Empathy fed to Artificial Intelligence?

[ARJUN]

SAP recently announced its intent to acquire, Qualtrics, the biggest acquisition in its four-decade history. Qualtrics has four different product offering. – Customer, Employee, Product and Brand Experience as part of its Qualtrics Experience Management Platform. Being one of the top rated customer experience management tool, Qualtrics is used to collect and analyze customer feedback which is often referred to as experience data [X- Data]. This X-Data is nothing but the momentary emotion of the customer or employee for the product or brand. Qualtrics collects this from various source like social media, through surveys, discussion boards in web, in-app, pictures, video, IoT, etc. SAP – the ERP giant, comes with gargantuan operational data. Almost 77% of world’s transactional data is touched by a SAP system. While SAP is yet to provide the product roadmap, this blog gives my view point for what this marriage between SAP and Qualtrics would mean for giving actionable insights to improve the Customer Experience(CX).

According to a CEI Survey, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. However, only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations. Wikipedia defines Customer experience (CX) as the product of Interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationships. According to Forrester: “every interaction, or touch point, your customer has with your brand. It not only includes the what’s (the interactions), but also the how’s (perceptions, feelings) the customer experiences.”

CX management is very critical for the organizations to ensure customer loyalty and retention. In this era of digital world, where instant gratification and ‘I wanted it done yesterday’ is the norm. Any delay in addressing the ‘perceived’ need of the customer, will make brands to lose the wow factor it intends to create.

‘The customer is one, regardless of devices and channels.

This is where Qualtrics brings value to the operational data power house that SAP has built over the years. Customer Experience is one of the four pillars of the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform, trusted by over 8,500 brands around the world is the most sophisticated CX platform in the industry. It includes flexible role-based dashboards, case management, full CRM integration, and a range of intelligent features built on artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics.

Customer feedback can be bucketed into two categories – Tactical Adjustments and Strategic maneuvering. While tactical one’s are for Quick wins and show stoppers; strategic maneuvering will have game changing ideas and long term suggestions. Let us see two examples – one in sales scenario and other in service scenario.

In the past, brick and mortar shops have been doing tactical adjustments based on real time feedback provided by customers. With e-commerce in foray, this real-time feedback is not fed back for actionable operational decision. For example – particular item is being returned so frequently. Once this data is obtained from SAP, based on purchase records we can find out what customers feel about that product and why they returned from various channels through Qualtrics platform. It could be product defect, delivery delay or simply over pricing. Once we get the X-Data, it will help in immediately addressing the issue. It could be getting the packaging right or setting the price right. With SAP’s intelligent suite, this could also be happening real-time with minimal manual intervention.

In the services scenario, we should be able to link the customer experience platform and employee experience platform to add value to both customer and employee. Each customer service executive will be rated based on customer feedback provided and the result is near real-time. So a bad day of Customer service agent or the Manager will not be passed on to customer. Also, it is possible to detect any red-lights in terms of product performance or otherwise, as soon as trend emerges, which can be fed back to Op-Data for further action.

Thus with Qualtrics-SAP integration, we can re-imagine how the empathy quotient can get channelized with operational data, in the intelligent suite, to ensure customers have a best in class experience, every time.