An Interview with Qualtrics’ Strategy & Research Suite Gurus

Editor’s Note: While I was attending the QualtricsX4 Summit 2024, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jill Larson, Chief Product Officer responsible for the Qualtrics’ market research suite of products, and Karen Goldstein, Head of Product Science, DesignXM and BX (Brand Experience). Read on to learn about how market research is essential for work on Customer Experience (CX), Qualtrics' expansion into the research space, and how it may affect other industry players.  Keep in mind that Jill emphasizes that Qualtrics is partner-first and aims to sell software rather than compete with agencies and consulting firms. But we do discuss Qualtrics' strategy and research suite, including panel management, qualitative research tools, and consolidation of different research systems into one platform. 

Let’s level set with your respective roles; Karen, we’ll start with you, and how your role fits with what Jill does

Karen Goldstein: I'm a product scientist. I lead the product science team on Jill's team. I've been a career-long market research practitioner, so, IRI, Synovate, Knowledge Networks, GfK, and then Qualtrics. Essentially my job is to be the voice of the customer, shoulder to shoulder with the PMs, the UX and engineering teams to make sure that we are building the right things that would've made my life easier for all those years.

Jill Larson: I lead the product team for all things related to brand and market research, so all of our products, which we're now referring to as the strategy and research suite. And I think one of the smartest things I ever did was bring Karen onto the team because I'm not a research expert (though I've become a pretend research expert over the last four years). It wasn't necessarily easy to find people that are longtime practitioners, experts in the field and also know how that translates into tech.

So Karen is pretty unique and has built a pretty unique, amazing team that work for her to help inform everything that we do. Not just tech, but we're thinking about what are the real methodologies that researchers need and what are all the pain points and how to solve that. And then because we're part of Qualtrics, we have to connect that back to CX and EX. And I would say even more so to CX because it's such an amazing virtual cycle of market research and understanding to think about around the corner what's next? How are people changing? And then you marry that with, okay, now we've landed some kind of experience with customers, what's going on? How is it landing with them?

What is your perspective on the role of traditional market research professionals in the world of CX?

Karen Goldstein: From my perspective, CX is about designing and fixing broken experiences. You may have alerts that this is a problem or this is a pain point. You need strategy and insight to figure out what is the right fix that will move the needle. So you're alerted that there was a customer care issue. Well, what is the proper messaging that needs to be communicated? All of that needs to be tested to make sure that whatever change you implement is the right change. I look at it as strategy and research, it's the underpinning of everything.

[related-article title="Qualtrics X4 Summit Takeaways: Strategic Leadership, Ethical AI, and Data Empowerment" url="https://www.greenbook.org/insights/insights-industry-news/qualtrics-x4-summit-takeaways-strategic-leadership-ethical-ai-and-data-empowerment"]

Jill Larson: There didn't used to be a CX discipline or it wasn't called that, there wasn't customer care. There were, almost always, people in companies who cared about how are things going and is this customer going to keep buying from us. And they were siloed into the call center. The KPIs on the call center were how to keep the calls really short and keep customers happy and get them off the phone because it's expensive. Or you'd have people more closer to the retail stores. And so they're trying to understand how did the customer experience go. And they're responsible for dollars brought in that day in the store. And then you had your digital team, which is usually your marketing team, and they're not usually listening to how did the customer experience go or why did people abandon their shopping carts necessarily. But they're designing, they're watching the metrics and seeing what's going wrong, what's going right. So this idea of customer experience started to evolve. 

For us (Qualtrics), we started seeing that around 2015, 2016. We created this category that we now refer to as Experience Management because we started seeing people doing research. They just happened to be doing longitudinal research with customers and then measuring things like CSAT and MPS scores from all over the company. And so then we started saying, well, this makes complete sense, of course they would be doing that. And then we started seeing HR and recruiting and people teams doing research on employees and then eventually potential employees, candidates.

Th underpinning is all that this is research just for different purposes. And so some of our buyers are the same person, where they tend to ladder up, they're either the CMO, or they ladder up to the CMO, and they're responsible for how products get positioned, how things are. They're looking around quarters at what's happening with competition in the same space. They're looking at how things are landing.

But in other companies, the teams are still siloed, sometimes call centers, maybe laddering up to ops, and other teams research are ... maybe they had their own research discipline or maybe there's also a discipline in marketing as well.

And so the challenge that we keep hearing is, those teams aren't always talking to each other. But look what can happen if they do. If you knew, if you were even running a call center or you're on a retail floor, and you actually knew why did we go make this new pair of shoes and who was it originally for and what problems does it solve, you're armed with a lot more information than just, hey, I've got to push some product today.

What's the strategy behind putting research back as an essential pillar of the organization?

Jill Larson: Research is still in our roots. It's been a growing business for us, and it continues to be. Market research is something like a $1.3/1.4 billion opportunity around the globe. So it's a huge opportunity for us. And again, going back to how we prioritize, not only do we want a larger slice of that market share because it's ripe, and there's no reason we can't continue to win in that space. But because the investments that we're making also ladder so well to CX and EX. So I'll give you some examples.

We could have said we're going to go deep into shopper insights and do shelf optimization. But would that support CX necessarily in a big way? No, that's a pretty specific use case. I'm not saying we would never do it, but that didn't seem like the low-lying fruit. So when we looked at that sort of placemat of here's all the things that we could do, that we know will add value squarely to market research and also will add value to CX, we said, "Well, qual." 

