X4 2023: Bring your frontline to the forefront

X4 2023 saw more than 10,000 XM leaders come together to experience 3 days of inspirational keynotes, more than 125 breakout sessions from the world’s biggest brands, and 18 new innovations launched on the XM Platform to help make business more human.

Making Business More Human Takes Center Stage

This year’s X4 saw 10,000 attendees, made up of Experience Management leaders from around the world, descend on Salt Lake City to learn, build, and be inspired to drive immediate change at their organization.

Among the 18 innovations launched, the main focus was on bringing XM to frontline teams, with a host of new purpose-built applications to help frontline managers, digital teams, contact center agents, and in-store staff deliver world-class experiences.

It adds to the already powerful suite of tools for research, strategy, and people to help companies take the right action on the frontlines to deliver experiences that drive growth.

“Because EVERY organization must deeply KNOW their customers and employees, and enable their digital and human frontlines to act in-the-moment to deliver the experiences that will build loyalty and commitment,” said Qualtrics’ President of Product and Engineering Brad Anderson.

Here’s a recap of some of the key themes and topics from this year’s event.

Bringing your frontline to the forefront

Acquiring, engaging, and supporting your customers has never been more important than it is right now.

And it all starts with your frontline. In the customer care keynote, Qualtrics’ Senior Manager of Product Marketing Kate Hodgins stressed that making business more human isn’t just a nice thing to do.

When you make a business more human customers can’t help but choose you. They can’t help but advocate for you. And they’re more likely to forgive you when something goes wrong.

Qualtrics unveiled a series of innovations that provide real-time frontline productivity solutions and deeper quality insights to help make improvements across the board.

Frontline teams can monitor their interactions personally and course correct where needed using Quality Management to analyze every call to ensure you keep your finger on the pulse of your call center.

Call center agents also gained a valuable life line with Real-Time Agent Assist which provides in-the-moment recommendations to help solve customer issues faster.

New XM features for People teams

Employees are the lifeblood of every organization and their experiences shape whether your business is successful. Because they’re the ones on the frontline delivering incredible experiences that move the needle.

When HR leaders and people managers are being asked to do more with less, it is mission critical we build diverse, engaged and high-performing teams to move the business forward.

And it isn’t about doing more surveys.

Qualtrics’ Head of Product Management for Employee Experience Wojtek Kubik said “It’s about using AI and listening tools that understand the nuances of human emotion in real-time, are capable of measuring all critical EX metrics, and can rapidly identify the right focus areas in every moment, not just the ones we ask or know about.”

To that end, we rolled out a number of new features on XM for People Teams, including Manager Assist and Continuous Employee Listening.

Both empower organizations to improve frontline manager and individual effectiveness and make informed and timely people and business decisions to help redefine and deliver better experiences for every employee.

Operationalizing empathy in Healthcare

Qualtrics’ Chief Medical Officer Dr. Adrienne Boissy kicked off the industry keynote by posing a simple, thought-provoking question.

“Do we really love our patients?”

When you think about the old adage “to know someone, is to love them” and then think about how information in healthcare organizations is often siloed and not always in the hands of the people who truly need it, you realize frontline teams often aren’t set up for success.

Dan Liljenquist, Chief Strategy Officer for Intermountain Health, said what healthcare teams really need is situational awareness.

Frontline teams need to be equipped with the tools that allow them to know the effort, intensity, and emotion of members and patients in real-time.

Tools like Experience ID captures every interaction a patient or member has with you from online chats to phone calls with your frontline and allows you to have a complete picture of their journey in order to provide empathetic experiences that improve satisfaction and loyalty.

Creating better lives for more people in the public sector

While the world around us has gone through a significant digital transformation, governments have often struggled to keep up.

In her opening keynote, Qualtrics’ SVP of Public Sector Chelsie Bright noted 60% of citizens worldwide are dissatisfied with their experience with government.

To combat this, local and federal governments must design frontline experiences that build community engagement and citizen satisfaction and prioritize self-service tools.

Ashka Dave, Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company shared research that noted the top performing states in customer experience do these 5 things:

1. Set a high bar for customer experience with a clear and compelling vision
2. Prioritize services that are most important to residents
3. Have stakeholder engagement to address inequities
4. Zero-in on common pain points along typical journeys
5. Invest in technology and “all of government” solutions.

The power of human connection in digital

In a cookie-less world, how do you stop digital being a series of disconnected, transactional moments?

It's emotion.

Real human digital experiences.

And those experiences need to be paired with a brand’s ability to:

• Meet customer’s needs in real-time and solve issues at speed
• Surface next-best-steps that are just right for the individual
• Stay two steps ahead of consumers by using everything you know about them
  

It is crucial that brands understand their customers individually and at a macro level across all the experiences, behaviors, and transactions they have with you and be able to tap into that memory.

Using Digital Experience Analytics, brands can help foster deep emotional connections without having to ask a single question.

Your digital frontline teams are automatically alerted when customers experience friction and receive recommended actions to resolve broken experiences using advanced AI. Session replays and behavioral heuristics help uncover the root cause of friction in order to drive better decisions and create exceptional experiences.

Businesses can dive even deeper into the customer data with Qualtrics Customer Journey Optimizer, a powerful tool that provides brands the full view of a customer’s omnichannel journey.

By combining behavioral, experience and operational data, you can see how taking certain steps improves or hurts the overall experience and be empowered to direct people down a route best-suited for them, generating greater revenue and improved satisfaction.