'Self-learning' AI big boon for Qualtrics' CX

In the ever-changing world of customer experience and retention, companies that are failing to keep pace with automation are undoubtedly going to be left behind.

Embracing the AI revolution has allowed companies such as Zip, Fonterra and Swftyx to slash the time it takes to conduct data analysis and interpretation, gain much clearer, more tangible insight into customer habits, and peer into the future of CX.

To maximise the efficiency of its CX, the use of AI has helped Qualtrics reduce inefficiencies across the customer journey, identify redundancies and significantly increase the profits of its customers.

With the assistance of Qualtrics, US lawn care firm TruGreen, whose clients include PGA Tour Golf and Minor League Baseball, boosted its annual revenue by $70 million, with a total of $500 million in additional revenue projected to be achieved within the next five years.

"TruGreen were running just surveys to understand the experience of their customers, which really only gives you a, maybe, 10 per cent view of actually what's happening across every experience, because customers are having experiences with them that aren't surveyed," said Vicky Katsabaris, Director of XM Strategy, APAC and Japan at Qualtrics.

"So, the key thing was that the CFO or the C-suite had a mandate to focus on churn, but they didn't know why customers were churning. Once they started to add in more sources of customer feedback, so they pulled in not just their surveys, but all their calls from the call centre, so they were actually transcribed.

"We took in the transcriptions of those calls, not the agent's reason that was coded in the system, but the actual conversations. That opened up all of the data that we could analyse, and then it pointed to other things being the reason for churn."

The brave new world of CX encompasses everything from hyper-personalising each step of the customer cycle and recommendations, to extracting significantly more meaningful data and insight from customer feedback, as well as vastly improving cumbersome and often frustrating chatbot experiences for customers.

AI's capability to learn from itself is only becoming stronger with time, enhancing the CX journey and furthering automation, for instance, when firms are looking to achieve better insight than the usual 'How did we do today' survey email that you receive multiple times each day, and probably rarely complete, can deliver.

Qualtrics is confident the firm is in a great position to leverage AI and emerging technology as it adapts to a new era of customer experience.

"One of the best use cases, easy to implement, is conversational feedback," Vicky said.

"So, that's still within a survey experience. With a customer, usually a survey is, 'How was your experience?' rated on a scale of, whatever the scale is, 0 to 10, or 1 to 5, and the customer gives you a score, and then there's a follow up question that's asked, 'Tell us why you gave us that score, what can we do better?'

"And, usually, the richness of that feedback is a challenge. The conversational feedback asks a follow up, and says, 'I'm sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with service. Can you tell us a bit more about that?'

"The AI then has a conversation with the customer about, tell us more about service. What we found is that we get three times more richer insights just from that one follow up, which is very targeted. Then three times more insights means more actionable feedback, giving you a better understanding of what's going on with service, for example.

"They're learning. They're learning from themselves."

Though the future of customer experience may be difficult to predict, at least for the short term, firms that are most efficient in harnessing AI and automation will enjoy the benefits, while poor execution of emerging tools has the potential to be a death knell.

"The trick is doing something with (insights), and that's the biggest challenge and roadblock so far," Vicky said.

"Being able to get richer feedback so that you then can automate some of the follow-up because customers want to be heard, you know? People want to be heard. It's a universal truth, right?

"So being able to close the loop with customers at scale is really important to delivering on that promise."

Casting its own gaze to the near future, New Zealand-based dairy exporter Fonterra will be utilising a mix of its own internal blueprint for growth and sustainability, as well as effective external CX strategies to ensure they are able to stay ahead of the curve.

"It's a big question," Tomasz Soluch, Future Insights & Innovations Toolkit Manager at Fonterra, said.

"We're all about the foresight – what will happen in the next five, ten years. I wouldn't say Qualtrics is the engine for this, that's separate for insight. That's something we are still developing.

"With foresight, we are still exploring what the insights are, so what will happen in the next two to five years. However, with foresight we are still trying to look ahead of five years, plus research… what will happen, what are the needs, what are the investments, etc."