Isabelle Zdatny, Head of Thought Leadership at the Qualtrics XM Institute, shares her deep expertise in customer and employee experience management. She discusses the drastic shift from annual surveys to real-time feedback, emphasizing the need for continuous insight management. The conversation highlights the vital role of AI in transforming customer experience and handling unstructured data. Zdatny also underscores the necessity of strategic planning for CX professionals to thrive in an ever-changing business landscape.
Modern customer experience management has evolved to prioritize real-time insights gathered from multiple channels, moving beyond annual satisfaction surveys.
The integration of AI-driven tools in customer experience management enhances decision-making by processing vast data and triggering timely actions based on feedback.
Deep dives
The Evolution of Experience Management
Modern customer experience (CX) management has evolved significantly from the traditional approach of deploying annual customer satisfaction surveys. Organizations now leverage a multitude of feedback channels to gather real-time insights from customers, allowing for a dynamic understanding of customer sentiment. This evolution paves the way for organizations to establish a continuous flow of insights, which can inform their decision-making processes on an ongoing basis. The goal is to shift towards embedded human empathy, where understanding customer needs becomes a fundamental part of the company's operations, rather than a separate function.
The Importance of Quick Adaptation
In today's rapidly changing business environment, organizations must prioritize the ability to quickly listen and respond to external signals. Factors such as geopolitical shifts, workplace transformations, and technological advancements, including AI, demand organizations to be agile in their operations. A strong CX framework can facilitate this adaptability by enabling businesses to 'sense' ongoing changes and 'seize' actionable insights effectively. Companies that embed real-time customer insights into their processes are better positioned to navigate disruptions and remain competitive in the marketplace.
Harnessing AI for Enhanced CX
AI is set to revolutionize customer experience management by streamlining existing processes and uncovering new insights into customer behavior. By leveraging AI-driven tools, organizations can process vast amounts of data, including unstructured feedback, allowing for faster and more informed decision-making. This technology enables the embedding of insights into day-to-day operations, triggering timely actions based on customer feedback, and ultimately improving interactions. CX professionals play a critical role by ensuring high-quality experience data is available to feed AI models, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.
If you go back in time 10 or 15 years you'll find it was common for a market research function within a company to send out a single survey each year to all customers asking about their satisfaction with the products and services they interacted with. The field has since greatly evolved as what we now call customer experience regularly receives customer feedback from multiple surveys and unstructured data, and we get that data from across multiple channels. But we still have a lot of evolution left if we want to keep up with the changes our companies are dealing with. Host Troy Powell welcome Isabelle Zdatny from the Qualtrics XM Institute to discuss the evolution of customer experience and experience management.