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Qualtrics releases Experience ID customer profile platform

Qualtrics Experience ID isn't labeled as a customer data platform, but it's not far off from one, as it aggregates customer info into individual profiles.

Don Fluckinger
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Published: 06 Oct 2021

Qualtrics this week revealed the fruits of two acquisitions made earlier this year. Together, customer journey orchestration platform Usermind and conversational analytics platform Clarabridge will comprise Qualtrics Experience ID.

Experience ID features available now include customer profiles, customer segmentation across market slices such as verticals and geographies, personalization tools, automated workflows and sentiment detection. Qualtrics plans to roll out more complete features and integrations with Usermind and Clarabridge in 2022.

The $1.125 billion Clarabridge acquisition was completed October 1. Financial details of the Usermind acquisition, completed in July, were not disclosed. Qualtrics itself was acquired by SAP in January 2019 for $8 billion. SAP spun Qualtrics off last year, followed by an IPO last January that raised $1.55 billion.

That chain of events led to the release of Experience ID, which isn't a customer data platform (CDP), according to Brad Anderson, Qualtrics president of product and services. Yet it shares some common CDP features and capabilities.

Some of those CDP characteristics include data ingestion from other sources, such as CRM and HR systems of record; data aggregation into individual customer profiles for personalization; and consolidation of customer data collected from many channels such as social media, phone and text conversations. Anderson claimed the quality of Qualtrics data separates Experience ID from CDPs.

"We integrate with a number of CDPs," Anderson said. "We're different from CDPs in that that we're really focused on that experience data. We collect a unique data set, where we understand sentiment, emotion and effort."

Analytics key to Clarabridge acquisition

Clarabridge, which specialized in conversational analytics driven by natural language processing AI, brings formidable capabilities to Qualtrics -- especially in combination with Qualtrics' existing analytics -- said Harley Manning, Forrester Research analyst. It pushes Qualtrics, which made its mark with voice-of-the-customer and employee surveys, deeper into marketing technology stacks.

Qualtrics had built analytics for structured data volunteered by customers, Anderson said, while Clarabridge brings analytics for unstructured "ambient" data from channels such as phone, text, chat and social media.

The company has a growth strategy of "land and expand," Manning said, where the software takes root in an enterprise. From what Qualtrics has revealed so far, Experience ID appears to be in line with that historical approach.

"We're not just expanding, but we're literally becoming the core of all of your customer insights and driving all of the things that customer insights can drive," Manning said.

Usermind was one of a number of standalone customer journey orchestration tools; large customer experience platform vendors such as Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe offer those features, too.

Manning said standalone tools offer finer controls over orchestration, a process that analyzes an individual's customer relationship with a company to determine the best approach to maximize lifetime value, typically by recommending automated marketing promotions to induce purchases along the way.

Usermind had been one of the top standalone orchestration platforms when Qualtrics acquired it, according to Forrester's analysis, Manning said.

Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.

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