Insights are great — but taking action is what we need now

We all have insights — and right now many organizations have more than they ever had before. Find out how to go one step further and use them to drive real change and take action to improve the experience for customers and employees

The way we work has changed forever. Digital transformation has accelerated at an unprecedented pace, workplaces and working practices have changed beyond recognition in 3 short months, and customer needs have radically changed.

None of this is ‘new’ as such, more that recent events have accelerated changes that were already underway, hitting fast forward on everything from the rise of remote working, to demands for brands to play their part in the global movement for social justice.

It’s forced brands to be agile, and across the board we’re seeing brands respond with four key activities:

• Listen more — as employee and customer needs change, organizations need to keep a pulse on what’s happening
• Listen across channels — with customers switching to digital at a faster rate, it’s more important than ever to install listening posts across physical and digital channels
• Identify experience gaps — what worked before, won’t necessarily work now, so as new customer and employee needs emerge, many organizations will be finding gaps that weren’t there before
• Act fast — knowing what’s not working, and why, is one thing but organizations need to take the right actions to close the gaps and respond to the changing needs of their stakeholders

It’s all about taking the right actions — something that’s far from easy at a time when there’s no playbook to follow or past experience to learn from.

The key is to go from insights — and let’s face it most businesses are drowning in data and insights — to action, in order to move fast and close experience gaps as (or even before!) they emerge.

How to go from insights to action

For over a decade, organizations have been amassing more and more data, and applying analytics to draw out key insights whether it’s in their product development, customer service, or employee experience.

Today, insights are not enough — the most successful companies are those that take the next step, and translate them into actions and tangible change for their employees and customers.

At Qualtrics, we built the Experience Management Platform™ to enable you to do exactly that.

Yes, there are more than 125 channels you can use to listen to customers and employees. And of course, there’s a powerful, predictive intelligence engine under the hood working 24/7 to turn that into breakthrough insights.

But to take it one step further, we’ve added a host of capabilities that help you go from insights to action.

• Text iQ — part of our predictive intelligence engine, it automatically structures open text feedback, like survey responses or chatbot conversations to identify trending topics and sentiment
• Smart Conversations — using Text iQ, it makes feedback a two-way process, automatically identifying what people are talking about, and responding accordingly - no wasted questions, just 2-way conversations about the things your customers and employees care most about
• Automated Actions — you have your insights, now you need to take action. XM Automated Actions uses custom workflows to take the actions for you. With no code workflows that integrate into your existing systems, it triggers the right actions in the right teams across the organization whether it’s creating a ticket, updating your records, or alerting a specific individual in the company.

With insights, you know there’s a problem. With a system of action, you not only know what to do about it — you’re already doing something.

It’s something you can apply across your employee, customer, product, and brand experience programs to help close experience gaps.

Here’s a few examples of how it’s being put into practice:

That’s just a few of the ways we’re seeing Qualtrics users make the most of the XM system of action to respond quickly, take action and make changes that have a big impact on their customers and employees.