Qualtrics XM review

Powerful but easy to use

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(Image: © Qualtrics XM)

TechRadar Verdict

Qualtrics XM is powerful but pricey, and whether it is worth the investment for your organization will come down to the size of the datasets you deal with.

Pros

  • +

    User-friendly, easy to get started

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    Extensive analytics and reports

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    Very flexible and customizable

Cons

  • -

    Expensive

  • -

    Exporting options could be better

  • -

    Support can be slow

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Qualtrics XM is an experience management (XM) software platform that promises to deliver ‘exceptional customer, product, brand and employee experiences’.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the idea of experience management, it is aimed at measuring and improving the experiences organizations provide to their customers and stakeholders.

The process involves first collecting feedback from customers, employees, suppliers, and partners. Then, using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), hidden insights are uncovered and routed to the people best suited to take action on the new information.

Plans and Pricing

Like many companies in the customer experience software market, Qualtrics XM doesn’t display pricing information on its website. However, I found other sites suggesting that prices start at $1500/year.

The reason Qualtrics XM doesn’t display prices is that every customer is offered a solution specific to their needs, and you first start by requesting a demo.

The company offers a wide range of products in a variety of categories, with a focus on the management of experiences for customers, products, employees, and brands.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

Qualtrics XM provides customer experience management software that will determine, analyze and improve your organization’s net promoter score (NPS). The NPS is a management tool that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company, and serves as an indication of customer loyalty and overall satisfaction.

In addition, Qualtrics offers digital customer experience software that aims to improve the click-through rates of your websites or apps through optimized digital journeys.

Finally, there is a ‘Voice of the Customer’ product that enables organizations to ‘listen’ to their customers with multi-channel feedback tools including surveys, websites, apps, voice assistants and chatbots.

Qualtrics XM has software for measuring employee engagement so that managers can pinpoint what is driving engagement and productivity, and can act in real-time to address problems and make improvements.

It also contains 360º feedback and performance review tools that automate employee performance reviews and the delivery of individual reports. In case you didn’t know, the 360º feedback process is one whereby superiors, peers, subordinates, and sometimes even customers of an employee evaluate his or her performance.

Finally, there is an employee pulse survey tool which is for feedback in the other direction, from employees to the company. It gives employees the means to provide feedback about general topics or specific projects or streams of work.

 

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

Qualtrics XM’s pricing research and market segmentation software products use surveys and complex conjoint studies so that organizations can analyze market segmentation and discover what works and what doesn’t.

Armed with that information, organizations can tailor products and services to specific segments, and marketing campaigns can target the right customers with the right messages.

There is also a concept testing tool for validating product ideas. It will measure concept effectiveness, identify strengths and weaknesses, and align concepts with brands.  Organizations can then focus on the concepts that offer the best market opportunities.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

This brand tracking software helps organizations track what’s happening in their markets so that they can react to new opportunities, measure the return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns, compare themselves to the competition, and eliminate barriers to purchase.

There is also an ad testing tool so companies can identify which ads will drive sales and which will fail and possibly create negative brand impressions.

Features

Qualtrics XM has a huge range of features, including 100+ question types, sophisticated logic, randomization, scoring, and translation. Some of the more noteworthy features are Core XM, the XM Platform, and Qualtrics iQ.

All of Qualtrics XM’s software products are built on top of the Core XM platform, which facilitates the gathering of customer insights, product research and development, marketing and brand research, and strategy and planning.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

All of this data and research can be centralized, which enables organizations to build end-to-end views of stakeholder journeys, avoid over surveying, improve the quality of insights, and target higher rates of engagement.

The Qualtrics XM Platform is built around advanced data processing, intuitive statistics, and easy-to-use reports and dashboards.

AI-based smart routing ensures the right people get notified by customized automatic alerts which can be triggered if the thresholds you set have been reached.

Qualtrics XM’s closed-loop ticketing system lets companies track issues to resolution. Tickets can be escalated or reassigned, or sub-tickets created, enabling customer responses to occur at scale.

Qualtrics iQ makes predictive intelligence and statistical analysis accessible for everyone. It is a suite of tools including Text iQTM and Voice iQTM which analyze text or recordings of phone conversations to reveal insights.

There is also Driver iQTM, which correlates data to prioritize key drivers, Stats iQTM to help both beginner and expert analysts identify trends and produce predictive models, and Predict iQTM, which automatically identifies at-risk customers and the drivers of their behavior.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

Interface and In Use

Each of Qualtrics XM’s products can be accessed through a web browser, either on desktop or mobile, and all are very well designed. You can tell a lot of time and effort has gone into making the interfaces as user-friendly as possible. They are clean and uncluttered, with lots of icons used alongside action buttons and links.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

Color has also been used effectively to pinpoint items that require attention.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

In addition, subtle interface changes occur between large and small screens, which ensures all the same data is still presented but in a way that works best for the device you’re using.

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(Image credit: Qualtrics XM)

Support

If you like to try and solve problems yourself, there is a series of help articles. For those who like to speak to someone for support, you need to have registered for an account and be logged in.

The Competition

If you consider Qualtrics XM to only be about surveys, then its competitors would be the likes of SurveyMonkey and ZohoSurvey, as well as KwikSurveys, and YesInsights.

But Qualtrics XM is a pioneer in the field of experience management, and its advanced AI and machine learning features really set it apart from anything else.

Final Verdict

Qualtrics XM is powerful but easy to use. It is packed with features and functionality, but it is also pricey. As an enterprise-grade software product, it may not be suited to everyone. If your organization deals with large datasets, then Qualtrics XM is ideal. However, if your datasets are small, the cost may outweigh the benefits.

John Faulds

John is a freelance writer and web developer who has been working digitally for 30 years. His experience is in journalism, print design and web development, and he has worked in Australia and the UK. His work has been published in Future publications including TechRadar, Tom's Guide, and ITProPortal.