Experience Management With Qualtrics

In 2018, SAP bought XM platform Qualtrics, enhancing its cloud portfolio and becoming a vocal proponent of experience management in the process. But what’s really behind experience management?

The abbreviation XM stands for experience management. XM is supposed to evaluate interactions between customers and company to predict problems, suggest countermeasures and make recommendations on what to do differently next time. Experience management gives customers the opportunity to rate the interactions themselves based on their opinions, their feelings, their personal experience.

Most companies do without customer feedback. Measuring customer experience in these cases means collecting data on completed interactions with customers, define key performance indicators and draw conclusions about customer satisfaction based on these KPIs. The problem with this approach is that conclusions can be wrong, leading to wrong countermeasures and ineffective investments. Companies should follow one simple principle: Only the customers themselves can give reliable data on their satisfaction and the reasons behind it. Qualtrics wants to give customers the opportunity to voice their opinions and make the data accessible to organizations.

However, Qualtrics isn’t just a customer experience solution. It is an XM platform that connects four relevant areas: customer experience, employee experience, product experience and brand experience. While Qualtrics can be seen as an ideal addition to C/4 Hana concerning customer experience, it can also work perfectly well with other SAP solutions.

Qualtrics and SAP: Xs and Os

Since SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics, the interaction between X-data and O-data has been a focal point in discussions about the new experience economy.

O-data are operative, historic data. They contain purely factual information about customers, building the foundation for operative KPIs.

X-data are experience data. O-data show what happened, X-data explain why it happened. They contain emotions and personal opinions.

The value in connecting SAP solutions and Qualtrics is in the interaction between X-data and O-data. SAP applications, like sales, finance or logistics systems, store O-data. Qualtrics can collect and analyze X-data. Integrating the systems and exchanging the data would mean discovering previously hidden patterns, giving organizations unique insight into why customers act the way they do. Consequently, companies can take effective measures to increase customer satisfaction.

Challenges ahead

While it sounds relatively easy, there are some challenges that have to be tackled first. Technological integration is only one pain point; companies also have to define use cases and internalize that customer satisfaction is dependent on customer experience, meaning that customer experience directly influences the profitability of an organization.

Integrated with SAP solutions, Qualtrics makes this correlation measurable and therefore optimizable. While some customers may be sceptic of its capabilities because experience management sometimes sounds like a reboot of customer relationship management, Qualtrics can do so much more.