Qualtrics CEO: AI can make businesses more human

The experience management category is still relatively nascent. The first things that come to mind are employee and customer experience, but there are also product and brand experiences which are not often talked about. How is Qualtrics helping businesses better understand what experience management means and where do you see the market heading?

Zig Serafin: The common theme we see in leading companies with the highest growth and profits is that they are closer to their customers. At their core, they’re moving more quickly in how they innovate, and they have an employee base that cares more about the brand they work for. They also have a better understanding of what their customers are doing throughout the customer journey.

Those elements ultimately define brand experience and if you have a brand experience that’s tightly connected to product, employee and customer experience journeys, you will be the most profitable, highest-growth leader in your space – or you will be disrupted by someone who’s doing it better.

Most business leaders who want to be at the top of the game are asking for help. In my meetings with executives around the world, the common theme is that CEOs want to know what their peers in other industries are doing. That’s important because the real innovation is happening outside their industry, and they want to be inspired. Moreover, the customers they serve every day interact with organisations across different industries. Those customers come with an expectation that’s a function of the best brand they love, and they’ll expect you to deliver a similar experience.

Rather than take the humanity out of the way people interact with businesses, AI with experience management can help organisations be more human. With the ability to combine reasoning and inferencing logic with precision training, it can help businesses do a better job of personalising their attention to customers

What brought me to Qualtrics after 17 years at Microsoft was the power of building a technology platform, not just individual products, but an entire ecosystem of business leaders, software developers, scientists, and researchers who can innovate on one platform to completely change the way customer, employee, product and brand experience is done.

Nobody had built anything like that, and markets are starting to understand its importance because of the platform approach. We make it simple and cost-effective – you can start with a purchase that you can put on a credit card and over time as you innovate, you can start to add more functionality.

That’s partly why Qualtrics has been one of the fastest-growing SaaS [software-as-a-service] companies over the past five years. It’s about the simplicity of the platform and working on core issues that leaders care about today, which is around how experiences affect their brands. Boards and shareholders ultimately hold leaders accountable to revenue growth, customer retention and profitability at the end of the day. Those are leading indicators of what your customers are thinking and the actions they’re taking that will impact your revenue.

Assuming the business leaders you’ve spoken to buy into what you’ve said, what are the biggest challenges they are facing in experience management?

Serafin: One of the challenges is that most businesses have grown up with silos, with each department operating with their own objectives. That’s how businesses were designed. You have a marketing department, sales department, customer service department and a product development department. As companies started to adopt technology over the past 20 years, every department adopted their own technology for their particular function. That’s good because it created efficiency and speed, but the bad thing is customers see those silos.

Today, if a customer calls a call centre, it’s not because they want to talk to the call centre. It’s because there’s an issue they couldn’t resolve on their own. The issue is usually upstream from the call centre – the product organisation may have built a malfunctioning product, the billing team may have created a billing system that makes it hard to process a payment, or an employee at the store who did not understand how to best help the customer.

That’s an example of what happens when you have data and systems sitting in silos. The challenge is, how do you take a company that was designed to take an inside-out perspective to one that takes an outside-in perspective? It’s about being in your customers’ shoes and seeing what they are experiencing with your business, from the moment they are on your website or app to walking into your store, or interacting with someone on the loading dock if you’re a B2B business.

That’s a big challenge right now, and we’re changing the game on that because we can enable companies to connect those dots through a single system to understand why people are feeling the way they do, the way they interact with your business and how to take action faster to address upstream problems and root causes.

The other thing I’d say is around the old saying that if you have happy employees, you have happy customers. It’s very true and we’ve all seen that, but the problem is HR departments are being measured separately from customer experience teams. That said, we’re starting to see the inflection point where top business leaders now want to understand what they do with their people and managers, so that employees can be most engaged and productive in customer moments that matter the most.

Through our platform, we can help companies understand the factors that drive employee engagement which in turn affects customer outcomes. We do it in real-time and that’s solving a major challenge. What’s happening now is that chief people officers are partnering with chief operating officers and chief marketing officers. In fact, HR leaders are becoming one of the most important people inside a company because they are now business partners in creating a better customer experience.

What’s the typical entry point into the Qualtrics platform, if any, given that you have diverse groups of customers from different industries with different requirements?

Serafin: The entry point usually starts with a distinct business problem. The good thing about Qualtrics is that there are several entry points. One could be around strategy and research to understand what’s around the corner, where my market is going and the effect that might have on revenue, performance and market share. That leverages our strategy and research suite.

What brought me to Qualtrics after 17 years at Microsoft was the power of building a technology platform, not just individual products, but an entire ecosystem of business leaders, software developers, scientists, and researchers who can innovate on one platform to completely change the way customer, employee, product and brand experience is done

Another business problem could be around attracting the best talent amid increasing competition for talent. With our employee experience suite, we can help companies understand what drives the best candidate experience and the factors that will affect employee retention.

The third area is around customer experience where we can help companies to be more effective in how they operate call centres and understand issues that need to be addressed to drive high profit and high volume in real time. They can use parts of the customer experience suite to understand what’s going on with their website – such as having a lot of traffic but low conversion – and start to optimise the experience to drive business results.

You talked about research being one of the entry points – what about surveys which people tend to associate Qualtrics with? Do customers go to you to run a survey before you get them to see the bigger experience management story?

Serafin: Research often starts with asking the right questions at the right time and knowing who the respondent is, so it’s very different from what people have been used to. Old school surveys were basic and asked the same question of every person in the same way. Even if you answered it yesterday, you will be asked the same question one month later. Qualtrics, on the other hand, is a very sophisticated research system that’s adaptive and conversational. We can dynamically adapt questions based on how you’re responding. It’s real time and personalised.

The other way you can do research is to tap information that already exists. There are people telling a business about how they feel through social media and call centres. An employee might be in a chat group trying to solve a business problem or deal with a manufacturing issue. These are places where you can glean powerful insights that reflect the frustration and friction that exists, providing you with another source of deeper understanding.

So, Qualtrics looks at soliciting sentiment in a dynamic and conversational way and what people are telling a business without having to ask questions. We combine that data to extract powerful predictive understanding that can be used to shift the position of the business.

Qualtrics announced a $500m investment into AI last year. What sorts of investments have been made and in which areas? And how much of those AI capabilities are driving more conversations with customers than before?

Serafin: First, we’re helping companies scale experience management with AI. The way we are applying the use of AI is by infusing it into the XM operating system that we’ve built to help companies meaningfully listen, understand and act, at scale, to close gaps and create experience breakthroughs. We’ve infused AI into the system to take what you might understand about a few customers or employees and apply that knowledge, insight and action to every customer, so that the customer feels like they’re the only customer of your business.

We’re very unique and for the most part, every feature you’ll see is about helping companies know what action they can take on what’s most important, for whom, and the impact on their business. For example, you can automate certain actions to speed up processes, or suggest quick improvements for employees on how to better manage their teams. For store managers, we can offer recommendations on how to enhance store performance compared to other locations. This is how AI brings experience management to the masses.

But rather than take the humanity out of the way people interact with businesses, AI with experience management can help organisations be more human. With the ability to combine reasoning and inferencing logic with precision training, it can help businesses do a better job of personalising their attention to customers. They can make sure that the next time you land on their website, what you see is specific to what you might need. They’ll also be better at addressing an issue without you having to call the call centre.