What are your top experience management challenges? We wondered about that and decided to conduct a non-scientific, fun exercise at the 2024 Qualtrics X4 Summit to find out. As a sponsor of X4, we had an exhibit and invited attendees to stop by and consider the following:
What are the biggest challenges to making XM work in your organization?
- Resources: Securing the resources necessary to support XM goals and initiatives
- Engagement & Alignment: Ensuring employees are on board with our XM objectives and understand their roles
- Data Integration: Consolidating the right data from the right sources to truly understand our customers and employees
- Action & Change: Driving the necessary actions and improvements to really make a difference
- Impact: Ensuring our XM strategy and programs result in quantifiable value for the organization
To make it both interesting and engaging, we provided participants with three marbles of different colors and instructed them to make their selection by dropping each marble into glass cylinders corresponding to each challenge. The gold marble represented their top challenge, the silver marble represented their number two challenge, and the white marble represented their number three challenge.
The overall results (all colors) were as follows:
- Action & Change (169)
- Engagement & Alignment (141)
- Resources (122)
- Data Integration (121)
- Impact (120)
Digging deeper – three additional observations
While the rankings based on total marbles in each cylinder are interesting, they don’t tell the whole story. The results are even more interesting when we consider at how people ranked their top three challenges. Here are three observations.
- Action & Change is truly a challenge for XM leaders. Indeed, Action & Change topped the list with 169 total marbles, but it is underscored by the fact that a significant number (67) of those marbles were gold. This cylinder also contained 58 silver marbles and 44 white.
- Data Integration is a top challenge for many XM leaders. Even though Data Integration ranked fourth (or a virtual tie for third), we found it interesting that many (51) considered it their top challenge. In other words, if we had only given participants one marble, it would have ranked second.
- XM leaders are not focused on Impact – yet. Of the participants who selected Impact as a challenge, half of them ranked it as their lowest priority. Only 19 gold marbles were in the cylinder, followed by 41 silver and 60 white. I think most XM leaders know that impact is important but find they need to have the resources, engagement, data, and action necessary to achieve and document the desired impact
Hear From the Author
Listen as Pat Gibbons describes X4 and shares his thoughts after listening to CX leaders’ top challenges.
Bonus – cash for cancer research
All in all, the exercise was an engaging way to meet people and discuss the challenges of making XM work in their organizations. But wait, there’s more! There was one more step as part of our informal study.
After each participant made their selections they were offered an envelope that contained cash – one bill that ranged between $1 and $100. After opening the envelope to see how much they received, they had a choice of keeping the money (no judgment for that) or returning it to Walker so that we could make a nice donation to 5 For The Fight, Qualtrics’ philanthropy for cancer research. The vast majority of participants quickly passed along their winnings and, with Walker’s additional contribution, $1,500 has been contributed to this worthy organization.
Thank you to all the X4 attendees who participated in our interactive exercise!