💬  Q&A Featuring Milind Kopikare, Head of Product - Surveys | Q&A

Hey Milind, no clue if you remember me at all but I was actually fortunate enough to sit down and talk with you at Summit a few years ago. Honestly can't even remember the pain points we were discussing at the time, but it was a great conversation.

That said, here is one to start us off:

What tools is the team currently working on for those of us programming surveys in the platform? Are there any new question types or tools we can get excited about?

Additionally, has the team considered whether a carousel question type would be a valuable tool for the platform? I think of this as a cross between the accordion and a loop and merge question. Allowing for the same question to be repeated for a set of options while only having one visible on the screen at a time, but maintaining users screen position for mobile friendliness. It is something I have considered developing, but it would be great if it became a built in part of the platform.

Thanks for doing an ama, i'm excited to see the questions others pose!

What's the craziest/most unique off-label use (uses other than typical surveys) you've seen they survey platform used for?

Hey Milind. Really appreciate access like this to ask higher level product questions. This is a bit of a technology architecture question, so hoping as the product owner you are able to answer it or engage the right resources on your side to get an answer. It would be great if you could provide some insight into how you see Qualtrics fitting into the enterprise technology eco-system...including typical issues and enterprise faces and whether you envision Qualtrics as the solution or something else.

Here is an example that might be helpful. To ensure a positive customer experience controlling the number of times a customer is 'touched' across sales & marketing, service, CX, research, etc. is critical. Qualtrics frequency controls manages survey frequency, but do you feel it would be the tool to manage frequency of customer touchpoints across all channels? This is an issue all companies are eventually going to have to tackle. One idea was to load customer 'touches' into Qualtrics as embedded data and then use Qualtrics as the central hub to determine which customers can be touched.

I'm assuming that, while theoretically possible, this would not be the role for Qualtrics you envision. If not then how would this ideally be addressed? Leverage APIs for all platforms that 'touch' customers to populate an internal 'customer touches' database to track touches across all channels...then build internal APIs so all platforms touching customers had to ping the internal database and see if a person can be touched prior to it happening. Availability to touch a customer would be based on rules, priorities, etc of course. That database could also be leveraged for sample availability for qualitative research as well.

Hopefully that all makes sense and helps you understand why it would be valuable to see where Qualtrics sees itself sitting in the enterprise tech ecosystem. Thanks!

Hi Milind, Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

I was wondering if you have any plans for improving the look of surveys that are exported to Microsoft Word? I have numerous clients who request Word versions of their survey, either for IRB submissions or for their own records. Currently when I export surveys to Word I have to spend a significant amount of time reformatting them to get them to the point where they are presentable.

> @AnthonyR said:
> Hey Milind, no clue if you remember me at all but I was actually fortunate enough to sit down and talk with you at Summit a few years ago. Honestly can't even remember the pain points we were discussing at the time, but it was a great conversation.
>
> That said, here is one to start us off:
>
> What tools is the team currently working on for those of us programming surveys in the platform? Are there any new question types or tools we can get excited about?
>
> Additionally, has the team considered whether a carousel question type would be a valuable tool for the platform? I think of this as a cross between the accordion and a loop and merge question. Allowing for the same question to be repeated for a set of options while only having one visible on the screen at a time, but maintaining users screen position for mobile friendliness. It is something I have considered developing, but it would be great if it became a built in part of the platform.
>
> Thanks for doing an ama, i'm excited to see the questions others pose!

Hi Anthony,

Yes, I remember you well! How's Communicus doing? Hope to see you again soon... for sure at X4 2019.

