Why AI and teamwork are the future of experience management

The Qualtrics X4 summit in London is Europe’s largest gathering of experience leaders and in 2023 it welcomed more than 1,000 delegates. Among them was Brad Anderson, president of products, UX and engineering for Qualtrics.

Anderson joined Qualtrics from Microsoft where he was responsible for the development of Microsoft 365, among other products. Now at Qualtrics he drives the development – and future – of one of the biggest platforms in experience management (XM).

In this interview he tells CX Network about the job functions, data sets and technological capabilities that are on track to transform XM and CX.

CX Network: You joined Qualtrics in 2021. What drew you to the role and what is your outlook for CX?

Brad Anderson: Most times in our careers we are polishing the existing rocks, if you will. The business mission at Qualtrics that was super interesting for me was to come and help create a new category – it is rare you get to do that. It is actually a personal mission as well, Qualtrics was founded in my hometown of Provo, Utah, and almost the entire engineering team is in Seattle, where I lived for the last 20 years, so I get to help build a company in the two places I call home.

If you look historically at the way CX programs have been run, it is a very small team of data scientists and analytics people but it is a small percentage of the people in a company. Probably one of the largest retailers on the planet, with 400,000 employees serving 50 million households, has five people on its CX team and four on the EX team. These nine people are charged with understanding the employee and customer experience.

Where I am going to take XM is that we are going to put it in the hands of everybody who interacts with customers.

Think about the frontline in a hospital, a hotel, someplace that does F&B, the frontline where people are calling a call center. We have to bring all those experiences together because right now the digital experience, the digital frontline is always a different team to the customer care or the frontline team.

It is clear customers have very disconnected experiences and you can see it when you jump from a chat to a phone, the first thing a customer has to do is repeat their entire history about what they are trying to solve. The way to create that is through the individual profile we create for every customer and every employee for each brand.

It is called Experience ID and whether it is a human interaction or a digital interaction, it allows us to store that history. That is where I think we need to head.

The second thing is to help organizations to understand they cannot run these programs in the disconnected way they have. When I talk to most enterprises, we discover they have 25 different ways or more that they are trying to listen in and understand customers and in addition, they are all siloed.

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CX Network: Can you share an example of how this has worked for one of your customers?

Brad Anderson: At the conference here in London, we shared the story of Adidas and it is profound.

Conceptually, everyone believes happy employees deliver better customer experiences, but the question always becomes how to prove it.

Adidas saw that 20 percent of its stores had double the average transaction size of the other 80 percent. They brought us in and we grouped their EX and CX data together and identified the specifics in the employee experience in the 20 percent that were driving the increased customer transcactions. The secret to achieving that was cross-XM and bringing everything together.

CX Network: Given the recent developments around the use of AI in CX and drawing on your experience at Qualtrics, Microsoft and Novell, how do you see AI being used in future and what does Qualtrics have planned?

Brad Anderson: We are going to see artificial intelligence (AI) built into everything and it is just going to become ubiquitous. For example, the dashboards we build for customers today are very geeky. They are built for data analysts and if you put those in front of an executive or business leader, they get lost. Think about us giving them a chat experience where they can ask “what should I know about this data?” “What actions should I take on this data?” “Give me a bar chart of this”. You then start to enable a business leader to approach all this data that we collect in our CX programs and make it usable for everybody. That is going to be one of the first things you see.

CX Network has written about channel mixes and channel preferences changing between generations and it is true that Gen Z do not want to do things on email, they want video and channels that are different to what the previous generation wanted.

One of the first places you will see us bringing a ChatGPT integration in, is we have an ability to collect qualitative videos, the summation of the feedback of a conversation that will be facilitated by ChatGPT.

Another example is that many customers run tens of thousands of different research projects on our platform every year, we have never had a way to search all that research and data that a company has done on our platform. Semantic search using ChatGPT and that natural language understanding is going to put data in front of those leaders.

Whether it is product research, CX research, not just being able to have a conversation to search the data you have collected and analyzed on our platform, but importing from other data sets and making it searchable across all of that.

If we think of the call center – the human frontline – they are stressed, they are often not treated very well by some customers and there is incredible turnover of 30 to 40 percent. But we can help them feel more confident by telling them the next action they should take. We can listen into the call and then in real time tell them their next best action. We will make the experience better for both the customers and employees and that will lead to greater loyalty and revenue.

Those are some easy examples, but it is going to be everywhere.

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CX Network: If more people in an organization can understand and act on CX data, how do you see this expanding CX teams? What kinds of job profiles could we see being incorporated in the CX function?

Brad Anderson: Often, the people who are the CX leaders are from the strategy and insights team who started to use tools such as these 10 years ago. I see a lot of people who started in product, brand and research, they are moved into CX roles because they understand research and increasingly, we are seeing them move into the data science and people analytics teams for EX.

The broader trend I see is that organizations are realizing they need to bring together the different teams that holistically create the frontline. The digital experience is often engineering and marketing, the customer care team falls under the COO and the research team, a lot of the time, is in the CMO organization. The organizations that are the leaders in CX are bringing those together to have a modern COO or CMO, who is accountable for the entire end-to-end CX.

We want to break down the silos but you need to do that within your organization, too. If you have these teams reporting to disparate leaders, there is no way it ever comes together in a unified way.

That is the biggest trend I see and that then drives consolidation in the organization and they want fewer vendors to better integrate and action the data.

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CX Network: The vendor point is very interesting. Our Global State of CX research for 2023 found that our network members see the integration of old, new and disparate technologies as one of their greatest challenges. Could that soon be solved?

Brad Anderson: Fifteen years ago when I was at Microsoft working on Office 365, we saw an incredibly fragmented market and enterprise customers would need 50 different products for managed security. We consolidated all those into the Office 365 platform.

Today, the same is happening in CX and XM that happened then in managed security. What I’m feeling right now with XM is exactly the same as back then.

I know how to do this and I know how this consolidation profoundly impacts the customer experience, and that is where we are heading.

CX Network: There is a huge amount of data being generated by customers and as we have mentioned this can provide a lot of insights when mined that can inform the entire business. How do you think the increased availability and volume of customer data will change the role and status of the CX professionals, from director to agent level? Do you believe AI could be a catalyst for elevating the status of CX in future?

Brad Anderson: I do think AI elevates the status of CX, because historically CX programs have been after the fact, after the transaction and after the interaction – sometimes days, weeks or months after – and really there is no way to save a poor experience at that point.

That has been how CX programs have operated since their inception. AI allows us to now bring that into real time, we do real time interventions, we can take real time actions whether it is a digital experience or whether it is a human delivering the experience to the customer.

Also, the dataset that AI draws on will expand. We have experience data, but organizations will want to bring that experience data together with their operational data to find out what is happening and what their customers are doing, and they are also going to want to bring that together with behavioral data to find out how the customers are doing something.

If you think about this cross section of behavioral, operational data and experience data and you now have operational data saying what is happening, behavior data saying how it happening and the experience data saying why it is happening.

Those datasets will be crucial in CX and EX because that gives you the whole picture. Of the three, the most valuable one is the experience data, because it tells you why.