Qualtrics aims to transform how organisations understand and act on customer and employee feedback with its launch of “Experience Agents.” Unveiled at Qualtrics X4 in Sydney, this innovation uses agentic AI to automate understanding at scale, moving beyond surveys to deliver proactive, personalised experiences.
Agentic AI is poised to revolutionise Voice of Customer (VoC) in profound ways, transforming it from a reactive data collection and analysis function into a proactive, autonomous, and deeply integrated system. Over the years, VoC has evolved from simple tools for collecting feedback surveys to sophisticated, comprehensive systems that drive deep insights into both customer and employee experiences. This evolution has been fuelled by technological advancements, particularly in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the increasing need for businesses to understand and act on sentiment across a multitude of channels.
Qualtrics took the concept of Voice of Customer (VoC) and expanded it into what they call Experience Management (XM). VoC is a vital part of that, but XM provides the overarching framework and technology to connect all the dots and drive enterprise-wide improvements. “We recognised several years ago that experience management, which had been a very, very fragmented set of capabilities across a lot of different siloed teams, needed to be consolidated,” explained Brad Anderson, President of Product & Engineering Qualtrics.
Qualtrics has consolidated into their XM platform a comprehensive range of enterprise grade capabilities for experience management into three core suites. Anderson elaborates, “We offer three core suites: Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and Strategy & Research. Each provides purpose-built capabilities for the diverse range of organisations and partners we work with. For instance, our Customer Experience suite includes the highly popular Voice of the Customer program, alongside our digital capabilities, like the ‘help’ functionality you often see on websites and apps.”
The Qualtrics Employee Experience (EX) Suite is a comprehensive set of solutions designed to help organisations understand, measure, and improve every aspect of the employee journey. “Our commitment to employee experience (EX) is rooted in a fundamental principle: engaged and empowered employees are the strongest drivers of exceptional customer outcomes. We believe there’s a direct, measurable link between how employees feel and perform, and the quality of the service or product customers receive”.
By bringing all aspects of EX onto a unified platform and framework, according to Anderson, unlocks a comprehensive range of capabilities and opportunities for organisations. This integrated approach allows them to go beyond basic functions to truly optimise every facet of the employee journey. It’s about more than just collecting feedback; it’s about connecting the dots between employee sentiment, productivity, and ultimately, the impact on the customer.
The Qualtrics Research & Strategy Suite is designed to help organisations make smarter, data-driven decisions by providing advanced tools for market research, product development, brand management, and user experience (UX) research. Unlike the Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) suites that focus on ongoing feedback loops, the Research & Strategy suite is geared towards uncovering foundational insights, validating ideas, and shaping future direction.
The roadmap of XM
Looking ahead, Qualtrics is poised to revolutionise XM with “Experience Agents”. Anderson said, “In a world of agentic AI, you are going to see autonomous agents that are able to understand what a customer is trying to do or what an employee is trying to do, and then, based upon training, take those actions on behalf of the customer, on behalf of the employee”.
As an example, with nearly 50 airlines using Qualtrics and generating over 100 million survey responses annually, human follow-up at such a scale is impossible. Experience Agents will unlock the ability for organisations to have empathetic, autonomous agents trained with guardrails to follow up on every customer and employee scenario.
Agentic AI and digital workers
Qualtrics’ experience agents are designed to help organisations in two key areas. Firstly, is survey enhancement. Experience Agents can be deployed to intelligently adapt surveys. When a response is vague (e.g., “entertainment” as a reason for dissatisfaction), the agentic AI will automatically ask clarifying, human-like follow-up questions (e.g., “What types of games or movies were you looking for?”). Qualtrics claims that this adaptive conversational feedback can increase survey completion rates by 75%, while delivering twice the actionable insights.
The second is that they provide digital assistance. When a user is lost or frustrated, our Experience Agents automatically step in. These agentic AI-powered solutions are designed to proactively guide customers or employees through their digital journey, helping them achieve their goals seamlessly.
“Essentially, Experience Agents are autonomous, intelligent agents finely tuned to understand the human experience. They empower organisations to take immediate, relevant action to “close the loop” with customers and employees based on the specific experience being delivered”, says Anderson. This moves beyond mere data collection to active, intelligent intervention, fostering deeper connections and driving significant improvements in both customer and employee satisfaction.
