Qualtrics says it can reliably correlate employee satisfaction with customer experience

BIG DATA

Qualtrics International Inc. today announced a new product line that it says can automate the task of connecting and measuring relationships among employee, customer and brand experiences.

Qualtrics CrossXM lets organizations correlate employee experience metrics like manager support, career development and recognition with the impact on customers as measured by satisfaction scores, repeat business and other factors.

The product responds to the growing awareness among business leaders that employee satisfaction directly influences customers. That relationship was dramatized by International Data Corp. research last year in which 85% of business leaders said employee experience and engagement translate directly to higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue.

A survey conducted last year by Qualtrics and ServiceNow Inc. found that 80% of customers have switched brands because of poor customer experience. The issue has acquired special prominence with high levels of post-pandemic employee turnover sometimes called the Great Resignation.

Qualtrics said its approach automates the typically manual process of finding correlations between employees and business outcomes so that best practices can be codified into standard, repeatable practices. It uses a cloud-based statistical analysis engine called Stats IQ that crunches experiential data and delivers statistically valid correlations of which employee experiences have the most impact on the customer experience.

“Whenever we have a customer or employee experience we want to understand we can take billions of data points and identify trends in vertical industries that are most important to employees,” said Brad Anderson, Qualtrics’ president of products and 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 impacted customer satisfaction were the ease of reporting an issue, high-quality communications with front-line workers and rapid resolution of a problem. “They found that front-line workers who felt recognized and celebrated were nine times more likely to resolve customer problems in a single visit,” Anderson said. “They’re now putting in the celebration and recognition programs that make sure that’s true everywhere.”

Qualtrics said a rental car company, for example, can use the technology to identify correlations between an inefficient rental car pickup process and negative brand perception. 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 different about those locations.

Real-world testing

Correlation and causation aren’t the same things, so Qualtrics said it has protected against the risk of delivering statistically meaningful but useless results by testing the service with more than 30 customers over the past six months. “As we brought the data back without exception they’ve said that the conclusions made sense,” Anderson said.

Qualtrics is considering publishing its findings in industry-specific reports as more data is gathered, Anderson said. “We’ll be surfacing data on a regular basis to give managers the tools to understand how they peer with other industry leaders,” he said.

The service will initially be provided at no additional cost to users of Qualtrics’ current CX and EX programs. CrossXM Employee and Customer Analytics is currently available. CrossXM Brand and Customer Analytics will be available for select audiences in early 2023.

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