Spotlight on Excellence

Behind every successful program is a passionate leader who embraces collaboration and innovation. Meet Lukas, the driving force of Knauf, who shares insights on how Early Access has become an important tool to shape his program.

An intro about Lukas and the program he runs at Knauf: 

CX expert from Munich, Germany, working in the field of customer satisfaction and CX for over 10 years. I started my career on the agency side at Kantar, where I got to know many different companies and approaches to CX, which helped me build a global CX program from scratch at Knauf Digital. As part of the Digital Marketing department, our initial focus was on improving our customers’ digital experience. Now that the CX team has moved to an overarching global function, we have started adding customer service and sales touchpoints to the program. What I love about my job is the variety of topics and tasks I work on, and that even after 10 years, I constantly learn new things and get in touch with all kinds of different functions, markets, and people within Knauf!

Lukas’s role and the program he manage/use the Qualtrics Early Access Program?

We as the CX team basically operate with three complementary roles. My colleague is mainly responsible for developing and designing customer journeys and personas. I take over by defining, implementing, and rolling out our measurement blueprint, including our global, regional, and local dashboards. My other colleague focuses on insights and implementing actions together with our global and regional roles. However, there is no clear handover point defined, as we benefit greatly from working in an integrated way, where we support each other’s tasks a lot.

I use the Qualtrics Early Access functionality mainly regarding digital feedback/DXA and dashboards, but also within workflows, which are both relevant for Customer Service and Digital.

What are some key achievements or milestones from your program using Qualtics Early Access that you’re especially proud of?

There are two major things where Qualtrics Early Access helped us a lot. When setting up DXA, we gave feedback regarding the tool several times and had direct discussions with the Product Owner responsible on the Qualtrics side. The direct communication helped both sides answer questions efficiently. It was great to see that, based on our feedback, a targeting functionality was introduced, and with this support, we were able to set up the tool the way we had imagined.

Besides that, a few months ago I got early access to the new workflow feature. The setup with several branches made it possible to bring some process improvements into our CRM tool development roadmap early, where we otherwise would have lost a lot of time until the next development cycle.

How has the Qualtrics Early Access Program integrated into your daily workflows or processes?

Most of the time, we have one or two Qualtrics Early Access topics we actively participate in to see if and how we can integrate them into our existing processes and workflows. I’m always looking forward to receiving the Early Access recruitment emails, as they often include interesting features. It is also great to regularly see Early Access features we participated in later getting announced to everyone in the product release notes.

Could you share a specific example where Qualtrics Early Access made a significant difference in achieving your goals?

Participating in the above-mentioned Early Access Program regarding the workflow branch feature made a significant impact for us, as it helped us not only to bring this onto the development roadmap early but also made a tremendous difference in setup and maintenance efforts. As a result, we’ve been able to speed up the rollout of our program to more Knauf markets.

What advice or tips would you give to other partners or customers starting to use the Qualtrics Early Access Program?

Even with loaded roadmaps, stay open to new features, as they can really make a difference (see above), and it is rewarding to see that your feedback can have an impact.

But also, don’t get too excited and sign up for too many features at the same time, so you can give proper feedback, as it always takes more time to properly look into a new feature than initially expected.