Last week, I attended Qualtrics’ annual customer event, X4, and this year it was different.
It was different, not because it was in a new location – it was in Seattle this year, instead of Salt Lake City, where it has been held for the past couple of years.
Or, because they have a new CEO in place – Jason Maynard only took on the role in February this year.
It was different because, unlike other technology vendor events, there were no major new product announcements or demos on the main stage.
Now, I’m not saying that Qualtrics didn’t announce anything at the event.
They did, and in fact announced a bunch of new AI-powered innovations focused on improving the customer and employee experience, as well as market research, and closing what Maynard described in his opening keynote as the experience gap, i.e. the gap between insights and action.
These included:
- New enhancements to their platform that make it easy to bring contact center data into the platform, making what was previously an enterprise-only capability accessible to organizations of all sizes in weeks instead of months, as well as new social listening features that can instantly integrate feedback from Facebook and Instagram.
- New AI-powered automated text analytics capabilities that will allow the traditionally labor-intensive tasks of building topic models, tagging verbatims, and validating taxonomies to be done in hours instead of weeks, helping teams respond swiftly to what matters most.
- Experience Agents, which can proactively resolve issues before they escalate. Although these are only available in preview at the moment.
- Synthetic panels, or in other words, a consumer behavior prediction model built using real market research data from customers, that is designed to allow organizations to simulate how consumers might respond to research questions. This provides teams with a way to test concepts, messaging, and product decisions within hours instead of weeks, at half the cost of human panels. The synthetic panel for US consumers is now live, with plans to launch synthetic panels for the UK and Ireland, Canada, as well as Australia and New Zealand in the first half of 2026.
However, returning to the shift in focus for the event, I asked Brad Anderson, President of Products, Engineering, User Experience, and Security at Qualtrics, about it in a podcast interview I recorded at the event.
In true “eat your own dog food” fashion, Anderson explained that after last year’s X4, Qualtrics asked its customers for feedback, and discovered that customers wanted to see fewer product-focused presentations and more customer stories.
In short, customers said they wanted to hear stories that would inspire them and give them something to aspire to.
Anderson admitted that, as a “product guy,” this pivot was personally difficult for him, resulting in the first keynote he had ever given without doing a single product demo.
He added that their shift in focus was influenced by the maturing of their customer base, with an increasing number of the ‘early majority,’ in Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations language, being ready and able to embrace the full scope of Experience Management.
This feels like an eminently sensible move and matches other insights I hear from the market, which suggest that although brands are enthusiastic about all the technology and capabilities emerging, many of them are simply not yet ready to take advantage of these new innovations.
In fact, I have heard some brands say that, often, when they attend tech vendor events, it can feel like trying to board a bus that’s just out of reach and speeding away into the distance.
But the truth is that you can only go as far and as fast as your customers are willing to go.
Yes, you can nudge, encourage, and even cajole them a little. But ultimately, it’s their journey. So, Qualtrics’ decision to shift the focus of their event feels like a smart move.
Did Qualtrics Pull it Off?
From my perspective, I think so, and feedback from the conference floor was positive.
Initially, however, I must admit I was a little confused, but as the event progressed and we heard customer stories from Sandra Douglas Morgan, President of the LA Raiders; David Entwistle, President and CEO of Stanford Healthcare; Paul Brown, Founder and CEO of Inspire Brands; and Peggy Roe, EVP & Chief Customer Officer at Marriott International, on the main stage, it all started to come into focus.
While all those stories were great, the highlight for me was the presentation from Ben Dunham, CFO at TruGreen. It truly demonstrated what can be achieved when you listen to your customers, act on their feedback, and connect everything you do to customer and financial outcomes.
Dunham started his talk by informing the audience that TruGreen has 2.3 million customers, generates $1.5 billion in annual revenue, and is four times larger than their nearest competitor, but that their customer retention rate is ten points below the industry average of 80%.
Additionally, he pointed out that when he joined, TruGreen’s penetration of U.S. households was only three percent, highlighting a significant growth opportunity.
Thinking about how to capitalize on this opportunity, Dunham and his team realized that retention isn’t just a nice-to-have metric; it’s the best gauge of how good a business actually is at what it does.
So, they set a bold target of matching the industry average customer retention rate of 80% within five years, and when they crunched the numbers on what that would mean for the business, the results were staggering.
They calculated that an improvement of a single point of retention wouldn’t just deliver an extra $10 million of revenue in year one but would compound such that hitting their 80% target would unlock $500 million in new revenue and a $175 million increase in EBITDA.
To help achieve this, TruGreen decided to partner with Qualtrics and simultaneously introduce both Qualtrics’ employee and customer experience platforms. The reason for this, as Dunham mentioned from the stage, was best captured by a quote from Simon Sinek, Author and Inspirational Speaker on business leadership:
“Clients will never love a company until employees love it first.”
Tracking TruGreen’s Journey
Below are the key achievements of TruGreen’s customer service transformation:
- Initially, they thought that around 29% of the customers who left were doing so because of price. However, when they started really listening to customer calls, they found out that only six percent of customers were leaving because of price, and in fact, the rest were leaving due to service quality issues and lawn results.
- Moreover, when they replaced their infrequent and lengthy customer feedback surveys with simple micro-surveys, it instantly increased their feedback from customers from 500,000 responses to around 500 million responses, a 1,000% increase.
- When they introduced AI agents to handle routine inquiries, aiming to free up their human agents for more complex issues, these agents addressed 51% of customer concerns and reduced escalations by over 30% within the first week of deployment. The company now allocates 35% of its outreach to AI Experience Agents, which resolve simple issues autonomously and have an approval rating of over 50%.
- Employee engagement has increased by 20 points, rising from 53% to 73%.
- Their Net Promoter Score (NPS) has jumped from 4 to 34, with a long-term goal of reaching 50.
- They have improved their customer retention rate by 4%, and their focus on retention has already generated $280 million in revenue growth.
While TruGreen’s story and the results that they achieved are impressive, Dunham’s talk was also a great example of what can be achieved when you get clear on your strategy, understand the data and technology needed to execute it, and link it to financial, business, and customer outcomes.
To me, it should serve as an inspiration for every CX leader out there.
Imagine how you would feel if your CFO was on the main stage at one of your most important CX vendors’ annual customer event, extolling the virtues of your CX program and how it was driving business success.
That feels like a solid target to me, and I look forward to hearing from more CFOs who have become evangelists for their business’s CX initiatives.
