Experience Management with Qualtrics

The abbreviation XM stands for Experience Management. Interactions that people experience with a company are to be recorded by means of XM in order to predict problems, proactively prevent them, and derive opportunities for improvement.

The idea behind this is to actually leave the evaluation of these interactions to the customer, by asking them about their opinion, their feelings - in fact, their personal experience - regarding this interaction.

This is in contrast to the approach often taken by companies to draw these conclusions themselves. When companies talk about measuring customer experience, this usually means collecting data on completed actions of the customer, forming key figures, and then drawing conclusions about customer satisfaction from these.

The danger here is that the conclusions are not correct and, accordingly, the wrong measures are derived and investments are made that do not achieve their goals.

In principle, only the customer himself can provide a reliable statement about his satisfaction and the reasons for it. Qualtrics wants to give the customer this voice and make the data available to companies.

At this point, it is important to mention that Qualtrics does not only provide solutions for the Customer Experience domain. It is an XM platform, as it brings together the four relevant experience areas: Customer Experience, Employee Experience, Product Experience and Brand Experience.

It is obvious to consider the functionality of Qualtrics in the area of customer experience as a complement to the C/4 Hana suite. But the interaction with other SAP solutions will also be important here.

To make this more understandable, the terms X-data and O-data must be included. The interaction of these data has been stressed since SAP bought out Qualtrics and is valued as a driver for the Experience Economy. O-data refers to operational, historical data.

They provide information in facts about the actions of customers. O-data form the basis for operational key figures. X-data are so-called "experience data".

This means that if O-data can show what happened, X-data can explain why it happened. X-data describe beliefs, emotions and intentions.

The idea behind the added value created by the merger of established SAP solutions and Qualtrics is based on bringing together precisely this X and O data.

The O data comes from the SAP enterprise applications such as sales, finance, logistics systems or similar. The X-data can be collected and analyzed by Qualtrics.

Provided that the cooperation between the systems and the exchange of data work, the merging and joint analysis of X and O data can reveal previously unknown relationships, and the company has a chance of actually knowing how its customers act and why they act the way they do. Accordingly, targeted measures can be derived to increase customer satisfaction.

The challenge here, however, lies not only in the technical implementation, but also in defining the appropriate use cases and internalizing the fact that customer satisfaction is derived from the customer experience and that customer satisfaction has a direct and decisive influence on a company's bottom line and profitability.

Qualtrics, in conjunction with other SAP solutions, provides the right tools to make this correlation measurable and thus optimizable - in a way that was previously not possible without Qualtrics in the SAP portfolio.

Even if many customers are skeptical and experience management sometimes sounds like a new edition of customer relationship management - Qualtrics can do more.