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CX and UX—customer experience and user experience—are acronyms for hot software functions that enterprises are scrambling to add into their systems in 2017.
One can imagine that when Qualtrics sees those two terms, it just smiles. That’s because it’s been measuring and quantifying customer experience for 15 years and helped invent the term.
The Provo, Utah-based company, which describes itself as an “experience management” provider, on July 26 announced a new predictive intelligence and machine learning engine, Qualtrics iQ. The cloud-based service is similar in style to IBM Watson and can process massive amounts of text in seconds, is capable of deep statistical analysis, and makes predictive recommendations.
Analytics for Non-Specialists
Unlike Watson, however, iQ is available to individual CX practitioners and is designed for use by non-technical line-of-business users. Not that the company doesn’t like analysts or data scientists, is just that it knows most small or mid-range companies can’t afford such highly paid experts.
“The key piece for us is that there are tons of different organizations that measure things about a company, but measure them in silos,” Qualtrics Vice-President of Global Insights Mike Maughn told eWEEK. “For example, there have been some airline issues lately, where the product has had some issues, and they haven’t been handled as well as some would have liked. That led to employee experience problems, when things were not applied perhaps appropriately—which led to customer experience problems, which led to massive devaluation of the brand, and brand impact.
“Just shows how those four (silos) fit together.”
Qualtrics’ CX platform triangulates silos like these and comes up with high-level reports on customer experience that executives can understand and use to head off similar future problems before they happen.
Started at BYU as Customer Survey Service
Qualtrics, which started in 2002 at Brigham Young University as a customer survey platform, has continued to evolve over time. By launching Qualtrics iQ, the company is taking a major step toward allowing organizations to engage in conversational, non-intrusive feedback with customers due to the power of machine learning and predictive intelligence, Maughn said.
Qualtrics iQ is like IBM’s Watson, processing massive amounts of text in seconds, capable of deep statistical analysis, and making predictive recommendations. Unlike Watson, however, iQ is available to everyday CX practitioners, and does not require technical expertise.
Qualtrics iQ is comprised of three core components: Stats iQ, Text iQ and Driver iQ, and has been tested by about 200 clients in a pilot launch. Together, the three enable organizations to instantly process millions of response records, including open text feedback fields. It automatically prioritizes the most impactful experience drivers by automating advanced correlation and regression analysis.
The service allows organizations to automatically identify trending topics, statistically validate key drivers and identify the appropriate statistical tests and models, processing results in easy-to-understand terms.
Designed to eliminate time-consuming, manual data processes, Qualtrics iQ eradicates the tasks of sorting through open text feedback, performing complex statistical analyses, and identifying key drivers deep in data. Like Qualtrics’ XM Platform, iQ uses drag-and-drop functionality.
More details of Qualtrics iQ:
Qualtrics Text iQ: Uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to analyze open text feedback and surface trends in data. It automatically groups responses by suggesting relevant or related topics, and assigns sentiment scores to individual text comments (positive, negative, neutral or mixed). Text iQ helps identify emerging issues, immediately identifies areas of improvement and helps monitor improvements over time.
Qualtrics Driver iQ: Automatically helps organizations statistically identify key experience drivers deep in their data and prioritizes key driver variables so organizations know where to focus their efforts for the biggest impact. Driver iQ provides real-time filtering so every individual in the organization knows exactly what the biggest improvement opportunities are specific to their domains.
Qualtrics Stats iQ: Makes advanced statistical analysis accessible for the average user by providing automated and instant data analysis, all within the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform. There is no need to export the data or massage it in another software to gain insights. Stats iQ automatically chooses the appropriate statistical analyses for your data, then translates the results into plain English. The various advanced data analytics functions include relate, univariate, bivariate, crosstabs, regression and modeling.
Qualtrics iQ is now available as part of the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform. For more information, go here.