X4 Summit 2024 Recap: Qualtrics Shows Why Organizations Need a C-E-Xy (Customer Experience + Employee Experience) Makeover
Historically, organizations kept employee experience (EX) separate from their customer experience (CX) initiatives, costing them uncontrolled attrition and poor customer loyalty. At the Qualtrics X4® 2024, we connected with the global leaders from the Experience Management (XM) industry. These XM practitioners shared their insights on how organizations can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver human-like experiences across multiple touchpoints. We will tell you how popular brands use Qualtrics XM solutions to establish a real “human” connection with customers and employees to showcase their values, innovation, and ethics.
Experience Management: An Introduction to New-age Business Values
It’s true that organizations still suffer from an “experience disconnect.”
According to a PwC report, 54% of US-based consumers feel the customer experience offered by most organizations needs improvement — There’s an experience gap that prevents brands from becoming iconic entities despite meeting the baseline expectations.
For most parts, these brands deliver products and services that exceed the parameters linked to speed, consistency, convenience, and friendliness. However, there is no assurance that they will still be considered “experience champions” or leaders as the experience gap widens each time we discuss the trends.
The reason?
Currently, organizations are “flying blind” with their experience management strategies. The experiences are disjointed due to the lack of shared vision and efforts. Leaders at the helm lack the initiative to connect the customer experience with the employee experience. They lack the edge to take on new demands arising in the AI-led experience management landscape. In 2024, companies have fewer chances to get it right with “Experience Management.” Say less than one, especially if you haven’t begun your experience journey to figure out the gaps in the GenAI era.
Why Do Organizations Need a CEX-y Makeover in 2024?
When CX and EX work together, organizations reap incredible results from this ‘connected’ XM approach.
If the customer is king, then your employees are the king-makers. Give customers what they want and they will buy more, and come back again. Give employees what they want, and they will stay and perform better. Along the same thought, customers and employees behave similarly and have similar aspirations when they talk and act with humans and technology-powered assistants like chatbots and IVAs. When organizations listen and respond to their talks and actions, customers and employees naturally become your biggest champions and advocates.
World-renowned brands such as Porsche, DISH, Adidas, and Hyatt have figured out one thing is essential to their existence and growth — CX + EX, embedded into their organizational culture. They have mastered the Connected XM. We knew them for their managerial expertise, sustained by human efforts, in bringing together CX and EX under one roof. Last week, we heard them narrate to the experience management industry how adequately they match and exceed expectations using technology.
Thanks to Qualtrics!!!
AI at Qualtrics is not something that was cooked up in the last six months to impress customers and users. The experience management solutions provider has been working on its AI roadmap for the last four-and-a-half years, CEO Zig Serafin revealed during his opening keynote last week at the X4 Summit.
“Making businesses more human using AI” emerged as the highlight of the event showcasing how Qualtrics customers and product leaders are working with powerful new capabilities of the XM Platform. Powered by Qualtrics AI, an XM-specific AI specialized in human connection and purpose-built to get you closer to your customers and employees. For years together organizations have attributed their success to delivering high-quality customer experience (CX) in the physical and digital realms. At Qaultrics X4 Summit, we witnessed the role employees play in taking CX efforts to new heights. New technologies can now support customer-facing employees to collect, track, and analyze conversations and sentiments for personalizing CX across different touchpoints.
With AI at their fingertips, CX leaders can empower their employees with superior EX that directly impacts how organizations can increase productivity, retain talent, improve products, and optimize customer support. All these, together with EX and CX ingredients powered by AI, drive revenue and strengthen organizational culture.
How Did Brands Embrace a CEX-y Makeover Using Qualtrics?
At the X4 Summit, eight companies stood apart from the crowd by revealing their true business value through exceptional CX and EX initiatives. They were bold, creative, and honest about their XM efforts, and that was visible in the way they reaped benefits from investing in XM solutions to build human connections for their businesses.
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DISH Network
DISH NetworkWith the help of Qualtrics, DISH recorded a 10-point NPS increase within a year. It also reduced customer churn by using Qualtrics’ insights. Its cutting-edge approach to using Qualtrics AI to collect and analyze video feedback is helping agents uncover new customer insights from unstructured data. These insights are directly connected to business-wide improvements that are further cultivated to design and operate a customer-centric culture.
