Qualtrics International Inc. today announced what it says is the most significant upgrade of its platform for collecting feedback from employees and customers in six years: a round of new artificial intelligence-based features that improve the quality of information gathered about customers and employees as well as responses to that input.

The announcement of XM/os2 kicks off what Qualtrics said will be a $500 million investment in AI over the next four years. The software’s generative capabilities are the result of training on a database of more than 12 billion customer and employee profiles in an effort to automate sentiment analysis, better understand customer needs and respond more quickly.

Qualtrics said it’s now capturing and analyzing more than 3.5 billion conversations and interactions a year, including call center conversations, chat logs, survey responses, social media posts and product reviews, and using that to deliver personalized content and to undergird automated actions.

New AI-powered auto-segmentation capabilities in its ExperienceID customer experience database automatically group customers and employees into segments, such as teams, geographies and industries so trends and responses can be identified more easily. New generative pretrained transformer capabilities in the company’s xFlow workflow automation software enable organizations to automatically trigger GPT-powered actions in the systems their teams are already using.

Generative AI capabilities in the FrontlineXM software for support agents will recommend and generate personalized responses based on each customer’s profile data in the ExperienceID database so frontline workers can quickly respond to customer feedback on review sites, social media and other channels according to an individual’s history with the company and the nature of the interaction.

Smart social media monitoring

Frontline Team Assist continually monitors social media and review sites to flag comments that require immediate action and attach information about the customer, their activity and previous interactions with the company. It then recommends actions to take to resolve the issue.

“In the past, a team member would have spent hours scanning reviews and responding with cookie-cutter templates,” said Jill Larson, chief product officer for strategy and research. “AI not only cuts the time spent scouring websites but serves us better responses.”

For contact center employees, the system assesses such factors as a caller’s emotions and urgency and uses natural language processing to give agents real-time information during a conversation as well as prescriptive steps needed to address the problem based on the customer’s unique situation.

In a demonstration for journalists, Qualtrics showed a hypothetical scenario in which a customer calls in exasperation over bags lost on a flight. The demo showed how the agent could immediately see the customer’s history with the company and get a recommendation to offer gift cards or mileage credits in specific amounts based on the importance of retaining that individual customer.

New AI-enabled capabilities in Qualtrics Automated Call Summaries automatically summarize calls and enable agents to quickly generate support tickets, send personalized follow-up emails and create support knowledge base articles based on a combination of real-time information and historical customer data.

Survey-less employee feedback

The company is also boosting performance management capabilities with generative AI. XM for People Teams gathers both structured employee feedback from surveys and unstructured feedback from channels such as public Slack channels and job site reviews. It can correlate feedback with behavior data such as the number of hours employees are working, meeting lengths and frequency and after-hours activity to deliver an aggregated well-being score. This gives managers a continuous measure of satisfaction of people within their groups.

Qualtrics Manager Assist also provides personalized AI-powered coaching based on survey results, open-text comment areas and continuous listening. Predictive AI capabilities identify people and teams with a high risk of attrition and suggest the most likely reasons employees might leave so that managers and human resources professionals can take proactive steps to retain at-risk employees.

“AI can summarize comments without revealing identities to tell managers how their teams are doing without asking a single question,” said Paul Mayfield, chief product officer for employee experience at Qualtrics.

The Qualtrics Research Hub, which is a master repository of research and feedback data across an organization, is getting generative AI search capabilities to that such assets as brand studies, customer feedback and market data can be queried in natural language.

Finally, new AI capabilities in Qualtrics Video Feedback analyze video interactions to identify trends and associated quotes that are gathered into a single summary. It can scan a large collection of video content in minutes and discover insights that might elude a human operator, the company said.

GPT capabilities in xFlow are available today. Auto-segmentation, Manager Assist and generative AI-powered conversational experience capabilities are both in private beta test. XM Video Feedback automated summary capabilities will be generally available on August 15. Other capabilities will roll out through 2024.

Photo: Freepik