Introducing Discover — a powerful new set of products on the XM Platform

Today, we’re delighted to lift the lid on one of the most exciting updates to The Experience Management Platform™ in half a decade — a powerful new set of capabilities called Discover.

Since its launch, XM has come a long way and today, the platform is trusted by 16,750 companies around the world to help them close experience gaps and design new, innovative experiences for their customers and employees.

XM has never been more relevant either.

As switching costs trend towards zero, customers are more willing than ever to walk away after a bad experience.

Employers are facing a once-in-a-generation challenge of moving to hybrid work while navigating the so-called Great Resignation.

And consumers are placing more emphasis on sustainability and social impact when choosing the brands they want to buy from.

Understanding what matters to customers and employees, and taking action on it, has become mission-critical. The companies that succeed over the coming years will be the ones that are run from the outside-in, taking all the signals their customers and employees give them and using them to inform every decision they make.

The starting point for that is often to engage directly with your customers and employees, and ask the question.

‘How was your experience today?’

‘How likely are you to promote the company to family and friends?’

‘How likely are you to continue working at this company for the next 5 years?’

‘Do you have access to the right resources to do your job effectively?’

We’ve all answered these questions countless times as either customers or employees. And the insights businesses have pulled from engaging directly with people have helped identify and close billions of experience gaps around the world.

But truly understanding what matters most to the people you serve, whether customers or employees, is about more than just engaging directly.

Think about the last time you had a bad experience with a company you buy from. Did you wait for them to ask about the experience? Or did you go straight to social media to share your unfiltered views?

How about your experiences at work? When your IT equipment fails and gets in the way of working, do you file it away in your memory for the next engagement or pulse survey that comes around?

The fact is, the vast majority of feedback expressed about companies, their products, services, brand, or employee experience is never even directed at the people who can take action on it.

Instead, it’s expressed conversationally, and in the moment, on forums, websites, social media, chat, phone calls, and a host of other channels that, until now, have proved almost impossible for companies to truly understand.

This unstructured data represents some 90% of the data being generated every single day, and has historically been near impossible for businesses to harness in the right way.

Until now.

Discover the hidden signals your customers and employees won’t tell you

The new Discover products on the Experience Management Platform™ are an entire suite of tools that enable you to discover insights in unstructured data, whatever platform it’s shared on, and take action on it to close experience gaps.

It’s available today across the entire suite of applications on the XM Platform — CustomerXM, EmployeeXM, ProductXM, BrandXM, and DesignXM — and they are a game-changer for our customers.

Discover brings the unrivaled capabilities of Clarabridge’s conversational analytics and natural language processing into the XM Platform, enabling every team, in every organization to tune in to what customers and employees are saying, on every conceivable channel.

It opens the door, for the first time, to an always-on, active listening program that automatically combs through every interaction, on every channel, to surface experience gaps, and key insights to help you drive your experience transformation.

Combined with the industry-leading Engage capabilities already available on the XM Platform, it provides organizations with the ability to capture, and understand every experience for every customer, employee, or prospect, wherever they choose to express their views.

Through Engage, you can reach out directly, on any channel, and ask people about their experiences.

And through Discover, you can augment that with all the conversations people are having, on any channel, with or about your company.

The end result is the most complete data collection available, bringing together the things people tell you, and the things they don’t, combined with powerful analytics to get a complete picture of their experiences with your company.

Powered by AI and Natural Language Processing

Underpinning Discover is a set of powerful new tools in conversational analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Natural Language Processing (NLP)  that go beyond just telling you what people talk about.

Every chat, post, review, call, or comment is automatically analyzed to identify the topic, sentiment, emotion, intensity, level of empathy and effort, reason for contact, and intent.

By understanding the nuances in the language people use whether it’s through a phone conversation with a support agent, an employer review site, or a social media post, Discover enables you to go deeper than ever before.

It moves away from traditional, inflexible text analytics models by supplementing pre-built topic models with powerful AI that learns from human conversations, and constantly updates the system based on billions of real conversations with customers and employees.

But what’s most exciting about these new capabilities isn’t the detail it provides (though I grant you, that’s pretty cool in itself!) but what you can do with it.

When you add that depth of insight into the 5 billion experience profiles in Experience iD, you get a richer, more detailed view of every customer so you can go further than ever before in personalizing their experiences.

And when you use those insights to trigger xFlow, our workflow management and action engine that took some 2 billion actions last year, you can scale your experience improvements faster than ever.

Unlocking a treasure trove of new experience insights

Discover is now available across our entire portfolio.

For customer experience leaders, it will not only unlock a treasure trove of new insights from every channel imaginable, but will enable them to go beyond the words people use, and understand emotion, intent, and intensity in every interaction.

It will transform how contact centers operate by turning every phone call, chat, and email into a rich pool of insights. Agents will be able to close experience gaps faster than ever, and leaders will know exactly which investments to make into new technologies like self-service, chatbots and other digital tools without sacrificing customer satisfaction.

It will enable HR teams to tune in to the conversations happening around the business, to identify what really matters, in the moment, to employees as well as keeping a pulse on people’s health and wellbeing and the company’s progress on key initiatives like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

For product teams, it will pull insights from places like social media and review websites, and benchmark you against your competitors based on conversations not just with your customers, but your competitors’ too.

Marketing and brand teams will have instant access to millions of data points, tuning in to the sentiment and emotions people express when they talk about your brand.

And for market researchers, it’s the start of a whole new era where quantitative research sits side-by-side with conversational analytics on a single platform, unlocking a new source of respondents, and providing everyone in the organization with access to insights to help guide their decisions.

Discover has been built to supercharge your XM program, and provide the tools to tap into a huge pool of unstructured data that continues to grow every day.

When combined with the capabilities of Engage to reach out directly to ask for feedback, it will transform the way companies operate and provide the blueprint to operate from the outside-in, and drive growth in the years ahead.

To see how it all works, reach out to your Qualtrics representative for more information or book a demo below.