New Qualtrics Tool Ties Employee Experience Directly to Customer

Qualtrics launched Frontline Feedback, a tool that enables customer-facing employees to share customer comments as well as their own observations about products and services. Although the feature’s part of the CustomerXM suite, Qualtrics touts its ability to engage employees by including them in discussions of customer experience.

Qualtrics calls Frontline Feedback a collaboration tool that helps the managers and executives who oversee customer experience to collect, prioritize and act on comments from both customers and workers. It does this by “putting the voice of employees at the heart of their CX program,” the company said.

In effect, the product’s designed to kill two birds with one stone: As Qualtrics notes, call center teams, retail sales people and other front-line workers are usually in the best position to observe and record customer experiences, good and bad. This makes sense: No one’s going to take more note of a buyer’s complaint than the service agent or field technician who has to receive it. The comments they provide are first-hand accounts.

So, simplifying the process of submitting feedback helps businesses by providing management with stronger intelligence. In a statement provided by Qualtrics Tim Aulph, customer care information systems analyst at North American Bancard, said Frontline Feedback allows “the employees closest to the customer to share their insights and enhance our ability to address customer needs and preferences.”

At the same time, Qualtrics said, the product will boost employee engagement by directly involving workers in efforts to improve the customer experience. It’s flexible enough to let users submit feedback through multiple channels, and includes features designed to encourage collaboration, such as subscribing, commenting and upvoting.

It also prioritizes feedback and uses text analytics to uncover insights and recommended actions to appropriate teams and project owners, the company said.

Qualtrics is Weaving Experiences Together

Combined with previous product announcements, Frontline Feedback indicates that Qualtrics, which is owned by SAP, is one of the few companies to recognize the notion of experience doesn’t abide siloes.

In December, the company launched a flavor of its EmployeeXM product that helps IT executives measure their workforce’s technology experiences. They can then use the data to close gaps and understand where to make future investments. In testing the product, Qualtrics learned that issues many IT departments consider to be little things—such as boot times, battery life and number of crashes—have a measurable and notable effect on whether workers feel valued. So, it uses employee experience data to inform technology strategies and purchasing decisions.

Now here’s Frontline Feedback, which is intended to improve the customer experience by compiling more valuable data through an improved employee experience. A better experience leads to higher engagement, and engaged employees “are 4.6 times more likely to be customer-centric compared to disengaged employees,” Qualtrics said.

When launching its new version of EmployeeXM, Qualtrics said only half of employees—compared to 90 percent of C-suite leaders—believed executives pay attention to worker needs when introducing new technology. In the case of Frontline Feedback, Qualtrics seems to be building in its own bridge of that disconnect.

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Image: Qualtrics