Qualtrics, a popular customer experience management platform, is touting several new AI features in 2024.
Leveraging what the company describes as “the world’s largest database of human sentiment,” backed by a commitment to invest $500 million in AI, Qualtrics has been turning advances in generative AI into new capabilities to improve customer and employee experiences.
Brad Anderson, president of product, user experience and engineering at Qualtrics, said at a conference in Sydney in July 2024 that he expects AI to fundamentally change the value its software provides to customers. Anderson said the software will do this through a range of new AI features that accelerate access to insights from an organization’s customer data.
Qualtrics to launch generative AI-powered features in 2024
Qualtrics will be launching several new AI features across its product suites in 2024.
New AI features include:
Qualtrics Support: Qualtrics’ own version of a “Copilot,” the Qualtrics Assist feature, enables an organization to query specialized AI models trained on customer data using natural language questions. It is backed by the Qualtrics customer and employee dataset. Qualtrics Assist capabilities will be integrated across all Qualtrics product suites.
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Conversational feedback: Adding a new dimension to customer surveys, the conversational feedback feature will allow survey responses to be analysed in real-time and generate more questions for customers. This will help organisations to get more specific feedback from customers.
Smart Summaries: Qualtrics offers customers the ability to turn large amounts of customer data or employee feedback into concise, simple summaries for teams or managers to analyze data, deliver insights, and provide recommendations.
Automated Workflows: Users can automatically trigger GPT-powered actions on the systems their teams use, enabling greater automation of customer service workflows.
Qualtrics Product Packaging and Pricing Changes in 2024
In March 2024, Qualtrics announced it would streamline the packaging and pricing of its traditional products. The company came to market in 2024 with just three suites (customer experience, employer experience, and strategy and research), each consisting of three products.
Customer Experience
Qualtrics’ customer experience suite aims to help customers deliver better experiences across all physical and digital touchpoints, including contact centers, websites and mobile apps, and physical stores. Features include online reputation management and customer experience analytics across all channels.
Employee Experience
The Employee Experience Suite is designed to help with workforce engagement, manager effectiveness, and HR decision making. Features include employee engagement surveys, employee lifecycle improvement tools, and people analytics, including workforce attrition drivers and their prediction.
Strategy and research
The Strategy & Research Suite enables clients to conduct qualitative and quantitative research to support product design, market share growth, and brand health. Features include research and analytics tools, product usability and concept testing, and brand health tracking.
Consumption-based pricing
Customers who purchase access to one of Qualtrics’ product suites will have access to all products and capabilities within that suite for unlimited users, following a shift to consumption-based pricing. This will allow customers to “scale up” or “scale down” their use of the platform as needed. The amount a customer pays is based on the number of interactions they have with the platform.
The 3 Qualtrics AI Features That Are Likely to Be Adopted First
Qualtrics expects customers to focus on adopting new AI capabilities for internal use cases first. This allows them to build confidence in generative AI outcomes before deploying use cases for external customers, where customers perceive the brand risk to be higher.
Improve surveys and survey data with conversational feedback
Conversational surveys that can extract more specific, useful and actionable data from customers using generative AI are likely to be widely adopted. Anderson said many organizations are already conducting surveys, but they also want better data, making the new feature practical and useful for customers.
“When customers complete surveys, they have to click the ‘Next’ button,” he said. “On average, that button is clicked 50,000 times per minute in Qualtrics, and at the peak it’s clicked 300,000 times per minute. Each of those times is a back-and-forth iteration with our AI to understand whether the answer needs to be clarified.”
Provide leaders and employees with access to customer experience data
Customers will be able to convert the rich data dashboards they’ve created with Qualtrics data into natural language that anyone in an organization can understand. This helps democratize data beyond data teams and eliminates the need to manually create summaries.
“Our generative AI automatically creates those [manual summaries]“You can print it out as a PDF, as a Word document, and it has all the recommendations, all the insights, all the voice of the customer excerpts. It will be widely adopted because it is internally oriented and puts AI to work.”
Helping managers manage their teams with employee data
A manager assistance feature will allow managers to query Qualtrics AI to find insights, such as how their team is feeling or what their direct reports want a manager to improve. Managers can ask AI for recommendations on what to prioritize to improve their management.
“It can be discussed by a CEO, the data analytics team, or a front-line manager,” Anderson explained. “Front-line managers are often new managers trying to figure out what it means to be a good leader and manager. It’s like having a full-time coach sitting next to you.”
How two customers are using Qualtrics right now in the region
Singaporean telecom company StarHub and Australian travel agency Flight Centre have announced new use cases for the Qualtrics platform in 2024.
StarHub in Singapore
StarHub, a telecommunications, entertainment and digital services provider in Singapore, has selected Qualtrics to help it identify and bring to market new, optimized products, services and experiences. This effort is part of StarHub’s strategic transformation initiative, which aims to save $500 million and increase revenue by fiscal year 2026.
StarHub’s use cases include using real-time, multi-channel insights to better understand customers, improve customer service experiences, and be more accurate and efficient in decisions. StarHub says it plans to use Qualtrics to adapt to new consumer behaviors and launch new product offerings.
Flight centre in Australia
Flight Centre is one of the first organisations in Asia Pacific to implement AI-powered conversational analytics and natural language processing upgrades from Qualtrics, helping it analyse and respond to millions of structured and unstructured customer feedback.
With Qualtrics, Flight Centre listens to and analyses customer feedback across channels including email, chat, messaging, social and online reviews, traditional surveys and more. It can also understand the emotion, intent, preference and effort behind brand interactions.
What is the vision for the Qualtrics product in 2024 and beyond?
Qualtrics aims to use its AI strategy and new capabilities to dramatically increase value for customers. Brad Anderson said AI has the potential to “fundamentally change the value that experience management produces,” helping to bring about transformative change to the market.
Any new value will be based on data that Qualtrics can use to build generative AI models. The firm has 20,000 customers, including 91 Fortune 100 companies. Its data set includes 10.4 billion conversations (most of them call center phone calls), as well as 7.8 billion surveys.
“We believe we will increase the value we bring to organizations tenfold in the coming years,” Anderson said.
