“If you aren’t all running all of your CX on an integrated platform, you are falling behind and likely wasting time and money on problems that need to be fixed on the frontlines”

– Brad Anderson, President, Products and Engineering, Qualtrics

During the Day 2 keynote at Qualtrics X4, Brad Anderson spoke about the company’s new products and features, again reiterating the goal of having QualtricsXM integrated into enterprises around the world the same way that Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 are. Announcements centered on supporting frontline industries and workers with products that leverage Qualtrics’ AI, its enormous data collection, and its ability to tie it together to identify the levers to good experience.

Qualtrics XM for the Frontlines: “The days of having to ask for feedback are over”

Qualtrics is launching a new solution that is purpose-built for the digital, care, and frontline solutions. This introduction focuses on getting the benefits of experience management closer to the people who have the greatest ability to affect CX and EX such as contact center agents, digital teams, and people managers, enabling each to take faster action.

“The days of having to survey customers whenever we want to know about their experience are over,” said Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin. “Qualtrics is innovating to empower every organization to understand what’s going on at every stage of the journey, at every frontline touchpoint, without ever having to ask.”

These solutions have been described as using Qualtrics AI and machine learning at a human level to see where there are friction points and pain, without needing to ask, allowing the frontline to step in when the experience is happening and route the issue appropriately. This results in higher customer engagement and a reduction in the need for customer support. The workflows will integrate with the tools and systems organizations use on a daily basis including popular CRM software, email campaigns, chatbots, content management systems, call center technology, or learning management software.
The solution is live with preview customers and rolling out next month.

Frontline Care Solutions:  Frontline Agent Coaching and Frontline Team Assist

Research from Qualtrics shows that frontline care employees are being challenged with increased workloads and rude customers.  Forty-one percent feel emotionally drained from their work and about 34% of frontline employees say they aren’t even asked to provide input on improving business processes. The agent-customer interaction is crucial to experience, especially since it is sometimes the very first and only point of human contact with a company. If it is a bad experience, it has consequences. According to the XM Institute, these bad experiences cost companies an average of 8% of their annual revenue.

Qualtrics has announced two new solutions to help frontline agents provide better customer support and lower operational costs. Qualtrics can take the data from each human and digital touchpoint on the frontline and leverage Qualtrics AI to find friction points and allow real-time action and coaching that is based on sentiment, behavioral, and operational feedback.

• Frontline Agent Coaching: Provides agents post-call coaching and performance insights. Performance can be tracked across several key metrics, coaching plans can be accessed, and users can connect to the learning management system of their choice. On-the-spot rewards can be earned via the provision of great service.
• Frontline Team Assist: Captures and analyzes all an agent’s calls to provide agents and their managers a 360-degree view of their performance for more improved feedback and training. The solution leverages Qualtrics AI and natural language processing (NLP) and helps improve agent performance at scale.

“Frontline agents need every possible advantage to resolve customer issues the first time and do so in a way that builds loyalty,” said Qualtrics President of Product and Engineering, Brad Anderson. “Qualtrics is giving agents AI-powered insights and real-time coaching to resolve issues faster and with more empathy. Additionally, we’re empowering contact center managers with a personalized coaching portal so they can provide the most impactful feedback and training opportunities to get the best out of each individual.”

Frontline Team Assist and Frontline Agent Coaching are available today in private beta and will be generally available in the first half of 2023.

Two New Frontline Digital Products: Customer Journey Optimizer and Digital Experience Analytics

Qualtrics has introduced new solutions that can collect billions of data points from human and digital touchpoints such as customer service calls, website visits, or social media engagements, and layer on AI to find the largest sources of frustration and satisfaction. This allows improved prioritization of actions.

• Customer Journey Optimizer: Combines behavior, experience, and operational data to help teams take action and remove friction across any frontline journey. This is built into Qualtrics Experience ID and can quantify the revenue impact of any issue and can proactively redirect customers as needed.

• Digital Experience Analytics: Finds the meaning behind behavioral frustration signals so frontline digital teams can understand the “why” behind digital behavior. A visual replay of consumers’ behavior during their web experience can be seen, capturing key frustration signals like error clicks, rage clicks, and mouse thrashes. Qualtrics AI is used to find the most relevant session replays, so brands can prioritize actions.

Customer Journey Optimizer and Digital Experience Analytics are available in private beta today.

More is coming on the Qualtrics announcement about Manager Assist, as Dash Research interviews Wojtek Kubik, Qualtrics Head of Product Management for Employee Experience.

Partnerships: Five9, Merkle & Twilio

• Qualtrics and Five9 announced a partnership to integrate Five9’s cloud contact center solutions with Qualtrics Frontline Care. The new integration between Five9 Event Subscription Services and the Qualtrics XM Platform allows customer service teams to more deeply understand how their customers feel about a service experience, and unearth agent coaching opportunities and quality assurance issues. It also supports being able to respond more efficiently when a customer relationship might be at risk. “Personalizing customer experience is crucial with today’s consumers when it comes to brand loyalty. By combining Qualtrics’ cutting-edge natural language understanding and dynamic survey capabilities with our cloud contact center management capabilities leveraging Five9 Event Subscription Services, contact centers can leverage the data from the surveys to improve the customer experience,” says Scott Black, RVP Business Development at Five9. “Together we will help contact center teams gather higher-quality feedback and quickly and easily uncover process improvement opportunities, allowing businesses to deliver better customer service experiences.”
• Qualtrics and Merkle announced a new integration combining Merkury, Merkle’s identity resolution platform, with Qualtrics platform solutions, such as Experience iD (XiD). Merkury’s advanced identity resolution capabilities when combined with the Qualtrics XMOS will provide, enrich, and connect unified customer profiles that are based on first-party data, resulting in a deeper understanding of customer expectations and the ability to take more personalized actions.
  “Merkury’s suite of advanced identity resolution and enablement capabilities are essential in a world where consumer privacy is paramount and customer profiles are based on first-party data,” said Fabrice Martin, Chief Product Officer of Qualtrics XM for Customer Frontlines. “Our partnership will break down data silos across channels and provide the insights that brands need to deliver elevated experiences.” This integration is available as a private preview for select customers in the US.
• Qualtrics and Twilio are expanding their partnership and introducing a new no-code connector that allows real-time data sharing and integration between the Twilio Segment customer data platform (CDP) and Qualtrics’ Experience iD (XiD). “Twilio has world-class capabilities to capture interaction data and put it to use,” says Qualtrics’ Brad Anderson. “Our partnership combines the behavioral signals captured by Twilio Segment with Qualtrics XiD, providing customers with an understanding of the key factors impacting their customers’ experience by analyzing both structured feedback and unstructured feedback using Qualtrics conversational analytics.” A deeper dive is coming on the Twilio-Qualtrics partnership as Dash Research interviews Kathryn Murphy, VP, Product Management at Twilio.

Author Information

Sherril Hanson

As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.

Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.