Over the past two weeks, we attended back-to-back CX events: first, Qualtrics’ X4 in Salt Lake City, then Medallia Experience in Las Vegas. Both Leaders in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management Solutions, Q4 2024, these vendors court enterprisewide CX programs as well as digital, contact center, and location-based operations leaders. Despite the similarities in the products and target audiences, the conferences showcased materially different approaches.

Both providers announced a host of new or enhanced features, but of course the focus was on all things AI. Qualtrics made a bold jump into the (very busy) AI agent space with its announcement of Experience Agents. Experience Agents will be customer-facing, able to deliver chatlike experiences that go beyond menu-driven chatbots such as helping customers find products tailored to their needs, performing real-time service recovery, and conducting conversational surveys. In contrast, Medallia’s AI-related announcements mainly focused on employee-facing enhancements, including AI-supported Root Cause Assist and text analytics theme improvements. These features will help employees get more out of unstructured text and accelerate the insights-to-action process.

What both approaches have in common is that providers in this space continue to offer more than most clients can — or want to — handle. For many clients, especially those in healthcare or financial services, using generative AI in customer-facing applications is still too risky. For others, their organization’s unwillingness to pull more data into these platforms will limit the value of the AI-enhanced features.

Attendees at both events echoed what we see in our work with clients: Many are still struggling to mature beyond surveys to look at other sources of data, earn stakeholder buy-in, and show how CX connects to business goals. Attendees are excited for AI-powered tools, but they are realistic in understanding that these are in fact just tools. Organizational culture and strategy remain just as important and no less challenging to overcome.

Whether you’re using Qualtrics, Medallia, or another CFM solution, these events should have you thinking about:

  1. AI. No kidding. But as ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said from the Qualtrics stage, “the worst advice I can give you is to wait for second-mover advantage.” While your organization might not be ready to use the new AI-powered features, it’s time to start figuring out a path toward using AI to help understand your customers and create better interactions.
  2. Data. As Carolynn Smith, vice president and head of USB Service at Prudential Financial, said during a Medallia breakout session, “you can’t just layer genAI on top of bad data.” Prudential has been on a 10-year journey to modernize its data, and that labor is paying off now as it is able to experiment with lots of different AI innovations across the business. CX pros need to get closer to their data and IT counterparts to ensure that customer feedback is part of the organization’s data and AI strategy.
  3. Employees. There was a lot of talk about EX and CX connections during these events, but CX pros also need to think about how they can help employees boost their artificial intelligence quotient (AIQ) to leverage AI-enabled tech. Don’t underestimate the amount of internal effort needed to bring employees along as AI becomes more and more of a part of the everyday.

There’s a lot more to unpack from these events. If you’re a client and want to learn more, please give us a call!