Qualtrics Announces Winners of the 2020 XM Breakthrough Artist Awards, Celebrating Companies That Have Created Breakthrough Experiences with QualtricsXM

Disney, Goldman Sachs, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Volkswagen Group Australia, and Zebco honored as 2020 winners across the four core experiences of business: customer, employee, product, and brand

SALT LAKE CITY and SEATTLE, February 2, 2021 – Qualtrics (NASDAQ: XM), the leader in customer experience and creator of the experience management category, today announced the winners of the 2020 XM Breakthrough Artist Awards. The annual awards honor the most innovative brands who apply experience management to design breakthrough products, services, cultures and brands, or optimize existing experiences to the point where they delight and disrupt the status quo.

“Experience management is how today’s best brands design, deliver, and continuously improve breakthrough experiences that build a bedrock of loyal customers and employees,” said Kylan Lundeen, Chief Marketing Officer, Qualtrics. “The XM Breakthrough Artists Awards are our way of celebrating brands that have raised the bar on what customers and employees should expect from the companies they engage with.”

The winners of the 2020 XM Breakthrough Artist Awards include:

CX — Customer Experience Breakthrough Artist Winners

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina // Volkswagen Group Australia
With more and more health insurance options available to consumers every day, customers are demanding a quality experience in an industry that has not always been known for it. In 2016, Blue Cross NC saw an opportunity to reinvent its Voice of the Customer program by reducing lengthy wait times, giving more access to basic information, and streamlining listening programs that were divided across multiple departments and vendors. The state’s largest health insurer consolidated all of their providers into one and wholly revamped their customer experience program. They saw breakthrough results in less than a year including their highest Net Promoter Score ever, benchmarking them as an industry leader. As leaders began to operate with a 360-degree view of their customers across multiple groups and segments, their new system of action drove reduced costs, standardized projects, and, for the first time, the ability to close the loop with every customer. The CX program now delivers customer insights that inform product design, service improvements, and member engagement programs helping Blue Cross NC achieve improved business performance.

After years of declining sales and customer satisfaction, Volkswagen Group Australia (VWA) was grappling with the traditional dilemma: how do you get employees to act in the best interest of the company? The company homed in on experience management — and transformed their organizational culture by shifting from measurement-based to action-oriented programs. Instead of spending $10 million annually to reward employees based on customer feedback scores, VW eliminated the employee incentive bonus and instead ensured that every employee received feedback on how customers rated them against key drivers. With that simple change, VW’s system of action began to focus on individual and team scores and on improving training programs, with impressive results: The company’s NPS increased 5x, contact center satisfaction tripled to more than 90%, and VW experienced 40 months of consecutive improvements in an industry customer experience benchmark. After finishing last in a national brand study in 2015, VW customers were named most loyal in Australia in 2019.

EX — Employee Experience Breakthrough Artist Winner

Goldman Sachs

In a highly competitive industry for talent, Goldman Sachs created several cutting edge, large-scale employee experience initiatives, including an advanced conjoint study that identified a game changing employee benefit package for employee groups. Goldman Sachs received responses from over 2,000 employees across 14 global offices to inform future wellness offerings. The way Goldman Sachs embeds employee experience insights across the firm led to a highly effective system of action. Using the insights generated from their experience data, the bank created four new benefits, including a market-leading parental leave program for women and men that Business Insider calls “the most generous parental-leave policy on Wall Street.”

BX — Brand Experience Breakthrough Artist Winner

Zebco

As an iconic fishing brand suffering from declining consumer interest, Zebco faced an industry-wide dilemma: ‘Does fishing have a future with younger generations?’ Using Qualtrics , they relaunched their brand by identifying and tailoring campaigns and messages to the key drivers behind consumer, competitive, and market trends. The brand insights that Qualtrics surfaced informed Zebco’s logo redesign, visual identity, product packaging, and product designs. In the first year since the X-data-driven rebrand that was now deeply connected to the expectations, desires, and needs of the target growth segment, Zebco saw their largest annual growth in over 15 years, with 6% revenue growth, and brand awareness, favorability, and purchase intent growing by up to 30% to exceed all KPI goals.

Additional winners include:
Sony Interactive Entertainment, which wins as the Product Experience Breakthrough Artist
The Walt Disney Company, which wins as the overall Experience Management Breakthrough Artist

To learn more about the XM Breakthrough Artist Awards and this year’s winners, visit https://www.qualtrics.com/breakthrough-awards/.

About Qualtrics
Qualtrics, the leader in customer experience and creator of the Experience Management (XM) category, is changing the way organizations manage and improve the four core experiences of business––customer, employee, product, and brand. Over 13,000 organizations around the world are using Qualtrics to listen, understand, and take action on experience data (X-data™)––the beliefs, emotions, and intentions that tell you why things are happening, and what to do about it. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action that helps businesses attract customers who stay longer and buy more, engage employees who build a positive culture, develop breakthrough products people love, and build a brand people are passionate about. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.