Research from Qualtrics XM Institute shows that organisations risk losing US$3.7 trillion ($4.97 trillion) each year due to poor customer experiences. A single negative interaction can result in losing customers and their future spending potential. Additionally, timely service recovery is difficult because only one-third of consumers provide direct feedback when they have a bad experience with a company.
Moreover, many frontline workers — cashiers, bank tellers, and restaurant servers — lack the tools to perform their jobs effectively. According to Qualtrics XM Institute, these workers have the lowest morale compared to other employees and feel unsupported in their roles.
How can experience management solutions help frontline employees provide better customer experiences?
Building emotional connections
“Organisations need to move from the traditional siloed feedback system to a world where all forms of listening (from call centres, social media, surveys, etc) run on a single connected system to get a holistic view of the customer. [This will enable experience management to become] more adaptive, dynamic and a self-tuning system of action, to ultimately help humanise businesses,” says Zig Serafin, CEO of Qualtrics. He was speaking at the company’s X4: The Experience Management Summit in Sydney last month.
He emphasises the need to “deeply understand customers” and set “emotional connection” as the overarching goal. According to the Harvard Business Review, emotionally connected customers are 25% to 100% more valuable in revenue and profitability than those who are only highly satisfied.
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AI, he adds, can help organisations better connect emotionally with customers. “Combining experience management with AI will help organisations be far more human. With AI-driven experience management, organisations can glean deeper insights from customer feedback, including indirect comments (such as customers saying on social media that they have repeatedly attempted to complete a task) and behaviours like rage-clicking on the website to indicate frustration. Those insights can foster connections with customers while making every customer feel exclusive. In short, AI can drive the ability to activate action more quickly, effectively and in a scalable manner,” says Serafin.
For example, Flight Centre — a travel retailer and Flight Centre Travel Group’s flagship brand — uses Qualtrics AI to enhance customer experience and agent productivity. It uses purpose-built, AI-powered, advanced conversational analytics and natural language processing capabilities to listen and analyse customer feedback across structured and unstructured channels, including emails, chat, messaging, social and online reviews and traditional surveys. Consequently, it can better understand the emotion, intent, preference and effort behind every engagement.
Flight Centre also better understands the experience and sentiment across the customer journey and around key buying decisions, such as service and product quality, price, point of sale, trip experience and travel experience. The customer experience-specific insights enable Flight Centre to custom-craft and deliver tailored experiences addressing customers’ unmet needs and points of friction. This creates opportunities to enhance the customer experience in the moments and channels that matter.
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“While the needs, expectations, and behaviours of travellers continue to change at an accelerated rate, Flight Centre can deeply understand and respond to their needs better than ever with Qualtrics. Listening and responding to feedback has always been critical to our team, and with the new capabilities, we’re able to uncover even more actionable, specific insights that can help us deliver greater services, experiences, and products for our millions of customers,” says Andrew Stark, Flight Centre’s global managing director.
AI-enriched innovations
Powered by Qualtrics AI, the Qualtrics platform builds a picture of every customer relationship so that organisations can truly understand the voice of the customer and get the full picture of where to make improvements.
To help organisations further strengthen their connection with customers, Qualtrics recently announced AI-enriched innovations that address some of the old limitations of working with experience data. They include:
- Qualtrics Assist. It is an AI agent that allows everyone in an organisation to get deeper, actionable, and immediate insight into the customer experience by asking simple, natural-language questions about their feedback through an interactive dashboard.
Qualtrics Assist is uniquely tuned to understand customers, prospects and employees and transform complex data into clear and simple insights, recommendations, and suggested responses. It can automatically trigger actions and workflows based on proven experience management data and methodology to seamlessly improve experiences and inform decisions by predicting trends and simulating impact on business outcomes.
- Conversational feedback, which uses Qualtrics AI to analyse survey responses and generate real-time personalised follow-up questions. Qualtrics uses context from the answers provided to identify incomplete responses and prompt respondents to offer more specific and actionable answers. This gives organisations robust customer and employee insights while saving time and resources.
- Intelligent summaries that instantly turn customer feedback and market research into concise and simple overviews, empowering managers, researchers, marketers and customer care agents to take effective action confidently. The AI-generated summaries automatically surface and analyse key insights, offering easy-to-implement recommendations.
- Automated workflows powered by Qualtrics AI and xFlow (an automated action engine) enable organisations to trigger GPT-powered actions in the systems their teams are using automatically, informed by precisely engineered experience management data and expert-designed methodologies from Qualtrics.
Qualtrics says these new AI-powered capabilities are purpose-built for experience management and deliver on the company’s commitment to invest US$500 million in AI innovation.
“Ultimately, we want to enable businesses to humanise and create more personal connections with customers. So we’ll continue to help brands scale [good] customer experiences by leveraging AI so that every customer feels exclusive [and valued],” claims Serafin.
More than 20,000 customers globally use Qualtrics to analyse over 3.5 billion conversations — in more than 20 languages — every year. These include Australia’s Department of Regional NSW, Jollibee Foods Corporation, Singapore’s StarHub CC3 and Vietnam’s VietinBank.
Qualtrics holds an extensive database of human experience data featuring over 15 billion experience profiles. These profiles track sentiment, satisfaction, effort, engagement, expectations, and preferences throughout the customer and employee journey. Companies using Qualtrics have found that they can more effectively and promptly identify and address unmet needs and points of friction for both customers and employees.