On Day 2 of the X4 Summit, I spoke to Christina Sansone, vice president of CX transformation at DISH Network VP of CX transformation. Customers have a strong affinity toward brands that offer them a great CX at all touchpoints. DISH Network’s customer-centric culture is a living example. I asked Christina how her organization uses AI-powered video surveys and feedback software for sentiment and emotional analytics.
How has an XM solution provider like Qualtrics truly enabled DISH to meet its CX objectives?
Christina said, “Customers have to continually engage with your product to know they are getting value from it. When customers stop engaging, something is wrong.”
“We piloted an XM campaign (with Qualtrics XM Video Feedback) last year for our NPS survey. Within two weeks, we had roughly 100 videos come back to us. We were just shocked (with the results)! The pilot proved that our customers understood technology and wanted to send us the video feedback. It was a very relevant piece of information. We used the videos a lot of time to emphasize the specific points or parts of the customer journey. We do analysis of the customer experience. We talk to the customers to understand what can be done to improve the experience… But when I play the videos, and show them what the customer said, it makes it all so real. You can’t argue with the customer from that perspective,” added Christina.
Christina mentioned how they use the customer video feedback to encourage the field agents– it kind of cross-overs to the EX part as well.
Stanford Health Care
Stanford Health Care is the Healthcare Breakthrough Artist Winner at X4 Summit. Stanford Health Care improved the overall patient experience delivery to its customers. It recorded a 200% increase in patient reach and a 10% increase in patient response rates for surveys. Qualtrics transformed its patient experience program by addressing the challenges across its overall patient journey, bringing the focus to experience transformation by closing the loop with patients in real-time interactions. This helped the organization in building an action-centric culture across the healthcare system.
Qualtrics has helped Stanford Health Care improve the patient experience. To understand how, I spoke to Alpa Vyas, Vice President and Chief Patient Experience Officer at Stanford Health Care during the event. Alpa explained the patient experience industry has evolved drastically in the last few years. “Roles like mine –the “Chief Patient Experience Officer” probably didn’t exist in most hospitals or health systems a decade or decade-and-a-half ago. The fact that now there are more of us, I think it really speaks to the importance of bringing the patient’s voice, and perspective into the work that I do around improvement, quality, and engagement of our people and how their interactions can impact the patient experience. Organizational leadership has emphasized this in the last few years. More recently, there have been a lot of conversations about how we evolve our tools and the methods by which we measure the experience. We had traditional ways of measuring our CAPS program which has given us a great start. To understand the insights from a real-time perspective, we rely on experience management platforms and meet our overall objectives,” explained Alpa.
Shake Shack
Shake Shack uses Qualtrics AI-powered analytics and real-time brand tracking capabilities to capture customer insights. These insights help to deliver popular products and exceed expectations for in-shack experiences for guests. Qualtrics helped Shake Shack increase its “recommendation” quotient by 30%, landing them the X4 Summit’s Strategy and Research Breakthrough Artist Winner award.
Likewise, adidas won the Employee Experience Breakthrough Artist Award. adidas is recognized by Forbes as one of the world’s best employers and is leading globally by identifying and acting on the intrinsic link between employee experience and business outcomes. The company chose Qualtrics’ AI-powered solutions to strengthen its commitment to employee experience. Using AI, adidas is already empowering its managers at all levels to take effective action, based on feedback. Empowered with quicker insights, managers have improved their leadership capabilities to keep team members satisfied and engaged at work.
Citi, Hilton, National University, Hyatt, and the State of Missouri also shared their voice at the X4 Summit, highlighting the role of Qualtrics in improving the state of experience for businesses, employees, customers, visitors, and guests.
The C-E-Xy Suite for Organizations
Qualtrics announced major updates during the event. Most of these announcements were made on the Day 2 of the event. Qualtrics’ President of Product and Services, Brad Anderson opened up the session with a dynamic presentation that showed Qualtrics AI, Qualtrics AI, and Automated Workflows at play. Here’s a quick recap of the new AI-ladden products.
Qualtrics Assist
An inventive AI-powered personalized assistant that empowers individuals across an organization to gain actionable and immediate insights into customer and employee experiences.
Conversational Feedback
A machine learning-based feedback measurement tool to identify the fill rates of surveys in real-time.
Intelligent Summaries
A tool to auto-generate succinct and accurate overviews for managers, researchers, and customer care executives. This tool will enable faster GPT-powered responses to customer and employee feedback. The AI-generated summaries automatically extract key topics and analyze the pointers for managerial discussions.
