditional post-call survey. Imagine a customer just spent 30 min on the line with an agent explaining their problem and frustration, just to receive a survey post call, to tell the organisation what they just told the agent, and how they felt about the experience. Organisations should already know that. In fact, they probably do – they just haven’t started tapping into that data yet. At least not for CX and customer insights purposes.
When does GenAI feature?
We can now tap into those raw feedback sources and analyse the unstructured data in a way never seen before. Long gone are the days of manual excel survey verbatim read-throughs or coding (although I’m well aware that that’s still happening!). Tech, in particular GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs), are now assisting organisations in decluttering all the messy conversations and unstructured data. Not only is the quality of the analysis greatly enhanced, but the insights are also presented in user-friendly formats. Customer teams ask for the insights they need, and the tools spit it out in text form, graphs, tables, and so on.
The time from raw data to insights has reduced drastically, from hours and days down to seconds. Not only has the speed, quality, and ease of analysis improved, but many vendors are now integrating recommendations into their offerings. The tools can provide “basic” recommendations to help customer teams to act on the feedback, based on the insights uncovered.
Think of all the productivity gains and spare time organisations now have to act on the insights and drive positive CX improvements.
What does that mean for CX Teams and Organisations?
Including unsolicited feedback into the analysis to gain customer insights also changes how organisations set up and run CX and insights programs.
It’s important to understand that feedback doesn’t belong to a single person or team. CX is a team sport and particularly when it comes to acting on insights. It’s essential to share these insights with the right people, at the right time.
Some common misperceptions:
- Surveys have “owners” and only the owners can see that feedback.
- Feedback that comes through a specific channel, is specific to that channel or product.
- Contact centre feedback is only collected to coach staff.
If that’s how organisations have built their programs, they’ll have to rethink what they’re doing.
If organisations think about some of the more commonly used unstructured feedback, such as that from the contact centre or social media, it’s important to note that this feedback isn’t solely about the contact centre or social media teams. It’s about something else. In fact, it’s usually about something that created friction in the customer experience, that was generated by another team in the organisation. For example: An incorrect bill can lead to a grumpy social media post or a faulty product can lead to a disgruntled call to the contact centre. If the feedback is only shared with the social media or contact centre team, how will the underlying issues be resolved? The frontline teams service customers, but organisations also need to fix the underlying root causes that created the friction in the first place.
And that’s why organisations need to start consolidating the feedback data and democratise it.
It’s time to break down data and organisational silos and truly start thinking about the customer. No more silos. Instead, organisations must focus on a centralised customer data repository and data democratisation to share insights with the right people at the right time.
In my next Ecosystm Insights, I will discuss some of the tech options that CX teams have. Stay tuned!
