Qualtrics quantifies and enhances the ‘experience economy’ in new platform
Ryan Smith, founder and CEO of Qualtrics, announces the company’s new experience management platform on Thursday, March 2, 2017.
Jamie Morningstar, staff product manager of Qualtrics, explains the customer experience section of the new Qualtrics experience management platform March 2, 2017.
Qualtrics COO Jared Smith explains the four parts of the new Qualtrics experience management platform March 2, 2017.
Jay Choi, Qualtrics head of product marketing and content, explains the employee experience part of the new Qualtrics experience management platform March 2, 2017.
Greg Laughlin, Qualtrics product manager, explains the product experience section of the new Qualtrics experience management platform March 2, 2017.
Ryan Smith, founder and CEO of Qualtrics, announces the company’s new experience management platform on Thursday, March 2, 2017.
“The experience is the marketing,” said Joseph Pine, bestselling author, at Thursday’s Qualtrics Insight Summit.
Using a simple Gumball Wizard machine, Pine explained that today’s business world centers on the experience economy. What was once a good — the gumball — has now heightened to an experience — the fun of watching the gumball whirl down a two-foot long spiral.
“Goods and services are no longer enough,” he said. “Experiences are a distinct economic offering.”
To that end, Qualtrics founder and CEO Ryan Smith announced Thursday that Qualtrics is introducing a software platform that allows businesses to manage the four vital signs of all companies — the product experience, the customer experience, the employee experience and the brand experience — or what he calls the X data. This is different from the operational data, or O data — the sales, finance and day-to-day operations numbers.
“X data is the experience data. It’s the X factor data,” Smith said. “X data is the human factor data — the beliefs, the emotion to why things are happening. And what is going to happen next. O data is about the past, X data is about the future.”
The product experience line measures how customers interact with a company’s product, how they feel about it, and why. The Qualtrics customer experience line measures how customers feel about their involvement with the product or service. This type of data has already been available in other platforms, but Jamie Morningstar, staff product manager of Qualtrics, said that their platform now can statistically represent even the comments and sentiment customers express.
Additionally, in today’s business world, employees’ opinions about their work also bleeds into the branding and customer experience. If employees aren’t ambassadors for their company, it can actually reflect on the company’s bottom line. If customers aren’t happy with the product encounter or their interaction with employees, they share that via the internet, and the brand suffers.
Years ago, companies gained customer loyalty by offering the best or most unique product or service. Businesses still must adhere to that focus today. But with the internet, the prevalence and ease of posting customer reviews, and services like Groupon, the playing field that is the global economy has been leveled.
“Every product you consume, every service you use, is an opportunity for that business to offer you an experience — to offer that product or service in the context of an experience. From a business angle, that creates customer loyalty. From a customer angle, that is money you want to spend,” Morningstar said.
As Pine explained, if companies aren’t offering distinct experiences with their products or services, they are falling behind. Before Qualtrics’ new platform, though, there was no single place to go to see in real time how all four of these vital interactions — product, employee, brand and customer experience — were affecting the company and customer.
“Now they are all here on one platform. No other platform brings all these separate technologies into a single platform,” said Jay Choi, head of product marketing and content.
Smith explained Qualtrics put five years and millions of dollars into this new platform to give businesses the power to be their own statisticians. Literally with just the push of a few buttons, managers can see comparisons of multiple layers of data and statistics with very easy to read, plain language results. This allows them, across all areas of the business, to find what Smith called “experience gaps,” and to fill those gaps.
“It’s the takeaway you’d discover only with the power of statistical analysis. And now, everyone in this room has that power,” said Greg Laughlin, Qualtrics product manager.
