Qualtrics big plan: Digital twins of real customers to simulate, predict experiences

Qualtrics wants to simulate and predict the customer journey and experience to tie them to business outcomes. The company has enough data from decades of experience data to make it work.

In a strategic pivot, Qualtrics, which is best known for its customer and employee experience applications for everything from managing omnichannel channels, engagement and user experience, is becoming more of a data and AI platform.

The future of Qualtrics Experience Management is the XM Data & AI Platform, which will launch in 2027. Qualtrics is leveraging its years of experience data to simulate decisions, predict and intervene to resolve problems, deliver outcomes, reduce churn, build loyalty and ultimate increase lifetime value.

Qualtrics CEO Jayson Maynard said there's a gap between what people expect and what's delivered. This gap, dubbed the Experience Gap, has put nearly $3 trillion in sales at risk. "Experience has always been the strategy every leader believed in, but unfortunately the technology wasn’t available to execute at scale," said Maynard.

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Previously, Qualtrics' remit was to listen and measure experiences and provide insights so enterprises could understand what customers were thinking. All of that experience tracking has given Qualtrics a massive dataset and context over time.

Qualtrics also recently acquired Press Ganey Forsta, which measures healthcare experiences, for $6.75 billion. Qualtrics now can add decades of healthcare data to its platform.

Digital twins of real customers

Qualtrics has enough data from two decades to simulate, predict and deliver outcomes.

According to Qualtrics, lifetime value of customers is delivered through Experience Loops (X-loops) instead of one journey map. X-Loops evolve from acquiring loops to retaining them with multiple moments in between. X-loops are also dynamic. Context is what delivers the moments that drive the X-loop.

Qualtrics big plan for its platform is to generate synthetic data and build digital twins of real customers. With that digital twin, Qualtrics XM Data & AI platform will be able to do the following:

• Simulate experiences and reactions to new offerings and pricing and policy changes. Qualtrics said it will be able to deliver research-grade simulations fine-tuned on its own research corpus.
• Predict outcomes with Experience Prediction Models, small language models trained and optimized on Qualtrics proprietary datasets and ontology. Those models will be able to predict customer satisfaction, engagement and lifetime value.
• Deliver outcomes that are governed. Qualtrics said its platform will be able to check actions against enterprise rules and policies. Experience Agents will act within those rules and a feature called Trusted Outcomes will close the loop. That moment then drives context for the system.

Qualtrics' first installment of its new XM Data & AI Platform is available now with the following:

• Experience Loop Diagnostic Service, which maps the customer lifecycle, identifies missing data and surfaces disconnected systems. Qualtrics XM Advisors will deliver a defined relationship map of the experience as it operates, a visual model of the X-loop moments and a governance and roadmap to activate.
• Reputation Experience, which tracks what customers say publicly and creates a channel to acquire customers. Reputation Experience brings that data into the XM suite and connects it to data and context. Responses from companies can be managed across Google, Yelp and Facebook in the brand's voice. Reputation Experience also requires a services package.