Qualtrics

Overview

Qualtrics is an experience management (XM) platform designed to help organizations collect, understand, and act on feedback data across various operational areas. Founded in 2002, Qualtrics offers specialized suites for managing customer experiences (CX), employee experiences (EX), product experiences (PX), and brand experiences (BrandXM) source: Qualtrics Support. The platform provides tools for survey design, data collection through multiple channels, advanced analytics, and automated action workflows.

For customer experience, Qualtrics CustomerXM allows businesses to map customer journeys, identify pain points, and predict churn. It supports various feedback mechanisms, including website intercepts, in-app surveys, and post-interaction feedback, to provide a holistic view of customer sentiment source: Qualtrics CustomerXM Overview. EmployeeXM focuses on employee engagement, lifecycle feedback, and organizational culture, providing insights for HR departments to improve retention and productivity source: Qualtrics EmployeeXM Introduction. ProductXM assists product teams in gathering feedback throughout the product development lifecycle, from ideation to launch and post-release, helping to prioritize features and enhance product satisfaction. BrandXM helps marketers track brand health, measure campaign effectiveness, and understand market perception using tools for brand tracking and advertising research.

Qualtrics is primarily targeted at enterprise clients that require comprehensive solutions for managing experience programs at scale. Its capabilities extend beyond basic survey tools, offering features like predictive intelligence, text analytics, and integration with CRM and HRIS systems. The platform's enterprise focus is reflected in its custom pricing model and extensive compliance certifications, including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA source: Qualtrics Security Overview. Developers can utilize the Qualtrics Developer Platform to integrate survey data and program management into existing applications, enabling programmatic control over survey distribution and data retrieval.

Key features

• Survey Design and Distribution: Tools for creating surveys with various question types, logic flows, and branding options. Supports distribution across web, email, mobile, and in-app channels.
• CustomerXM: Dedicated suite for managing customer feedback, journey mapping, sentiment analysis, and closed-loop feedback across customer touchpoints.
• EmployeeXM: Solutions for employee engagement, pulse surveys, 360-degree feedback, and organizational culture assessment.
• ProductXM: Tools to collect and analyze product feedback, concept testing, feature prioritization, and user experience research throughout the product lifecycle.
• BrandXM: Capabilities for brand tracking, advertising effectiveness measurement, market segmentation, and understanding brand perception.
• Text iQ: AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) to analyze open-text responses, identify themes, and categorize sentiment.
• Predictive Analytics: Features to identify patterns in experience data, predict behaviors like churn, and recommend actions.
• Developer Platform & APIs: A suite of APIs for integrating Qualtrics data and functionality with other enterprise systems, enabling programmatic survey management and data export source: Qualtrics API Integration.
• Reporting and Dashboards: Customizable dashboards and reporting tools to visualize data, share insights, and monitor key experience metrics.
• Action Planning: Tools to create and track action plans based on feedback insights, facilitating closed-loop feedback processes.

Pricing

Qualtrics offers custom enterprise pricing, tailored to the specific needs and scale of each organization. While a free account with limited features is available for basic use (one survey, 100 responses), paid plans, such as "Research Core," require direct contact with the sales team for a quote source: Qualtrics XM Pricing. Pricing is typically based on factors such as the number of users, expected response volumes, specific XM product suites utilized (e.g., CustomerXM, EmployeeXM), and required integrations.

Common integrations

Qualtrics provides various methods for integration, including pre-built connectors and a developer platform with APIs. These integrations enable data flow between Qualtrics and other enterprise systems, enhancing automation and data utilization.

• CRM Systems: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot for linking survey responses to customer records and triggering automated actions source: Qualtrics CRM Integrations.
• HRIS Platforms: Workday, SAP SuccessFactors for integrating employee data with EmployeeXM surveys and feedback.
• Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: Tableau, Microsoft Power BI for advanced data visualization and reporting by exporting Qualtrics data.
• Marketing Automation: Marketo, Oracle Eloqua for personalizing survey distribution and follow-up based on marketing campaigns.
• Service Management Platforms: ServiceNow for embedding surveys into service workflows and leveraging feedback to improve service delivery source: ServiceNow Qualtrics Integration.
• Collaboration Tools: Slack, Microsoft Teams for sending notifications and sharing insights from Qualtrics.
• Data Warehouses: Snowflake, Google BigQuery for centralizing experience data with other operational data.

Alternatives

• Medallia: Offers a competing enterprise experience management platform with a strong focus on customer and employee feedback across various channels.
• SurveyMonkey: Provides a widely used survey platform, suitable for a range of use cases from simple polls to more complex market research, with various pricing tiers.
• ServiceNow: While primarily an IT service management platform, ServiceNow includes extensive customer and employee workflow capabilities that can incorporate feedback and experience data.
• Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo): Provides a robust survey and feedback platform with advanced features for market research and data collection.
• Confirmit (now part of Forsta): Offers enterprise-grade solutions for customer experience, employee experience, and market research, including advanced text and sentiment analytics.

Getting started

To begin using the Qualtrics Developer Platform to interact with survey data programmatically, you typically authenticate with an API token and then make HTTP requests to the Qualtrics API endpoints. The following Python example demonstrates how to retrieve a list of surveys using the Qualtrics API. This example assumes you have an API token and a data center ID.

import requests
import json

# Replace with your actual API token and data center ID
API_TOKEN = "YOUR_API_TOKEN"
DATA_CENTER = "YOUR_DATA_CENTER_ID" # e.g., "iad1" for US East, "eu1" for Europe

BASE_URL = f"https://{DATA_CENTER}.qualtrics.com/API/v3/"
HEADERS = {
    "X-API-TOKEN": API_TOKEN,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
}

def get_surveys():
    endpoint = "surveys"
    url = BASE_URL + endpoint
    
    try:
        response = requests.get(url, headers=HEADERS)
        response.raise_for_status() # Raise an exception for HTTP errors
        
        surveys = response.json()
        if surveys and "result" in surveys and "elements" in surveys["result"]:
            print("Successfully retrieved surveys:")
            for survey in surveys["result"]["elements"]:
                print(f"  - ID: {survey['id']}, Name: {survey['name']}")
        else:
            print("No surveys found or unexpected response format.")
            
    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        print(f"Error retrieving surveys: {e}")
    except json.JSONDecodeError:
        print("Error decoding JSON response.")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    get_surveys()

Before running this code, ensure you have the requests library installed (pip install requests). You will need to obtain your API token and data center ID from your Qualtrics account settings. The API documentation on the Qualtrics support site provides detailed information on available endpoints and authentication methods source: Qualtrics API Reference.