XM + CX = An Obvious Partnership

Qualtrics and Genesys just announced a new partnership, combining Qualtrics’ Experience Management (XM) capabilities with Genesys’ customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions, supporting Genesys’ vision of Experience as a Service. During a briefing with both companies, my initial reaction was, “What took so long – this is an obvious partnership.” 

According to the joint press release, “The new alliance will bring together Genesys’ engagement data, such as a customer’s previous service interactions, and Qualtrics’ experience data, or how customers felt about the service they received, to help companies to understand every factor impacting customer satisfaction in a single view.”

For those of you unfamiliar with Qualtrics, the company had its roots as a survey platform for market research, and over the years made investments to become an experience management company and the creator of the XM category. Essentially, Qualtrics helps organizations design and improve experiences using data. Over 13,500 organizations use Qualtrics to “listen, understand, and take action on experience data (X-data™) – the beliefs, emotions, and intentions that tell you why things are happening, and what to do about it.”

The company’s XM Operating System lets organizations manage their customer, brand, and employee experiences, as well as the interrelationships between them. The system focuses on three areas:

• System of collection – including surveys and the voice of the customer 
• System of intelligence – taking the data and correlating it to uncover meaningful insights 
• System of action – a no code/low code method for more predictive actions based on customer sentiment or interactions 

The goal of the Qualtrics and Genesys partnership is to drive experience management and experience service as a continuous loop in real time, helping organizations better service customers while enhancing the customer and employee experience. Contact centers amass huge amounts of customer data based on customer interactions, including demographic, transactional, and behavioral data. While contact center vendors like Genesys generally have survey tools for collecting additional customer data, Qualtrics provides real-time experience data and access to attitudinal data to create a more complete view of the customer.  

According to Qualtrics, “Our ability to improve the experience within the contact center is an important way of supporting customers at critical moments of decision.” In other words, while Genesys has insights as to what customers are doing, Qualtrics has insights into why they are doing what they’re doing, and how they feel about a company or brand and the customers’ interactions with the company. Combining these insights with service history from Genesys helps to shed light on how to improve the overall experience. The transactional and behavioral data collected from various systems are used to help make predictions and enable organizations to act on the data. 

As Genesys’ Olivier Jouve, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Genesys Cloud, explained, as part of the Genesys vision for Experience as a Service, Genesys pulls data from a variety of sources, and orchestrates the data and build models to push the next best action at the “moments of truth” in front of agents and customers, enabling organizations to act on that data.

Together, Qualtrics and Genesys can provide a holistic view of a customer’s service experience history, enabling organizations to take steps to improve the customer experience. By looking at customer sentiment over time, past service interactions, and communications preferences, Qualtrics can get insights as to how customers perceive their interactions through self-service resources, AI-powered chatbots, or customer service agents. Organizations can develop workflows, trigger actions such as next-best action, and proactively react and respond to situations. For example, if the data shows that a customer had a negative experience when interacting with an airline’s contact center, the airline can try to proactively remedy the situation by presenting an offer or giving the customer some bonus mileage points if the data shows that’s what the customer values, or those offers proved successful in other, similar engagements. Or if a customer had a negative online interaction, the information can be automatically shared with the agent, who can take steps to improve the situation, or the interaction can be routed to the appropriate team to fix the issue. 

When asked about scenarios, Qualtrics chief product officer Jay Choi provided several use cases. In addition to being used to help identify next best actions to take, the combined capabilities of Qualtrics and Genesys can be used to help agents identify cross sell and upsell opportunities, as well as suggest what offering to push at the right moment if a customer is likely to churn, making this combined offer just as compelling to Sales and Marketing centers, as it is within customer service centers.

Another use case is developing training programs based on customer feedback. For example, if call recordings show that an agent didn’t know about a promotion or the proper product technical specifications, the company can develop training programs to ensure the agents are as knowledgeable as possible.  

An auto manufacturer head of contact center and auto body claims used Qualtrics to correlate a data parts shortage with customers’ willingness to recommend. Based on the data, the company realized that by better managing their parts supply and processes they can improve customer likelihood to recommend.

The partnership spans go-to-market, marketing, and product. A Qualtrics and Genesys integration is available to customers today on the Qualtrics Marketplace and Genesys AppFoundry. 

Some relationships are a natural fit. Qualtrics and Genesys are one of those obvious partnerships.