Qualtrics Customer Experience

What is Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a powerful software platform for experience management (XM). Its main purpose is to help organizations listen to, understand, and act on feedback from customers, employees, and the market. The platform allows businesses to collect data through surveys, website feedback, social media, and other channels. It then uses advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to find important insights from this data. This helps companies improve customer loyalty, employee engagement, brand perception, and product development. Qualtrics was founded in 2002 by Ryan Smith, Jared Smith, Stuart Orgill, and Scott M. Smith. The company has headquarters in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, Washington, and serves businesses all over the world.

Qualtrics Features

Qualtrics offers a wide range of features to manage experiences across different parts of a business.

• Omnichannel Experience Management: Collect feedback from every customer touchpoint, including email, web, mobile apps, social media, and call centers. This gives you a complete 360-degree view of the customer journey.
• AI-Powered Customer Surveys: Build and customize surveys with an easy-to-use editor. The platform's AI, called Qualtrics AI, can help you design better questions and analyze open-text feedback automatically to understand sentiment and intent.
• Website & App Feedback: Capture real-time feedback directly from your website or mobile application. This includes direct comments from users as well as behavioral data like 'rage clicks' to identify points of frustration.
• Digital Experience Analytics: Monitor how users interact with your digital properties. Track clicks, swipes, and entire user journeys to find and fix gaps in the digital experience.
• Contact Center Analytics: Analyze conversations from your contact center, including calls and chats. Use AI to understand customer emotion, effort, and intent to improve agent performance and customer satisfaction.
• Quality Management & Compliance: Automatically score 100% of agent interactions against quality and compliance standards. This helps identify coaching opportunities and reduce business risk.
• Agent Coaching: Provide agents with real-time, personalized feedback and coaching plans based on their performance. This helps improve their skills and engagement.
• Location Experience Hub: Gather and analyze feedback specific to physical locations like stores or branches. This empowers local managers to make improvements that build customer loyalty.
• Online Reputation Management: Monitor and respond to online reviews from a single dashboard. Use AI-generated response suggestions to manage your brand's reputation efficiently.

Qualtrics Pricing Plans

Qualtrics pricing is customized based on the needs of each organization. They do not offer standard public pricing tiers. Instead, they provide a quote after a consultation or demo. The plans are flexible and scalable, designed to fit different business sizes and requirements.

• Solutions for Small Businesses: Tailored packages that provide essential tools for feedback collection and analysis for smaller teams.
• Solutions for Mid-size & Enterprise: Comprehensive plans that include the full suite of XM products, advanced analytics, AI capabilities, and integrations. These plans are designed for large organizations that need to manage complex customer and employee experience programs.

The final price depends on factors like which products you choose (CustomerXM, EmployeeXM, etc.), the number of users, the volume of responses or interactions, and the level of support required.

Qualtrics Free Plan

Yes, Qualtrics offers a free account that allows users to access the core survey platform. This is a good way to explore the basic functionalities of the tool. The free plan typically includes:

• The ability to create a limited number of surveys.
• A set number of questions per survey.
• A cap on the number of responses you can collect.
• Basic reporting and data analysis tools.

This plan is ideal for students, academic researchers, or small projects. For more advanced features, higher response limits, and access to the full Experience Management platform, a paid plan is necessary. They also offer free trials of their more advanced products upon request.

How to use Qualtrics

Getting started with Qualtrics involves a clear workflow for gathering and acting on feedback.

1. Create a Project: After signing up, you start by creating a new project. This could be a customer satisfaction survey, an employee engagement study, or a website feedback collector.
2. Design Your Survey: Use the intuitive drag-and-drop editor to build your survey. You can choose from many question types, add logic to show or hide questions based on previous answers, and customize the design to match your brand.
3. Distribute Your Survey: Share your survey through various channels. You can send it via email, embed it on your website, create a QR code, or post it on social media.
4. Collect Responses: As people respond, the data is collected in real-time within your Qualtrics dashboard.
5. Analyze the Data: Use the built-in reporting tools to analyze your results. You can view data in charts and graphs, filter results, and use the Text iQ feature to analyze open-ended text comments.
6. Share Insights and Take Action: Create dashboards to share key findings with your team. Use the insights to make data-driven decisions to improve your customer or employee experience.

