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Qualtrics adds BrandXM experience management tool
Qualtrics adds Brand Impact Simulator, which BrandXM users can use to model how changes in a customer experience might entice new customers to make purchases.
Qualtrics will release a new tool for BrandXM users -- Brand Impact Simulator -- in September to model experience management changes and offer users insights on how prospective customers would feel about them.
A BrandXM user might wonder, for example, how lowering shipping charges, offering no-questions-asked returns or driving awareness about lesser-known products might induce potential customers to make a purchase. Brand Impact Simulator statistically analyzes detailed survey data from panels -- groups of prospective customers -- and gives end users the ability to perform their own data cuts and build dashboard views.
While this capability is something several voice of the customer vendors already offer, Forrester Research analyst Harley Manning said that Qualtrics is known for solid implementations.
"What Qualtrics tends to do really well is put a sexy name on something, market it well, and end up owning it in the marketplace," Manning said. "That's what I expect that they'll do here, too."
Qualtrics expands experience management footprint
In recent years, Qualtrics divided its experience management, or "XM" tools into four categories: customer, product, employee and brand experience.
The difference between them is who's filling out the surveys. The difference between customer experience and brand experience, for example is that Qualtrics customer experience tools measure feedback from a user's existing customers, and brand experience focuses on collecting data from non-customers to gain insight on what experience attributes would get them on board as new customers.
"It really helps you get to know all of those non-customers," said Paul Sheets, general manager and senior vice president of Core XM and brand experience at Qualtrics. "Let's face it, even market leaders may only have a 20% or 30% market share. There's tremendous value in understanding the non-customer."
Planned Clarabridge acquisition may figure in future features
In late July, Qualtrics entered a definitive agreement to acquire Clarabridge, a conversational analytics platform, for $1.125 billion in stock. Clarabridge built its AI tools from its proprietary natural language processing engine to analyze customer feedback from channels diverse as social media, email, support calls, chats and product reviews.
When the acquisition deal closes -- likely in the fourth quarter of this year -- Qualtrics will have more advanced tooling with which it could enhance Brand Impact Simulator, Manning said. It's relatively simple to survey current customers and ask them what they want more of, but once users start looking at sources beyond surveys, it gets more complicated.
"To get insights at scale without having to survey people, [you could] use data from social media and contact centers -- two great sources of free information -- that you ran through Clarabridge," Manning said. "You might find that people want stuff that you didn't know they wanted, or that something is more important than what people said it was [on surveys]."
Brand Impact Simulator will be available to Qualtrics BrandXM customers at no additional charge.
Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.
