Learn the XM Platform

About the Experience Management (XM) Platform

Experience Management (XM) is an area of market research that seeks to understand the relationship employees and customers have with specific organizations. Experience research goes beyond whether or not someone is “satisfied” with a company, instead looking closely at specific moments and interactions in order to identify strengths and areas of improvement.

As you can probably guess from that description, experience research can be extremely broad. To help ground the concept, here are just a few examples of the questions you can answer using our platforms:

• Which of your new product offerings do customers prefer? What features would they be willing to trade off?
• Is your company’s website full of helpful info and easy to navigate?
• How does a particular journey, such as e-commerce, affect your customer’s satisfaction?
• Do your employees feel they have the tools they need to succeed at their jobs? How does this affect their engagement?
• What common themes appear in your customer’s open-ended feedback?
• Is your support team answering customer questions within SLA? If they are, which teams and shifts are excelling the most?

Holistically, you can think of Qualtrics as an Experience Management platform – or the XM Platform for short.

The Main Product Areas of the XM Platform

We’ve talked a little about how diverse the needs of an experience management program can be. Likewise, Qualtrics comprises an array of softwares, each specialized in addressing different research needs.

On the topmost level, XM includes 4 key apps. You access each of these apps using a unique user account on different URLs:

• Qualtrics Platform
• Customer Journey Optimizer
• XM Discover
• Qualtrics Social Connect

If you’re browsing the support site and you’re unsure which app you’re reading about, you can check the app in the upper-right of the page.

Hover over an icon to see the app’s full name. Apps not covered on a support page will be grayed out.

Each of these platforms offers a variety of specialized functions. In the next sections, we’ll provide a brief overview of each one, with links out to more resources where necessary.

Qualtrics Platform

Technically, every app in the XM Platform can be thought of as part of Qualtrics, the company. But to make the separation between these apps easier to understand, we’re going to refer to the software you access from qualtrics.com/login as the Qualtrics Platform.

Qualtrics hosts a large variety of research tools that all live and communicate within one common platform. Amongst the things you can do in Qualtrics include:

• Create surveys from scratch, or from expertly designed templates.
• Distribute your research across a wide variety of channels, such as email, text, and links embedded in your site.
• Customize a survey experience based on previous information your respondents provided.
• Perform analyses and find statistically significant results.
• Create dynamic, detailed dashboard reports for all kinds of stakeholders.
• Use organization and team structure to restrict the data each team sees.
• Embed feedback in your website.
• Host a directory of all of the contacts in your organization, complete with profiles of all of their touchpoints with your company.
• Create dynamic segments of customers based on key attributes.
• Automate everything from emails, to ticket assignment, to file uploads.
• And more!

Are you ready to create your first project? Check out our guide!

Because Qualtrics covers a wide variety of functions, we have written a lot of materials that can introduce you to our platform and all it’s capable of. For a list of features and their introductory pages, try browsing our support site’s homepage.

You can also search our website with customized filters. In the example shown below, we’re looking for how to get started with workflows.

Customer Journey Optimizer

Journeys describe the end-to-end experience that your customers (or other people of interest) have when interacting with your company. The Customer Journey Optimizer (CJO) allows you to combine operational and experience data into a single journey view, helping you to identify ways to improve your customers’ experiences.

First you’ll build a journey and all its milestones, and then you’ll integrate with the systems key to making that journey run smoothly.

You can access CJO on https://cjo.qualtrics.com/signin. See more about the signup and login process.

Once you’re in, learn more about navigating the platform and key terms.

XM Discover

When it comes to open-ended feedback, it can be hard to analyze unstructured thoughts and make business decisions based on them. Yet employees and customers provide some of their most valuable insight when asked to write freely outside of a predetermined list of answers.

To help bridge this gap, XM Discover is home to some of the world’s most advanced conversational analytics. With this software, you can gain insights from the feedback people provide, then build dashboards highlighting these findings with your stakeholders.

Discover is accessed on https://cxstudio.clarabridge.net. It has 3 product areas that specialize in different steps within the conversational analytics process:

• Connecting your feedback to Discover.
• Performing conversational analysis.
• Creating dashboards to report on your findings.

For help getting started with XM Discover, see the XM Discover Basic Overview.

Qualtrics Social Connect

Qualtrics Social Connect (QSC) allows you to view and respond to mentions of your brand across different social media profiles. Your organization’s support team can use Social Connect to create cases and respond to customers without having to switch to many different websites with different logins.

You can access QSC on https://app.engagor.com/login. Learn more about creating your account and logging in.

Integrating the XM Platform

While these apps may have separate user accounts and logins, that doesn’t mean they’re separate! Here are a few ways you can connect these apps if you have access to two or more of them:

• Embed an XM Discover dashboard in a Qualtrics dashboard, or vice versa!
• Trigger an assortment of actions in Qualtrics when alerts are sent in XM Discover.
• Run a contact center or quality management system by creating Qualtrics tickets based on XM Discover alerts.
• The Qualtrics Outbound Connector lets you use XM Discover data to trigger different workflows in Qualtrics. These kinds of workflows can also be used to export enriched XM Discover data into Qualtrics!
• Pull verbatim data from Qualtrics or QSC into XM Discover so you can perform advanced text analysis.
• Enhance how social media mentions of your brand are automatically categorized by connecting XM Discover to Social Connect (QSC).
• Integrate Qualtrics with QSC to pull key information from both QSC and XM Discover, thus allowing you to consolidate and analyze all of your customer feedback in one place.
• Display customer feedback and text analysis collected in Qualtrics alongside Customer Journey Optimizer (CJO) milestones with milestone analysis.

Qtip: If you’re interested in other ways you can integrate your Qualtrics data with CJO, reach out to your CJO Implementations Representative.

Shared Support Resources

There are many resources you can count on to help you with topics from Qualtrics, XM Discover, Social Connect (QSC), and the Customer Journey Optimizer (CJO).

• On the support site, you can access more than a 1000 free-to-use articles on everything from getting started with our products, to common use cases, to the intricacies of every small setting.
• For a monthly selection of features that are in development, see the Product Roadmap.
  Qtip: The Product Roadmap uses the same product icons the support site does, so you can easily tell which app you’re reading about.
• If you’re interested in following recently released and upcoming features for any of these apps, see Product Release Notes on the XM Community.
• The XM Community itself is also open to discussions with other users across the XM Platform, from the many product areas within Qualtrics, to XM Discover, and more.
• For learning courses and education videos, check out XM Basecamp.

Contacting Support

Sometimes, online resources can’t answer all of our questions. The Support Team you’ll reach out to will vary based on the app you’re using.

• Qualtrics Platform: See the Customer Success Hub.
• XM Discover: Select Support from the avatar menu, or go to the Customer Success Hub for instructions.
• Customer Journey Optimizer (CJO): Work with the Implementations Representative who is helping you set up your CJO journeys.
• Social Connect (QSC): See Contacting Social Connect Support.

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