Customer Care Assist
An advanced call analytics and contact center intelligence tool, Qualtrics Customer Care Assist is part of the XM for Customer Experience suite. It generates a personalized coaching program for contact agents based on strengths and weaknesses based on call analytics. So, Qualtrics AI, assisting humans, would tell managers how friendly and compliant their agents are, and if they need additional coaching for the upcoming calls and meetings.
You can read more about the latest innovations here.
What Could C-E-Xy Outcomes Look Like for the Organizations?
Organizations with XM strategy at the center of their operations could immensely benefit from the insights delivered by CX, EX, and market research software providers. From discovering new XM opportunities within an industry to developing a new line of products and solutions, CX + EX can drive innovations at scale.
For CHROs, the XM outcomes could look like this:
- Getting insights on where to invest for improving employee experiences and customer outcomes;
- Deciphering EX trends and using them to enhance employee loyalty and productivity;
- Finding new strategies to hire candidates, retain existing talent, and support field executives operating at different locations;
- Creating new feedback mechanisms powered by AI, computer vision, and deep learning capabilities that can solve unseen problems and challenges.
To help CHROs and HR professionals, Qualtrics announced many new GenAI-powered product features in its XM for Employee Experience™ suite. The new AI capabilities will enable organizations to combine attrition data with employee experience feedback, ultimately providing an insights-driven report on retention strategies that could prevent future turnover and disengagement at the workplace.
Then, there is Qualtrics Assist™– a next-gen solution for managers and leaders who require additional insights and trends analysis to understand employee sentiments. Qualtrics EX platform also delivers personalized recommendations as a response to employee feedback. This enhances employee engagement, retention, loyalty, and productivity. According to Qaultrics research, only 43% of individual contributors say they have seen positive changes in response to employee feedback. It highlights the need for specific and targeted action. These recommendations will be further improved by Qualtrics AI enriched with EX methodology, which will provide tailored guidance that evolves with team dynamics and context directly in the workflow to help managers and leaders take decisive and informed action.
This image shows why CHROs should invest in a connected XM platform.
For CMOs, the XM outcomes could look like this:
- Building efficiencies in service delivery using up-to-date technologies and social responsibility;
- Promoting next-level customer success models;
- Enhancing brand visibility through combined CX and EX goals;
- Driving employee engagement to boost frontline revenues.
Boosting XM Connectivity Efforts with Bain
Bain and Qualtrics expanded their GTM partnership to accelerate product innovations for CX and EX. This major announcement for XM leaders would allow Qualtrics to integrate its AI capabilities with Bain’s proven customer experience methodologies. Jointly, this would empower the clients to more effectively measure, manage, and improve customer and employee experiences. The integration includes moving Bain-exclusive modules directly into the Qualtrics XM Platform™ to assist organizations with a streamlined approach toward a C-E-Xy makeover. Brad Anderson, President of Product, UX and Engineering at Qualtrics said, “Qualtrics and Bain are at the forefront helping organizations across the globe unlock the significant value of customer experience, and together are uniquely positioned to help organizations deliver greater impact in today’s AI world.”
Rob Markey, a partner at Bain & Company and a leader in the firm’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice added, “Bain research has shown that enduring loyalty leaders—companies that lead their industries in Net Promoter Score® or satisfaction rankings for three or more years—grow revenues more than twice as fast as their industry peers. By combining Qualtrics’ outstanding experience analytics software, Bain’s customer strategy expertise, and both firms’ extensive AI skills, we will continue to create innovative delivery approaches to help our clients deliver more value to their customers, grow the value of their customer base, and set new standards of customer-centric excellence.”
Making the Right XM Connections with AI
Poor customer and employee experience can negatively impact relationships with the organization after just one negative interaction. According to a recent Qualtrics XM Institute research, “bad customer experiences lead directly to lost revenue, and just one negative interaction can result in losing a customer and their potential spending in the future.” Using AI, companies can prioritize providing highly personalized support to improve customer experience through their frontline employees. AI tools for CX and EX, enable companies employees to reduce friction and enhance the productivity of their frontline workers. While nearly two-thirds (73%) of consumers are comfortable interacting with chatbots for support, 81% of consumers seek human-only support for high-stakes decision-making for insurance, banking, healthcare, and medical issues. As organizations incorporate better AI-powered CX and EX solutions for their customer and employee interactions, the demand for a “human touch” with digitized access will garner more importance in the coming months. Organizations should take a measured step in leveraging AI for their C-E-Xy makeover to meet and exceed XM benchmarks in 2024.
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