X4 2024 Employee Experience Showcase: Powering the future of work with AI

This year’s X4^® revealed how a synergy of people science strategy and next-generation AI tools can take data and insights further, faster. Here’s how our tools are delivering powerful EX gains even in a climate of high uncertainty and attrition risk.

From declining employee trust and revisions to pre-pandemic work policies, to retention challenges and prioritizing HR efficiencies over people outcomes, employee experience (EX) is in a turbulent period of uncertainty and change.

Across the globe, HR leaders and people teams are having to rethink how they operate and deliver experiences as a result — not only meet top-line executive needs, but also ensure sustainable development for the business and its people well into the future. Yet despite the clear advantages of EX, budgets are contracting, and HR leaders find themselves in an all too familiar position: doing even more with significantly less.

However, with recent advancements in the field of AI, particularly generative AI, organizations now have the means to transform how work gets done, how, when, and where they listen to their people, and what strategies they implement to create best-in-class experiences with speed and at scale.

At X4 Salt Lake City 2024, we unveiled Qualtrics^® AI to the world, including our XM^® for Employee Experience suite underpinned by powerful AI capabilities to help organizations leverage technology to forge deeper connections with their workforce.

These brand-new capabilities will enable your people to work more productively and streamline processes, empower your managers with automated insights and personalized action plans to develop their teams, and support your leaders with proactive analytics, linkage analyses and much more to help them stay ahead of what their business and people truly need.

Let’s take a look.

Attrition analytics

Our new AI-powered drivers of attrition solution helps managers proactively identify and intervene when employee intent to stay is low. By combining qualitative employee feedback with operational metrics, it identifies what’s driving attrition in your organization, be it low trust, a lack of belongingness or inadequate tools, so that you can take action. Ready-to-use dashboards act as a springboard for retention strategies and manager interventions with at-risk employees.

Drivers of attrition analytics creates a model that is specific to your business. It forecasts the quantitative improvements and financial benefits that will result when you make changes to the attrition drivers you identify. It’s experience management tied to ROI on a dollar-value level.

Automatic summaries that unify the voice of the employee

Employee feedback is richer and more nuanced when it’s delivered in an employee’s own words - but that comes with a cost if you have to process it manually. Now, managers can see insights from qualitative employee feedback data summarized automatically by Qualtrics AI.

Synthesizing multiple employee responses into one summary makes it quick and easy to get to the heart of how employees feel, saving time and effort. It also means that feedback is anonymized, allowing employees to contribute with confidence, and managers to make decisions they know aren’t skewed by personal opinion.

Because managers get more detail, faster, they can spend more time adding value to the employee experience with things like personalized coaching plans and strategies grounded in employee feedback. They also gain insights on key themes across their teams, allowing them to proactively adapt their approach.

Out of the box, this solution is pre-loaded with Qualtrics EX25 methodology, but you can easily tailor it to your company’s preferred KPIs. EX25 is empirically designed to be holistic but concise and highly actionable, taking your people analytics way beyond engagement surveys. It incorporates 25 EX drivers that influence 5 fundamental KPIs: Turnover intention, Well-being, Engagement, Experience vs. Expectation, and Inclusion.

Even more manager experience support

We are continually building on our products for management experience, adding AI and machine learning to bring managers the information they need, when they need it, along with recommendations and insights backed by multi-modal business data.

Managers can request personalized recommendations from the Qualtrics XM platform, derived by combining engagement scores with data from employee social channels. They can see topical themes and sentiment from social channel signals, graded by volume and emotional intensity. ln In the future, managers can look forward to recommendations enhanced with employee behavioral data too.

With Qualtrics Assist, managers can explore data and research questions using a conversational model that feels intuitive and natural to use. It offers real-time responses and recommendations personalized to each manager, delivered through an AI-powered chat interface within Qualtrics.

Results that go way beyond the employee

We know intuitively that happy employees make for happy customers, but with CrossXM^TM it’s a matter of science.

Because Qualtrics is a single source of knowledge, your EX data and insights don’t sit in a silo. They can be combined with other experience management knowledge capital from elsewhere on the Qualtrics platform, giving you an even richer, more contextually relevant understanding of the results that ripple out from your strategic decisions.

With CrossXM you can unlock the impact of all your experiences and clearly delineate how initiatives across EX and CX affect each other and your bottom-line outcomes. For example, you can measure the effect of employee development or training initiatives on metrics like customer satisfaction — or identify how customer advocacy and loyalty affect employee recognition and engagement.

Better yet, it can help you predict what the future outcomes of your EX initiatives might be, using past data, so you can invest in the ideas that show the most promise.

This is the future of employee experience

Ultimately, the future of business belongs to companies that understand how AI-powered experience management can help make business more human by bringing understanding and empathy to every interaction at scale.

And at Qualtrics, we’re building the solutions organizations like yours need to turn experience into a competitive advantage.