Qualtrics targets ‘action gap’ with AI copilot

Experience management specialist Qualtrics is pushing ahead with its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, launching new features designed to close the gap between collecting customer feedback and acting on it.

The company’s latest product, Qualtrics Assist for CX, is a copilot-style tool for managers and executives who want to explore customer experience data directly. Currently in preview and expected to be generally available next quarter, it uses guided insights to allow non-specialists to ask simple questions such as, “What are the top three customer complaints?” and receive immediate, data-backed answers.

During a recent visit to Australia, Qualtrics president Brad Anderson said there is “nothing like this on the market right now”, adding that these new AI “experience agents” will allow organisations to “close the loop” on feedback every time.

The volume of experience data processed in the Qualtrics cloud – including 1.2 billion surveys a year, with an average of 14.5 questions per survey – helps the company’s experience agents understand what a customer or employee is trying to do or say and then take the right action, Anderson explained.

This can include providing guidance to a frustrated customer on a website, asking intelligent follow-up questions in a survey, or automatically generating a “make good” offer, such as bonus frequent flyer points for a high-status passenger whose in-flight entertainment system failed. Anderson said such capabilities improve survey completion rates, enhance the customer experience, and can double the number of actionable insights.

The new tool joins an existing suite of Qualtrics AI products, including Conversational Feedback for generating dynamic survey questions, Location Experience Hub for frontline workers, and the Digital Experience Analytics platform, which uses heat maps and funnel analytics to detect website issues.

Sam Ramjahn, head of solution engineering for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Qualtrics, noted that one Australian airline previewing Assist for CX reported reducing the time to understand unstructured feedback from months to hours. “There’s no point asking for feedback if you’re not going to do anything about it,” he observed.

This is a critical issue, according to Vicky Katsabaris, director of experience management strategy at Qualtrics, who said that, currently, only 10% of organisations successfully turn their experience data into actions. She added that AI makes it possible to process feedback from all channels and determine the correct action in each case, citing Adidas as an example, which discovered a link between specific employee engagement initiatives and better in-store customer experiences.

However, the launch comes as a report from Qualtrics and McKinsey revealed that many senior executives in Australia are reluctant to lead their industry in AI adoption. While 76% of Australian executives are giving greater priority to experience delivery, only 8% consider it a critical priority – a much smaller proportion than their peers in the US (41%) or the UK (32%).

Similarly, only 7% of local executives aspire to be leaders in AI adoption, compared with 15% globally, even though most believe it will significantly change their industry.

According to McKinsey partner Martin Lindquist, the stakes are high. The report estimates that organisations worldwide could gain $1.3tn in annual value by using AI to improve customer experiences, with that figure potentially rising above $2tn.

Around half of the improvement comes from increased productivity, almost a third from revenue growth, and the rest from process improvement, he explained.

Australian organisations are good when it comes to having “bold vision”, said Lindquist, but they need to redesign the experiences they provide, and that means listening to customers so they can measure and predict their customers’ needs.

“The pace of change is unlike anything we’ve seen,” he said, urging businesses to start experimenting. “Some organisations are going quite hard at it, and we’re seeing it happen quickly.”