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City of Corona Partners With Qualtrics to Increase Resident Engagement and Boost Employee Satisfaction

Qualtrics® XM Platform® helped one of California’s historic cities increase employee satisfaction by 28% and increase by 10x the number of residents giving feedback

With Qualtrics, the City of Corona uncovered meaningful insights to improve the services it delivers to city residents, including a special downtown revitalization project

Last updated:  October 18, 2023


PROVO, Utah & SEATTLE (Oct. 18, 2023) — Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management (XM) category, today announced that the City of Corona, Calif. has used the Qualtrics platform to drive meaningful improvements in engagement and satisfaction among residents and city employees. The city saw a tenfold increase in the resident willingness to provide feedback after adopting Qualtrics. Corona chose Qualtrics to help drive its digital transformation in June, 2021. Qualtrics’ cloud-native XM platform is enabling the city to capture and analyze feedback from its residents and employees and take action to improve the services it delivers, enhance the workplace experience, and inform the transformation of its downtown into a thriving, vibrant destination.

A Historic City Embracing Change

Leaders of the historic City of Corona, established in 1886, recognized the need for a more modern, digital way to engage residents and staff in crucial decisions impacting their experience.

The city chose Qualtrics as their single, unified platform for listening, understanding and acting on all stakeholder feedback. As part of their internal modernization efforts, Corona used Qualtrics to capture employee feedback on their internal technology resources. Through this work, employee feedback informed new technology investments and enablement, culminating in a 28% increase in employee satisfaction with tech resources. As a result of employee feedback, the city also implemented a four-day workweek, which led to reduced attrition rates and heightened employee fulfillment.

Democratizing Decision-Making by Giving A Voice to More Community Members

The city took the same data-driven approach to its resident experience, seeking early feedback on its downtown revitalization project and city rebranding initiative. Traditional in-person methods of collecting feedback reached a limited audience, so the city expanded where and how they gathered residents’ feedback and preferences beyond town hall meetings to farmers markets, social media, government websites and QR codes. This enabled the city to get a much more inclusive view of resident feedback. Corona also harnessed Qualtrics AI to analyze the unsolicited feedback residents were providing about their government interactions on social media, the city’s website, and other channels.

With Qualtrics, the City of Corona can now integrate resident feedback with geographic information systems (GIS) analysis in order to reach previously underrepresented segments of its population. Resident feedback based on this approach has informed how the city will allocate $100 million for its City Park project. Feedback from community members within one mile of the park was weighed more heavily than feedback from residents who live farther away. This ensured the preferences of underrepresented people who reside closer to the park were not outweighed by a louder majority. Funds have been allocated to update the park for community sports, an aquatic center, and a venue for music, festivals and other events.

“As CIO, it’s important to advocate for technology available today that helps us listen to the silent majority in our city,” said Chris McMasters, Chief Information Officer at City of Corona. “Early successes with improving response rates and community engagement taught us how critical it is to close the feedback loop and communicate back to our people. Corona residents can now see and feel the tangible outcomes of their input, reinforcing the significance of their contributions and building trust with their local government.”

An Inclusive City for All Residents

Qualtrics Digital Experience Analytics helps the City of Corona ensure its new website catered to resident needs. With features like rage click tracking and session replay to identify and resolve common website experience issues, the city is able to identify points where residents have issues on the site and address them to improve the experience for everyone. The city also uses Qualtrics Customer Journey Optimizer to reduce friction, and improve digital self-service so they can save frontline employee time for more strategic activities.

“This transformative, human-centered approach to improving employee and customer experience would not have been possible without Qualtrics,” continued McMasters. “The XM platform has become indispensable to serving our community, and enhancing representation and quality of life across the city.”

“Government leaders like Chris McMasters at City of Corona are doing some of the hardest work anywhere – driving transformational change in traditional bureaucracies,” said Chelsie Bright, head of public sector industry at Qualtrics. “They started by fixing pressing problems like better enabling city employees with technology and repairing broken and frustrating resident journeys on the website. The City of Corona is a pioneer in adopting new and innovative digital solutions to transform the experience of engaging with government – listening to the voices of all city residents and employees to inform planning and then taking action to improve outcomes, at scale.”

To learn more, see https://www.qualtrics.com/customers/city-of-corona/ .

About Qualtrics XM for Government

Qualtrics helps government organizations design experiences that build public trust and foster community engagement by putting people at the center of every government experience. As the most comprehensive platform for strategic experience management, Qualtrics enables government organizations to capture feedback across every touchpoint and journey, streamline workflows and automate actions to continuously improve the experience of communities and employees. Its unmatched ability to capture unsolicited feedback and segment populations based on actual experiences helps government agencies design more inclusive and effective services, programs and policies. Qualtrics is FedRAMP-compliant, ISO 27001-certified and HITRUST-certified, so organizations can confidently collect and analyze data knowing sensitive information is secure. The solutions are used by more than 600 state, provincial and local government organizations and more than 170 federal offices to harness the power of resident and employee sentiment to design policies and provide services the public needs most. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com/government.

About Qualtrics

Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management category, is a cloud-native software provider that empowers organizations to deliver exceptional experiences and build deep relationships with their customers and employees – so they can understand their greatest friction points, retain and engage top talent, and deliver the right products and services. Nearly 20,000 organizations around the world use Qualtrics’ advanced AI to listen, understand, and take action. Qualtrics uses its vast universe of experience data to form the largest database of human sentiment in the world. Qualtrics is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah and Seattle. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.

About the City of Corona

The City of Corona, established in 1886, is a historical Southern Californian city boasting a diverse population of over 160,000 residents. With a thriving business district, picturesque parks, top-tier educational institutions, and captivating scenic surroundings, Corona epitomizes a dynamic and thriving community.