As you have hopefully seen, I’m now running the Qualtrics XM Institute, where we will be producing easy-to-consume, compelling content and training that both inspires business leaders with experience management (XM) possibilities and helps them drive value from their programs. Many people have asked me recently about why we’re now focusing on XM instead of on customer experience (CX).
The quick answer is that we are still focusing a lot on CX. It will continue to be a critical component of our work. The longer explanation for this CX-to-XM transition requires me to first break down how these two domains work together.
I’ve had the opportunity to lead the CX movement for many years now, and I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish together. While CX still has a lot of room for improvement, the discipline now has a robust set of repeatable skills and practices, which are being used by a growing—and increasingly capable—community of CX professionals. We’ve come a long way over the last decade!
When I take a step back and think about how CX has changed the way leading organizations operate, it’s really reshaped their behavior along two key dimensions:
- They have made human beings the center of focus
- They continuously generate and act upon insights
We unlocked something powerful in CX. By combining an intensified understanding of how people think, feel, and behave with our dramatically improving capabilities to uncover and act on those insights, we’ve created an entirely new set of best practices. In fact, I believe that this combination of humanity and intelligence will form the basis of how organizations compete in the future. It will be the fundamental component that defines success or failure.
But the power of humanity and intelligence is valuable beyond just our interactions with customers. We need to take what we’ve learned in CX and extend it across the entire enterprise, from suppliers, to employees, to partners, to customers. Every part of our organization should be built on a platform of humanity and intelligence.
That’s what XM is all about—Propelling humanity and intelligence across an enterprise.
Think of CX as the initial use case of XM. Yes, there’s still a lot to do in CX, but there are many other use cases that we should be thinking about as well, such as employee experience (EX), product experience (PX), and brand experience (BX). And all of these different experiences should be built upon the same XM foundation.
Our CX efforts have already been extending to XM. Customer journey mapping has led the way to employee journey mapping, voice of the customer programs have defined the model for voice of employee programs, and the understanding of behavioral economics and the use of experience design is being applied across many new areas.
If you’re a CX professional, I hope you’re just as excited about XM as I am. Not only will it generate even more demand for your skills and capabilities, but it also gives us the opportunity to take all we’ve learned from CX and apply it in a myriad of interesting new ways.
The bottom line: XM expands the humanity & intelligence uncovered by CX.
