In the post-pandemic, hyper-personalized world, businesses now operate in an ever-changing landscape. Not only the current & prospective customers and employees, but all the stakeholders, are becoming more demanding, sensitive about their experiences and do not shy away from sharing them on social media. Increasingly, organizations big and small, are embracing the Experience Management (XM) approach. Companies are realizing that experiences comprise distinct offerings that create economic value. To supplement their existing organizational data, companies have begun to collect experience data, since experiences are seen as a competitive advantage. Therefore, to stay competitive, companies are leveraging new capabilities, such as, experience management platforms that provide various services to automate the process of identifying and improving experiences across an organization, that allows them to deliver on what people really care about – their experiences.  

What started with User Experience (UX) in the software world, became mainstream with Customer Experience (CX). However, now experience management encompasses other areas, such as brand experience, employee experience (EX) and product experience, which are all seen as interrelated.  

As per Qualtrics, the world’s most successful companies don’t just respond to problems when they occur — they act before they happen, resolving bad experiences, and designing new ones that will drive business success. This is done through experience management, which is an organization-wide approach to understanding the emotions behind every interaction and how they impact behavior, to take the right steps to improve the experience across the business. 

With this background of growing realization by all organizations that managing experiences is vital to all aspects of business, on 12^th September 2023, Qualtrics hosted its first-ever Experience Management event “XM Live” in India at Hotel Taj Santacruz’ Grand Ball Room in Mumbai. It was a late afternoon (3 to 6.30 pm) event that was attended by their customers, prospects, industry leaders and peers.  

The event provided a face-to-face opportunity to hear firsthand from a lineup of speakers from Kotak Mahindra Bank, Wipro, HDFC Bank and Mahindra Automotive as to how they are leveraging actionable insights from their customer and employee experience programs to drive business outcomes. 

Quadrant Knowledge Solutions (QKS), a leading strategic consulting and advisory firm attended the event. Their team comprised Narayan Gokhale (Associate Research Director), Nikhilesh Naik (Analyst) and Kalpesh Parmar (Client-Partner).  

Discover the Power and ROI of being a human centric business. - Navneet Narula, Country Manager, India began the deliberations through his welcome address, elaborating on the theme of the event as to by managing experiences, how successful companies do more than simply react to problems as they occur. They try to predict and mitigate problems before they happen. 

The XM platform: How AI is powering XM for the frontlines - Abhi Ingle, Qualtrics’ Chief Business Officer’s session focused on the latest innovations to help develop a CX, Market Research, and EX program that helps create personalized experiences at scale. He talked about their all-on-one XM platform that has three software suites to create -  XM for Customer Frontlines (to deliver better experiences in contact centers and across every digital and physical touchpoint), XM for People Teams (to engage teams, improve manager effectiveness, and make informed 
people and business decisions), and XM for Strategy & Research (to design products people love, increase market share, and accelerate growth). He emphasized on the new Generative AI feature of the platform, based on the data derived from the 3.5 billion conversations analyze and 2 billion actions automated.  

Scaling up customer experience to drive sustained growth - Kamlesh Vora, Senior Executive Vice President and Head of Customer Experience, Kotak Mahindra Bank had a fireside chat with Harish Agarwala, Head of Customer Experience Solution Strategy, Southeast Asia and India, Qualtrics. He covered their journey of implementing the XM platform, talked about how earlier insights lacked actionable information and how they can easily scale CX resulting in sustained growth.  

The Employee Experience Edge: Insights from Wipro’s journey - Shveta Srivastava, Head of HR Technology Transformation, Wipro spoke about the challenges of managing the expectations of their 250,000 employees worldwide. Conducting one employee-survey per year, analyzing, and implementing findings with about 20% attrition rate were among the several hurdles that they tried to navigate through their inhouse platform. However, a few months back they took a baby step towards implementation of the XM platform and have been able to achieve results in one quarter which used to take more than a year. She believes a good EX results in strong CX leading to better business outcomes.  

An efficient insights operating model that drives agility and brand growth - Dhawal Thaker, Head of Research and Media, HDFC Bank has been using the XM platform for the past one year. The presentation and subsequent fireside chat highlighted how the bank has been efficiently able to use the “XM for Strategy and Research” feature to conduct customer surveys on the fly and benefit from the insights gathered into their operating model to drive agility and brand growth.  

Real-time Customer Voice with insights to empower digital and human frontlines - Santhanam Surendran, Head of Customer Centricity from Mahindra Automotive presented how earlier they used to map only three major customer journey milestones of presales, sales and after-sales, to now the XM Platform enabling them to map the customer journey at 12 different touch points – product discovery (2), presales journey (6), sales journey (2) and after sales journey (2) providing them benefits of flexibility & convenience, customized feedback, coverage of the entire universe, Realtime feedback and undiluted VOC. This has enabled them to gather insights not only at the regional level but up to each dealer level. This has resulted in better CSAT scores at each touchpoint of their customer journey.  

Realizing the value of XM - James Scutt, Principal XM Catalyst, Qualtrics XM Institute. Qualtrics has an inhouse XM Institute. Its mission is to create a thriving global community of Experience Management Professionals by equipping leaders with the skills, knowledge, and connections they need to succeed.  Their faculty conducts ongoing research to uncover leading-edge best practices and trends, which are shared through thought leadership, community, training, and certification programs. James spoke about how companies that invest in experience management start with a competitive edge but are faced with the challenge of proving the economic value to leadership when the return on investment (ROI) is not immediately obvious.  He provided insight into how to demonstrate the ROI of experience management and gain executive buy-in. 

Qualtrics’ speaker lineup represented a good mix of customers from different industry verticals, two from the Banking sector and one each from the IT Services and automotive sectors respectively. This was well blended by two sessions from Qualtrics, one about innovations in the XM platform and the second one about the work being done by their XM Institute.  

To sum up, Qualtrics India teams first flagship Experience Management event in Mumbai, provided the opportunity to listen to their customers and peers in the industry on valuable tips to bring every organization navigate the shifting needs of customers and employees in 2023 and beyond. The event provided a good networking platform for connecting with peers in respective industries facing the same challenges, and who have come up with innovative ideas that can be implemented in their businesses. The event lived up to the theme of understanding why being a human-centric business is critical to navigating increasing customer and employee expectations. Designing and optimizing every experience can indeed deliver breakthrough results.  

Author : Narayan Gokhale Associate Research Director at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions