The spread of coronavirus brought a drastic change in the way millions of people around the globe go about their daily business. While working remotely is considered standard by IT companies, doing so in such a scope and over a long time came with new problems, challenges, and a solution: Experience Management.
The sudden change from the office to a decentralized workspace like the home office caught many companies unprepared and confronted them with the need for proper digital communication solutions. This includes replacements for in–person meetings, customer visits, and ways to socialize during the pandemic. Additionally, in order to keep everyone as productive as possible in these challenging circumstances, it is crucial to have a communication channel established so any problems like missing hardware, health, or financial issues can be addressed as fast as possible.
Naturally, we have less personal contact due to the epidemic and this also affects our customer relations. Therefore, we must work even harder to stay in touch with our customers to ensure that we provide exactly what they need when they need it.
Considering these challenges, a good experience management solution is a perfect fit to keep in touch with employees and customers alike. At this point, Qualtrics, lately acquired by SAP, a long-year partner of amiconsult, comes into play. According to SAP, they see a huge potential in the combination of their operational data and Qualtrics experience data as stated in their announcement:
SAP and Qualtrics Will Together Deliver the Transformative Potential of Experience Data (X-Data) Combined with Operational Data (O-Data). – SAP News Center
What is Qualtrics
Today, Qualtrics is a well-known experience management solution that specializes in the acquisition, analysis, and presentation of experience data and is used by many big companies as well as brands. The importance of experience data (X-data) as a complement to the well-established operational data (O-data) became apparent within the last years, resulting in Qualtrics’ rising popularity.
Qualtrics enables companies and brands to continuously gather trends, moods, opinions, and all kinds of feedback which provide valuable insights, especially when combined with conventional O-data sources like sales, finance, or HR data. Thanks to these insights we can quickly detect and adapt to factors like changes in customer needs, employee attrition, or product satisfaction.
Qualtrics divides the broad field of Experience Management into four distinct pillars and provides solutions specifically designed for the corresponding audience and use-cases:
- Employee Experience (EX): Focusing on employee engagement, happiness, and feedback.
- Customer Experience (CX): Designed to ensure an accurate overview of customer needs, trust, and loyalty at all times.
- Product Experience (PX): Specialized in gathering product–specific feedback for old or potential new products.
- Brand Experience (BX): Including tools to evaluate and improve brand recognition and loyalty.
Besides the prebuilt and modifiable solutions like surveys and dashboards for these four pillars, Qualtrics provides an extensive and robust tool to create surveys and dashboards from scratch and enrich them with embedded data to fit your specific needs.
Qualtrics and Covid-19
In these times, many companies provide support to help people and other companies physically or financially suffering from the pandemic. Qualtrics is doing its part by providing a broad suite of different COVID-19 solutions. These can be simply used free of charge by utilizing the publicly available Qualtrics demo and include a wide variety of prebuilt surveys focusing on company, education, and government tasks.
The company solutions include a set of surveys that concentrate on employee wellbeing and tracking customer needs in the context of COVID-19. On the one hand, the “Return to Work Pulse” gathers feedback of your employees to ensure that they feel comfortable to get back to the office and have everything they need. This includes potential concerns, improvement ideas, and opinions. On the other hand, the “Workforce Symptom Check” as well as the “Workforce Contact Tracing” assist in minimizing the spread of the disease and trace potential infection chains. On the customer–facing side, the “Frontline Connect” and “Customer Confidence Pulse” help to continuously monitor and adapt to evolving customer expectations.
Challenges and opportunities
Qualtrics is a great tool to improve products, sales, and employee satisfaction by utilizing the insights experience data can provide. But as we have seen in our past projects, the addition of such an extensive and powerful tool to an already existing company ecosystem comes with its own manifold challenges. The most serious of them being integrations with other products, establishing running support, and proper governance to ensure data privacy and compliance with company guidelines.
As a long-year partner of SAP, amiconsult was the obvious choice for their journey of integrating the newly acquired Qualtrics product into the vast SAP ecosystem. Thanks to our expertise as consultants in the fields system and product support, identity and access management, project organization, as well as process optimization we were able to tackle all challenges along the way.
During our project, the main challenges were the following: firstly, as with other products, it was necessary to integrate Qualtrics with other systems in the ecosystem. Consequently, integrations were needed for systems managing the company user base, access rights, customer contacts, and data hubs.
Secondly, to ensure a smooth-running system and good user experience well–established support is key. Which on the one hand includes technical as well as product support teams and knowledgebases, training, and guides for thousands of inexperienced users on the other hand.
Lastly, due to the nature of Qualtrics, a lot of the gathered data will be personal data, opinions, and emotions. This in combination with today’s importance of data privacy makes central governance mandatory to ensure company regulations. Furthermore, since Qualtrics surveys represent the company to your customers, it is also very important to have a clear style and quality guidelines to ensure a uniformly good experience.
Experiences are meant to be shared, so let’s take this journey together.
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