We've not been doing qualitative research, you know this, we've been known for quant for years and years and years. 22 years. And we definitely have been making investments on analysis related to open text responses, and then more recently to call center recorded calls and transcripts and even to online reputations, you can look at social data. But we didn't really have true qualitative methodologies. That seemed like a really obvious space for us to get into because they just marry so well together. So we did our homework.

Karen Goldstein: And researchers don't just have one toolbox to play, they're mixed method researchers, so then we should have mixed methods.

Jill Larson: And what better way to capture more from your existing customers or your employees than enable them to record video and give you video feedback or do an in-depth interview with them or do a focus group with them. So it completely makes sense. So now we've got customers like Delta Airlines who they've got a huge voice of customer program that they've put in place. It's not just quant, they also are now implementing video feedback at scale.

So qual made sense. So Karen helped us design everything from video feedback to how people are using in-depth interviews and focus groups. And we'll continue, there's a long roadmap of adding more and more capabilities.

And then another example, two more examples at least, another one would be panel management. Researchers need panel to talk to. Well, why wouldn't you have a panel of your customers that you're also leveraging for other things? My favorite example I think is Porsche who has the Porsche Buyers Club. They don't call it a panel or an advisory group, it's the Buyers Club. And they know the most distinct characteristic in that panel is either you're a classic car person or you're a new Porsche person. And they're very different types of people. But they use that panel in ways that are more like a loyalty group. You get to see some really cool stuff early on and we want to get your feedback.

And we've got people using more traditional versions of panels where they're doing product testing or they're getting early feedback on everything from buying fruit in the grocery store to censuses using panel management for all sorts of different studies. So that made sense to researchers and it made sense to CX.

And then a third example would be the research hub. Why wouldn't you want to be able to access all of your insights? And it doesn't really matter at the end of the day if we're building that tech to help you find insights for products that haven't been launched or feedback from customers that are experiencing your services.

You could potentially cast a shadow over a lot of people in the industry as you will now be new competition for them. You are going to be challenging them on some level.

Jill Larson: We are, we are. I will tell you, we see our two biggest competitors as Thoma Bravo and Press Ganey. So Thoma Bravo bought Medallia and then they bought UserTesting and then they bought Living Lens. We're not trying to chase them, but I think we both see this vision where these things are coming together in a really interesting way where you need all these capabilities. And so Medallia is doing a similar thing. Similarly, Press Ganey bought up a whole bunch of different research platforms and then renamed them Forsta over the last couple of years. So we are seeing a lot of I would say former partners starting to get a bit nervous because we are expanding our research capabilities.

Qualtrics has offered consulting via research services for some time now. But we really are partner first. And so what we don't want to do is go compete with the big, big or small, agencies across the world. We want to sell software, that's our number one goal. And so every time we have an opportunity to help work with a partner, whether it's an implementation partner, a thought leader, any kind of SI, we are all for it. Because again, we're looking for scale in software revenue. We're not necessarily looking to go big into the services business and go become the next Kantar, Ipsos or Nielsen. They're really good at their jobs, we'd rather be partners.

How will your new strategy & research offerings work?

Jill Larson: We currently don't, and we don't have any plans to offer moderation services. We're really looking to fill in gaps where we don't have partnerships or a customer doesn't have a partner relationship, or maybe there's a region where there's a service needed and there's a gap. We still want to be partner first.

So if a partner said, "Hey, we're going to go help you with your survey design," or, "We're going to go conduct these in-depth interviews or focus groups." We want them to be using Qualtrics tech. But we're all for them doing anything from implementation to thought leadership, to guidance, to using their own scoring system and benchmarks to help customers make decisions.

And to be clear, we are not in the panel business. What we want to do is support customers who want to build and manage their own panels. So I know we're competing with some other companies, they tend to be smaller. And we don't currently offer any services to help you build and manage that community. We might because some of our customers have been asking, but we would rather have partners that can do that, and then leverage our tech to manage the panel and continue to engage with them, etc.

So right now, the customers that have been adopting Audience Management, which is our panel management tool, are managing it themselves. I don't think I've heard of anybody yet, not that I understand every single customer deeply, but the customers that I've talked to that are using it are managing that panel in-house themselves. But it is theirs, they're curating the panel. Some of them are going broad and then targeting directly for certain studies. Some customers are doing small panels.

If they're keeping that panel list, if you will, in Qualtrics, in XiD, in our directory. And then we've got tools that help manage contact frequency and things like that. So that's one offer that we've had out for a year and a half. And we just keep adding more value to it.

And different from that, you also might be running a study where you want access to a third-party panel that you don't know. And our customers today would go to research services and say, "Here's what I need." And they can still do that. But we're also building online panels that you can just buy access directly from the software. So you don't have to talk to humans if you don't want to. You can use a credit card. In the future you could use an invoice. And you could say, "I just want to run a study right now, I need 5,000 respondents of gen pop." So these are good for quick responses. 

As we wrap, what’s one last thing you want our audience to know?

Jill Larson: I think I would say there's more that you can do with our suite than you probably are aware of, so talk to us, ask us, find us. Because I think you'd be floored at how much you could do with Qualtrics.

Karen Goldstein: I was going with the consolidation, is you don't need to know all these different systems, it's all easy to do one system, and we have those tools for most research use cases.