To answer your questions:

_What tools is the team currently working on for those of us programming surveys in the platform?_

Our mission is to make sophisticated research simple. Specifically, to help programmers, we have done 3 things:

(a) Added more APIs to manage surveys. In particular, we have released Conversational APIs that enable users to render surveys on any conversational interfaces, including chatbots and voice activated interfaces. We also recently released more APIs to ease survey translation.
(b) Programmers would like assurance that their survey has no mistakes and can provide great quality data. To help with this, we have introduced a Quality Checker. This is still in early access (let me know if you would like access to it). Early results show that it significantly improves productivity and acts like a digital reviewer of your survey before you send it out.
(c) To help programmers maintain various versions of the survey and publish a version that can override a live version, we have also introduced Survey Publishing. We will be enabling this to everyone as early as this week.

_Are there any new question types or tools we can get excited about? Additionally, has the team considered whether a carousel question type would be a valuable tool for the platform?_

As you know, we have 100+ question and sub-question types that we support. But I understand that you would need custom question type support. To enable that, we have added enhanced JS libraries that enable users to create new custom Question Types. Here is a catalog of custom question types that you can build taking advantage of the enhanced JS libraries. Would the carousel question type that you mentioned be similar to the 'Accordion' that we have in the above demo? If not, please reach out to me and we can figure out the best way to support you on that question type.

Hope this helps. Look forward to continue working with you!

-Milind

> @AndrewWKU said:
> What's the craziest/most unique off-label use (uses other than typical surveys) you've seen they survey platform used for?

Hey Andrew,

That's a great question. One of the strengths of our platform is the sheer flexibility. And with great flexibility comes great use cases! I have seen some pretty amazing uses of the survey platform beyond regular surveys... or at least surveys as we know it. I would break them into 3 categories:

1. Conversational interfaces: Users are embedding surveys into various conversational interfaces like in-product feedback, chatbots, IVR systems, and even voice activated devices. Here are some examples of a survey being called on Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Google Home. The Google Home | Qualtrics integration almost sounds like a real person. :-)

2. Real time ML: Users are calling NLP/ML APIs through the Qualtrics Survey Flow. This is resulting in highly contextual and personalized surveys. Here is an example where we ask a survey post-flight. If you type that you are doing ok, we will simply end the survey. However if you sound upset and specify a reason like your bags were torn or prices were too high or the customer service rep was rude etc., the survey will deep dive into that specific topic.
This is another interesting example where the survey can read the emotion on a face to determine the satisfaction level.

3. Workflows: I have seen surveys used to enable end to end workflows. So, for example, in a university or school, a student registers for a course using a survey. That survey then triggers another survey to the teacher to allow that student to take the course. Based on the teacher's input, another survey may get triggered that will be sent automatically to the parents of the student getting approval to have the student register. These surveys use the capability of iQ Directory/Contacts and piped text to pull in the teachers' and parents' emails, the Signature question type to get their signature, and email triggers or Actions to trigger a follow-up action.

I would love your feedback on whether any of the above use cases (or others you have seen) would be valuable to you and how we could enable them using the Survey Platform.

Thanks!

-Milind

> @dekennedy7 said:
> Hey Milind. Really appreciate access like this to ask higher level product questions. This is a bit of a technology architecture question, so hoping as the product owner you are able to answer it or engage the right resources on your side to get an answer. It would be great if you could provide some insight into how you see Qualtrics fitting into the enterprise technology eco-system...including typical issues and enterprise faces and whether you envision Qualtrics as the solution or something else.
>
> Here is an example that might be helpful. To ensure a positive customer experience controlling the number of times a customer is 'touched' across sales & marketing, service, CX, research, etc. is critical. Qualtrics frequency controls manages survey frequency, but do you feel it would be the tool to manage frequency of customer touchpoints across all channels? This is an issue all companies are eventually going to have to tackle. One idea was to load customer 'touches' into Qualtrics as embedded data and then use Qualtrics as the central hub to determine which customers can be touched.
>
> I'm assuming that, while theoretically possible, this would not be the role for Qualtrics you envision. If not then how would this ideally be addressed? Leverage APIs for all platforms that 'touch' customers to populate an internal 'customer touches' database to track touches across all channels...then build internal APIs so all platforms touching customers had to ping the internal database and see if a person can be touched prior to it happening. Availability to touch a customer would be based on rules, priorities, etc of course. That database could also be leveraged for sample availability for qualitative research as well.
>
> Hopefully that all makes sense and helps you understand why it would be valuable to see where Qualtrics sees itself sitting in the enterprise tech ecosystem. Thanks!

