Why rich, unique data is key to great AI-enabled customer and employee experiences

Aligning with customer values and empowering employees is key to business success, and AI-powered experience management software enables corporate leaders to achieve these objectives. 

So what is experience management? According to Qualtrics, it involves businesses and governments listening to everything customers and employees are sharing with them, and using the insights they derive to continually improve the experiences they provide. 

Historically, businesses have used ‘after-the-fact’ tools, such as post-interaction surveys, to understand customer and employee experiences. While these listening mechanisms remain a critical part of an organisation’s toolkit, the capabilities enabled by AI are set to help customer experience and employee experience leaders accelerate the ability to take action on feedback in the right way to create more meaningful, relevant, and human interactions.

Why are these human connections important for a business or government? Research reported in Harvard Business Review has quantified the value to a business of a deeply engaged, highly emotionally attached customer, relative to a highly satisfied customer.  

The researchers found that the lifetime value of a customer who was emotionally connected to a business was a full 52 percentage points higher than the lifetime value of a highly satisfied customer. 

How important is data in training AI to enhance experience management?

According to Brad Anderson, President, Products, UX, Engineering and Ecosystem, at Qualtrics, leveraging AI models trained on large, unique customer and employee experience datasets is key to forging these connections.

“AI is only as good as the data used to train the models. The precision, quality, and reliability of the output from AI is directly linked to the data it is built on top of. This is where Qualtrics comes in,” Anderson said.

“We have the largest collection of human sentiment and emotion data on the planet. Today there are more than 12 billion profiles in our system, consisting of everything from solicited survey feedback to unsolicited information such as call centre interactions and help desk conversations.” 

Qualtrics is using these vast, unique data sets to train its AI models, which Anderson said gives the company’s customers a competitive advantage through being able to deeply understand what it takes to deliver a better experience.

Deriving insights from unstructured data, such as conversations or reviews, represents a new opportunity for organisations to elevate their customer and employee experience. And it’s another area where Qualtrics is putting AI to work by helping customers analyse structured and unstructured feedback, and to understand the emotion, intensity, and effort behind every engagement.

“We can identify more than 50 different emotions from this unstructured text, and help businesses improve their products, brand and customer experience,” Anderson said. 

Translating insights from AI and data into actions 

Experience management is more than just experience monitoring, Anderson says, pointing out that insights are of little use without action. With Qualtrics, businesses can create policies the vendor executes through a workflow system, based on the conditions it identifies.

“For example, airline customers range from the most valuable to those who look for the lowest price and are not loyal,” Anderson explained.

“With our platform, an airline can run different workflows for those groups under circumstances such as an extended flight delay. They can connect top customers to the call centre to be booked onto another flight, while customers on a budget can be issued a gift certificate to get dinner at the airport while they wait.” 

Over the last 12 months, Qualtrics customers have executed more than 2 billion workflows to close the loop with customers and employees–500 million of those in July this year, he said.

Combining AI with human input key to great experiences

While AI that leverages rich, unique and clean datasets is revolutionising experience management, Anderson notes the human element is also still an integral component. 

“We do not see AI replacing humans, but we do see humans with AI replacing humans without AI,” Anderson said. “Businesses that use AI to empower employees to serve customers are accelerating faster than their competitors.” 

Research published recently by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in conjunction with Harvard revealed BCG consultants that used generative AI completed 12.2 percent more tasks on average than those consultants that did not use generative AI, and completed those tasks 25 percent faster. Generative AI users surveyed also produced outputs at 40 percent higher quality. 

“These examples show that when you add AI, humans get things done faster and better,” Anderson said. 

The nexus between AI and humanity is shown in the HBR research that demonstrates emotionally connected customers are worth more to businesses, he said. 

“The question every leader needs to ask is ‘how do I build connections with my customers and my employees?" He said. 

“You do so with the human traits of empathy and caring. Qualtrics helps businesses be more human by providing real-time, AI-powered capabilities that help team members understand the next best course of action.”