Today’s interview is with Zig Serafin, CEO at Qualtrics, the leading Experience Management software provider. I spoke to Zig at Qualtrics’ recent X4 event in Salt Lake City. We talked about Qualtrics’ vision, the highlights from the event, the XM Operating system, Qualtrics AI and the hundred different AI models that they have built, how they are empowering 43 out of 50 of the world’s largest brands to listen and then take action at scale and in real-time and the upcoming Qualtrics X4 EMEA event in London on June 6th.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The Generative AI landscape: The good, the bad and the boring – Interview with Don Schuerman of Pega – and is number 502 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, ahead of the annual gathering of experience leaders at Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th. There you can hear about some of the best customer experience programmes from industry leaders and companies including Belron, Allianz and Adidas. You can register now at the Qualtrics website.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Zig:

• AI is going to be a transformative force in helping businesses to drive revenue growth and expand cost efficiency.
• But, in particular, AI is going to help us better understand our fellow human beings in order to help us build deeper human connections.
• Qualtrics’ vision is to empower brands to listen and then take action at scale in real-time.
• They have the largest customer sentiment database on the planet.
• We have the XM operating system, which is the experience management operating system for businesses to understand, and act on human connections and human signal.
• So, as you learn more about what you’re doing well or not well, you can better understand and process it, and then you can actually activate action.
• We built an operating system for businesses to be able to span departments and different data sets inside of a company. And, what we’ve done is we’ve infused into that Qualtrics AI.
• Qualtrics AI has about a hundred different AI models that span sentiment, language understanding, task generation, etc., which translate into new capabilities. These capabilities could be anything from semantic search to understanding effor
• The operating system has many new capabilities being introduced into it and on top of that we have applications that are then powered by that AI foundation.
• Qualtrics Assist for managers, for example, is an example of an application that shows up inside of their employee suite.
• Qualtrics for the frontlines is an example of a capability that will show up as part of what we enable for companies who have frontline workforces in location-oriented businesses.
• 43 out of 50 of the world’s largest brands use Qualtrics, with the majority of them today at different stages of adoption and use of our system.
• The common theme across all of them is you have to operate your organization from an outside-in perspective.
• Standing in the shoes of a customer means that you don’t care about how a company is organized internally.
• Standing in the shoes of a customer means that you understand how, across a continuum of the journey, a customer interacts with your digital properties, your website, your apps, through coming into your store, to interacting with your product through to the service life cycle, for instance. And, having one thread that’s woven through it all creates a very powerful connected data set, which then gives you a more probabilistic view into where your business is going to go with that one customer or a whole segment of customers that look like that.
• So most businesses that we work with are on a path to want to run their business that way.
• But not all businesses are at the same place or moving at the same pace.
• We’re not only a technology leader and an innovator in advancing this category, but we also have the XM Institute, which helps develop solutions and build best practices, as well as a partner community that helps transform brands into becoming experience-led based businesses.
• The common denominator in all of this is how businesses are making decisions.
• Cross-experience management takes the four core experiences of your brand, your employees, your product and your customer and connects them so you can understand what’s driving what.
• We can actually be in a position to remove calls into the contact center from actually having to take place by solving upstream problems.
• What we are not doing is trying to become the system that replaces the call center infrastructure. So we’re not the calling and routing system, but we are certainly improving and expanding what an analytics system should be able to do in the call center.
• We are removing legacy technologies, and in the process, we’re actually saving businesses substantial sums of money because of the fact that we can consolidate all of these different separate listening and analytics systems and we bring it all together on one system.
• That has huge capital and operational cost reduction implications. But most importantly, by bringing it all together it’s far more predictive of what it takes to drive revenue for a company.
• Nobody wakes up in the morning looking forward to call the call center.
• The call center is the emergency triage room for all of the things that are not working inside your company.
• If you aren’t fixing the bigger picture, which is what caused the call center call in the first place and what was broken along the continuum of the larger customer journey, then you are just putting a band-aid on the problem.
• The faster you get ahead of that, the faster you’re going to be a leader in your market and also save a lot of money.
• Check out X4 in London on June the 6th.

About Zig

Zig Serafin is the Chief Executive Officer of Qualtrics. Zig helped Qualtrics create and become the leader of the experience management category, with the launch of the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform, changing the way organizations manage and improve the four core experiences of business—customer, employee, product and brand.

He has led the rapid growth of Qualtrics to 20,000 customers, and he led the team that took Qualtrics public under the ticker symbol ‘XM’ with an IPO valuation of $15B. Previously, he was a leader in SAP’s 2019 acquisition of Qualtrics for $8B, at the time the largest private enterprise software acquisition ever.

Zig sits on the board of Qualtrics and the board of Moody’s. He joined Qualtrics as Chief Operating Officer in 2016 and was previously Corporate Vice President at Microsoft and led its multi-billion-dollar enterprise collaboration services business that became Microsoft Teams.

Check out Qualtrics X4 in London on June 6th, the Qualtrics product suite, say Hi to Qualtrics and Zig on X (Twitter) @Qualtrics and @Zserafin respectively and feel free to connect/follow Zig on LinkedIn here.