Qualtrics Builds New Bridges for Customer Data and Feedback: The 2021 CRM Conversation Starters

It’s been a bumpy ride for Qualtrics the past few years. In late 2018, the company was acquired by SAP for $8 billion. Then in July 2020 SAP announced that it was spinning out Qualtrics, giving it back its independence.

The company, which maintains headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has made a few significant acquisitions on its own since then. Its most recent was the purchase of Clarabridge, a provider of omnichannel conversational analytics, for $1.1 billion in late July. With the combination, organizations will be able to tune into, analyze, and act on what customers and employees are saying across channels.

For Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, the acquisition “gives Qualtrics the ability to structure unstructured omnichannel conversations and fills a gap in the Qualtrics product portfolio. Enterprise customers are looking for these capabilities and will find it helpful to have them available from one vendor.”

Forrester Research vice president and research director Harley Manning agrees. “On the surface this looks like an exceptionally good move for Qualtrics. Clarabridge is strongest in some very important areas where Qualtrics does not stand out,” he says

The Clarabridge deal came just a week after Qualtrics acquired Usermind, a customer journey orchestration and analytics provider, for an undisclosed amount.

And with Microsoft veteran Zig Serafin at the helm as CEO since July 2020, the company has also inked significant partnerships with Genesys and ServiceNow. The former will bring together Genesys’s engagement data and Qualtrics’s experience data. The latter brings sentiment data from Qualtrics into ServiceNow customer and IT workflows.

Qualtrics has also been busy on the product development front in the past year. In April it launched the Customer Care Command Center to help organizations improve agent effectiveness by tapping into the hearts and minds of customers and taking action to improve the experiences they deliver. The Qualtrics Customer Care Command Center gives every agent access to customer feedback insights and more focused coaching from managers. With a feature called Perception Gap Analysis, agents can provide their own feedback on customer interactions and identify gaps between their perception of the service delivered and the customers’ perception. Agents can also request help from managers, flag interactions they would like reviewed, or bring attention to positive customer interactions.

Also new from Qualtrics is XMOS, an operating system for experience management. XMOS is a single platform that enables companies to bring together all of their experience data, analyze it, and take action.

Qualtrics also this year launched Relational Customer Experience and Account-Based Relationship Diagnostic, which give companies a holistic view of their customer relationships; Digital Support Optimization, which helps companies deliver customer care through any digital channel; and Delighted AI, an artificial intelligence engine to automate the customer feedback process.

Qualtrics also enhanced its Qualtrics XM Platform with Trend-Based Actions, which constantly monitors key performance indicators and triggers alerts if they drop below a certain threshold; Segments, which helps companies build dynamic customer segments based on preferences, feedback, behavior, spending habits, and other indicators; Relative Importance Analysis (RIA), an analytics technique built into Stats iQ to help companies uncover key drivers and the root causes of poor experiences; and purpose-built CX products for digital interactions, customer care, account management, locations, and foundational CX.