At Intact Financial Corporation, when a customer shares feedback that signal doesn't sit in a queue. It triggers an alert to the frontline, and the manager who picks it up has already reviewed the customer's recent calls before saying a word. Any issue gets acknowledged, and resolved, fast.
It wasn't always this way. Customer experience had developed across the organization as six distinct programs, each operating on its own platform. Measurement varied accordingly, with the same core KPI defined and tracked in different ways depending on the team.
This fragmentation showed up for the customer. The signals were there. Customers were being listened to, but the insights were not being acted on in time. "By the time a report was assembled, the moment to act had often passed,” explains Darko Rakin, Senior Customer Experience Strategist at Intact.
From insights to outcomes
When Intact consolidated its programs onto Qualtrics®, the first thing to change was speed to action.
"As soon as we moved to Qualtrics, our ability to react to customers and the issues they need addressing all became very actionable."
That speed reshaped the frontline's relationship with feedback. Alerts now route customer signals to the right team in the moment, meaning issues get addressed while they still matter.
The team also started analyzing the open-ended responses across its Voice of the Customer programs. "That helped us a lot in terms of direction," explains Rakin. "It helps provide the 'North Star,' where we should be focusing on and what are the different issues that hinder our performance."
Customer experience is the business
"We are a customer experience-driven company," Rakin says. "We are here to help our customers succeed and thrive in bad times and the good times."
One of the company's long-term goals is to turn three out of every four customers into advocates—an objective Rakin says is embedded in everything the company does, on the employee side and the customer side alike.
"Qualtrics is an integral part. It has a lot of different capabilities that we need to build our programs and actually effectively run them."
The omnichannel road ahead
Intact's program is still expanding. Surveys remain the core of how the company collects feedback today, but over the next 18 months Rakin expects the biggest investment to go toward a true omnichannel approach, bringing emails, chatbot conversations, SMS messages, social feeds, and call data into the same analysis.
"We are using Qualtrics to try to predict the future. To help us identify the customers that are ready to churn," Rakin says, describing the next stage of the program's evolution. AI is central to that vision.
"What we are excited about is the ability. Let's say you have three types of customers identified as passives—give you a seven or eight on that NPS question," details Rakin. "The question is which one to prioritize, how to prioritize it. And of course, you're looking to overlay the operational data and the customer value, the money invested, the tenure, whether the customer is new to us or not and so on."
"We have teams analyzing all this, and we're using AI to do this much faster—to show us exactly how to develop those clusters so that our teams can focus more on developing specific communication to those customers and turn them into promoters."
Rakin doesn't put a dollar figure on the work yet; with operations as complex as Intact's, he notes, modeling the precise financial impact of a shift in NPS is still a work in progress. But the direction is clear—and so is his read on the platform's role in getting there.
