of SAP SE Qualtrics International Inc. subsidiary today announced a new product line it says can automate the task of connecting and measuring relationships across employee, customer and brand experiences.
Qualtrics CrossXM lets organizations correlate employee experience metrics such as manager support, career development and recognition of impact on customers as measured by satisfaction scores, repeat business and more other factors.
The product responds to the growing awareness among business leaders that employee satisfaction directly influences customers. That relationship was dramatized by research by International Data Corp. last year where 85% of business leaders said that employee experience and engagement directly translates into higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue.
A survey conducted last year by Qualtrics and ServiceNow Inc. found. that 80% of customers switch brands due to poor customer experience. The issue has gained special prominence with high levels of employee turnover after the pandemic sometimes called the Great Resignation.
Qualtrics says its approach automates the typically manual process of finding connections between employees and business results so that best practices can be codified into standard, repeatable experiences. It uses a cloud-based statistical analysis engine called Stats IQ that crunches experiential data and delivers statistically valid correlations where employee experiences have the greatest impact on customer experience.
“Whenever we have a customer or employee experience that we want to understand we can take billions of data points and identify trends in vertical industries that matter most to employees,” said Brad Anderson, president of products and Qualtrics engineering.
Qualtrics cited the experience of Lumen Technologies Inc., a maker of managed technology services. Its analysis of employee and customer data found that the three factors that most affected customer satisfaction were ease of reporting an issue, high-quality communication with front-line workers and quick resolution of an issue. problem “They found that front-line workers who felt recognized and celebrated were nine times more likely to solve customer problems in one visit,” Anderson said. “They’re now putting in place celebration and recognition programs that make sure that’s true everywhere.”
Qualtrics says a rental car company, for example, could use the technology to identify correlations between an inefficient rental car acquisition process and negative brand perceptions. It can then follow up by using advertising to highlight improvements in that area. Businesses can also identify which call centers or retail stores have the most satisfied customers and drill down to find out what’s unique about those locations.
Real world testing
Correlation and causation are not the same thing, so Qualtrics says it guarded against the risk of delivering statistically significant but useless results by testing the service with more than 30 customers over the past six months. “As we returned the data without exception, they said the conclusions made sense,” Anderson said.
Qualtrics is considering publishing its findings in industry-specific reports as more data is gathered, Anderson said. “We will be releasing data on a regular basis to give managers the tools to understand how they are peering with other industry leaders,” he said.
The service will initially be provided at no additional cost to users of Qualtrics’ existing CX and EX programs. CrossXM Employee and Customer Analytics are currently available. CrossXM Brand and Customer Analytics will be available for select audiences in early 2023.