Thanks @dekennedy7! Great questions. Let me try and break it down and do my best to answer them.

I would break down your questions into:

(a) What issues are Enterprises facing with Qualtrics today that we are addressing?
(b) How do we plan to help Enterprises manage multiple customer touchpoints?
(c) How can we leverage the database of customer touchpoints to help Enterprises?

(a) What issues are Enterprises facing with Qualtrics today that we are addressing?
One key issue that we face is scaling within an Enterprise. Qualtrics is a versatile product and often we find that many users across different departments in the same org use Qualtrics organically. Clearly it is to the company's and Qualtrics benefit to consolidate under a single license. However, for this, we need to make it really easy for the Brand Administrators to easily manage hundreds (or even thousands) of user accounts. They need a dashboard level view on which user is using which product and when. My colleague, Jay Dave, is adding features to make it really easy to do exactly this. Stay tuned as we make some radical improvements to the Admin section.

(b) How do we plan to help Enterprises manage multiple customer touchpoints?
We recognize that an Enterprise will have multiple touchpoints with their customers. Many of them are never tracked. And for those that are, they are often spread across different systems. We want to make it easy for Enterprises to manage customer touchpoints in any of these scenarios. And we do not want any Enterprise to contact a customer multiple times. There can be nothing more annoying to a customer!
So if the customers transactional data is maintained in Qualtrics, we have iQ Directory - a very robust system to manage and maintain customer experience data. This is a smart system that tracks when a customer was last contacted, how they were contacted, and also the details of that interaction. It ensures that users only contact a customer when appropriate.
Now, if the customer data is on different systems like Salesforce, Marketo, etc., we solve that problem by making it easy to integrate with these systems. Through our integrations with these systems, we can pull in the customer data and use that to decide if that customer needs to be contacted.

(c) How can we leverage the database of customer touchpoints to help Enterprises?
With a database of customer touchpoints, either through Qualtrics iQ Directory or through integrations with other customer systems of record, we can use it to personalize the survey we ask customers. Thus we can avoid asking questions for which the customer has already answered. We can use the past information to update the customers' records in Qualtrics and use that to make better predictions about that customers behavior and lthe ikelihood to churn using tools like Predict iQ. There any many other ways that Brands can use this database of customer transactions to improve the experience their customers have with the Brand.

> @uhrxx005 said:
> Hi Milind, Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.
>
> I was wondering if you have any plans for improving the look of surveys that are exported to Microsoft Word? I have numerous clients who request Word versions of their survey, either for IRB submissions or for their own records. Currently when I export surveys to Word I have to spend a significant amount of time reformatting them to get them to the point where they are presentable.

Thanks @uhrxx005! Great feedback. We understand that users want to export surveys to Word to make it easier to get feedback and collaborate with other users.

In Q3/Q4 of 2017, we made some significant enhancements to the Survey Exports to Word. These included the ability to export the logic, flow, coded values, and any graphics in the survey. We also added the ability to style the Word doc with the Brand's logo. And lastly, we added features to download various language translations of the survey to Word or view all translations in the same Word doc. See here for details on this.

Is there an example of what you end up reformatting? We could explore if that is something we can enable. One of the things with Word is that there are some limitations on what you can export. So while we can manually make a lot of format changes in Word, we may not necessarily be able to make them automatically via APIs when we export the survey.

Thank you so much to everyone who participated for your thoughtful questions! We loved the chance to kick up a dialogue between Qualtrics & our customers, and hope to see you in our future Q&As!