Pros and Cons of Qualtrics

Pros:

• Comprehensive Platform: It is more than just a survey tool; it's a complete experience management platform for customers, employees, products, and brands.
• Powerful Analytics: The AI and analytics capabilities are very advanced, allowing for deep analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data.
• High Customization: The platform is highly flexible, allowing you to create very specific and complex feedback programs.
• Scalability: It is built for large enterprises and can handle massive amounts of data and complex organizational structures.
• Strong Security: Qualtrics offers enterprise-grade security and compliance features, which is important for large companies.

Cons:

• High Cost: It can be very expensive, making it inaccessible for many small businesses.
• Steep Learning Curve: While basic surveys are easy to create, mastering the advanced features requires significant training and time.
• Complexity: For simple survey needs, the platform can be overly complex and overwhelming.
• Sales-driven Process: Getting started often requires speaking with a sales representative, which can be a slow process.

Qualtrics integrations

Qualtrics integrates with a wide variety of business systems to help you connect experience data with operational data. This allows for a more complete view of your business.

• Salesforce: Sync feedback data with customer records in Salesforce to give your sales and service teams a deeper understanding of customer health.
• Adobe Experience Cloud: Combine customer feedback with behavioral data from Adobe Analytics for a full picture of the digital customer journey.
• Microsoft Dynamics: Integrate survey data directly into your CRM to personalize customer interactions.
• Slack: Set up workflows to send real-time notifications to Slack channels when specific feedback is received, such as a poor customer review.
• Zendesk: Create tickets in Zendesk automatically based on survey responses to ensure customer issues are addressed quickly.
• Marketo: Use feedback data to create smarter segments and trigger personalized marketing campaigns in Marketo.

Integrations are typically configured within the Qualtrics platform, often requiring administrative access to both Qualtrics and the other application.

Qualtrics Alternatives

• SurveyMonkey: A popular survey tool that is generally easier to use and more affordable than Qualtrics. It is excellent for straightforward surveys and market research but lacks the comprehensive experience management capabilities of Qualtrics.
• Medallia: A direct competitor to Qualtrics in the enterprise customer experience market. Medallia also offers a powerful platform for capturing and analyzing customer feedback across multiple channels. The choice between them often depends on specific business needs and pricing.
• Forsta: A strong platform for market research, customer experience, and employee experience. It is known for its powerful multi-channel data collection and analytics, making it a good alternative for research-focused organizations.
• Gainsight: This platform is focused more on Customer Success management. While it has feedback features, its main strength is in managing customer health, lifecycle, and retention, making it a different but related alternative.

Qualtrics API

Yes, Qualtrics provides a comprehensive set of REST APIs that allow developers to integrate the platform with other systems and automate workflows. The API lets you manage surveys, distribute them, retrieve response data, manage users, and much more.

To use the API, you need to generate an API token from your Qualtrics account. You can find this in your Account Settings under the Qualtrics IDs tab. This token must be included in the header of your API requests for authentication.

Here is a simple example using cURL to list all surveys in your account:

curl -X GET \
  'https://yourdatacenterid.qualtrics.com/API/v3/surveys' \
  -H 'X-API-TOKEN: your_api_token'

Replace yourdatacenterid with your organization's specific datacenter ID and your_api_token with your actual API token. You can find extensive documentation and guides on the Qualtrics developer portal.

Qualtrics Affiliate program

Qualtrics does not offer a traditional public affiliate program where individuals can sign up to earn commissions for referrals. Their business model is focused on direct sales and strategic partnerships.

However, they have the Qualtrics Partner Network (QPN), which is designed for consulting firms, marketing agencies, and technology companies that want to build solutions or services around the Qualtrics platform. This program involves a more formal partnership to help joint customers succeed. If you are interested in becoming a partner, you should visit the partner section on their website and contact their partnership team directly to discuss opportunities.