Ally + Qualtrics

Access to customer feedback isn’t a barrier for Ally Financial: the fully digital bank has long enjoyed extensive visibility into the experience of its customers, ranging from surveys and call-center interactions to insights into the ways in which customers interact with Ally’s website and products. Instead, Ally’s challenge was figuring out what to do with all that data—how to pull actionable insights from the deluge, and how to act on them quickly enough to salvage at-risk customer experiences. Ally turned to Qualtrics for a solution. 

Ally fills gaps with NLP-enabled comprehensive listening

For years, Ally collected more verbatim customer feedback than it was able to analyze, so its customer experience (CX) insights were based on the small fraction of feedback it pulled for manual review. That approach worked fairly well for identifying overall themes, but many nuanced insights fell through the cracks, and Ally also lacked the ability to identify customer-specific opportunities and risks.

That changed when Ally added the OXM (Omnichannel Experience Management) solution from Qualtrics. Using NLP and AI, Ally was able to analyze 100% of the open-text feedback its customers provided across multiple channels, enabling the bank to identify and intervene at scale in cases when customers experienced friction. And by addressing the sources of customer pain, Ally also enabled other customers to bypass those negative experiences altogether: within months of its launch, the AI system identified 109 system issues and successfully addressed 103 of them. 

Eliminating pain before the customer feels it

It’s one thing to notice when a customer is experiencing pain. Ally wanted more—it wanted to anticipate customer pain, and to gain the ability to address the potential friction before the customer even experienced it. Accordingly, Ally worked within Qualtrics to model customer journeys that frequently resulted in undesirable CX outcomes. Based on those models, Ally not only took action to fix some broken experiences, but it also gained an ability to proactively minimize customer frustration in cases when the model indicated a customer was at risk of experiencing friction. 

Agility, ownership, and initiative when confronting an emergency

As the speed and granularity of Ally’s CX insights has increased, so has the company’s ability to proactively address emerging customer concerns. One example: as wildfires ravaged Southern California in early 2025, Ally identified affected customers and reached out with helpful information related to topics such as available ATMs. Ally also quickly connected to support customers who had lost property financed with loans from Ally.