‘Experience’ has gained a prime status in the past decade — everything seems to revolve around experience in the universe of management, marketing, and even more specifically with respect to relationship marketing. It has become like a sine qua non of operating in this universe. There can be multiple contexts for framing experience — customer experience, brand experience, user (or product) experience, and also employee experience. Nevertheless, these concepts are inter-linked, and customer experience could be the central point-of-reference just because all other forms of experience eventually contribute to the customer’s experience. After all, this is the age of experience economy (cf. Pine and Gilmore).

This focus on the role of experience and primarily customer experience (CX) in contemporary marketing surely has not escaped the attention of companies involved with data-based marketing particularly on the service side (e.g., technology, research, consulting). In mid-November 2018 enterprise information technology company SAP announced a stark move of acquiring research technology firm Qualtrics for the sum of $8 billion in cash (deal expected to materialise during the first half of 2019). Qualtrics started in 2002 by specialising in survey technology for conducting consumer and customer surveys online, and has later on broadened the spectrum of its software products and tools to address a range of experience domains, put in a framework entitled Experience Management (XM).

However, less visible to the public, Qualtrics made an acquisition of its own of Temkin Group — an expert company specialising in customer experience research, training and consulting — about two weeks before announcing the SAP-Qualtrics deal. Qualtrics was reportedly engaged at the time of these deals in preparations for its IPO. Adding the knowledge and capabilities of Temkin Group to those of Qualtrics could fairly be viewed as a positive enforcement of the latter prior to its IPO, and eventually the selling of Qualtrics to SAP. Therefore, it would be right to say that Qualrtics + Temkin Group and SAP are effectively joining forces in domain knowledge, research capabilities and data technologies. Yet since the original three entities (i.e., as before November 2018) were so unequal in size and power, it raises some major questions about how their union under the umbrella of SAP will work out.

SAP specialises in enterprise software applications for organisational day-to-day functions across-the-board, and supporting software-related services (SAP was established in 1972, based in Germany). It operates today in 130 countries with 100+ innovation and development centres; its revenue in the 2017 financial year was $23.46 billion. Many of the company’s software applications can be deployed on premises, in the cloud, or hybrid (SAP reports 150 million subscribers in the cloud service user base). The two product areas of highest relevance to this story are CRM & Customer Experience solutions and the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions & Digital Core (featuring its flagship platform HANA). The two areas of solutions correspond with each other.

The S4/HANA platform is described as an intelligent ERP software, a real-time solution suite . It enables, for example, delivering personally customised products ordered online (e.g., bicycles). For marketing activities and customer-facing services it should require data from the CRM and CX applications. The ERP platform supports, however, the financial planning and execution of overall activities of a client organisation. The CRM & Customer Experience suite of solutions includes five key components: Customer Data Cloud (enabled actually by Gigya, another acquisition by SAP in 2017); Marketing Cloud; Commerce Cloud; Sales Cloud; and Service Cloud. The suite covers a span of activities and functions: profiling and targeting at segment-level and individual level, applicable, for instance, in campaigns or tracking customer journeys (Marketing); product order and content management (Commerce); comprehensive self-service processes plus field service management and remote service operations by agents (Service). In all these sub-areas we may find potential links to the kinds of data that can be collected and analysed with the tools of Qualtrics while SAP’s applications are run on operational data gathered within its system apparatus. The key strengths offered in the Customer Data Cloud are integrating data, securing customer identity and access to digital interfaces across channels and devices, and data privacy protection. SAP highlights that its marketing and customer applications are empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to personalise and improve experiences.

• At the technical and analytic level, SAP’s Digital Platform is in charge of the maintenance of solutions and databases (e.g., ERP HANA) and management of data processes, accompanied by the suite of Business Analytics that includes the Analytics Cloud, Business Analytics, Predictive Analytics and Collaborative Enterprise Planning. Across platforms SAP makes use of intelligent technologies and tools organised in its Leonardo suite.

Qualtrics arrives from quite a different territory, nestled much closer to the field of marketing and customer research as a provider of technologies for data collection through surveys of consumers and customers, and data analytic tools. The company has gained acknowledgement thanks to its survey software for collecting data online whose use has so expanded to make it one of the more popular among businesses for survey research. Qualtrics now focuses on four domains for research: Customer Experience, Brand Experience, Product Experience, and Employee Experience.

• The revenue of Qualtrics in 2018 is expected to exceed $400 million (in first half of 2018 revenue grew 42% to $184m); the company forecast that revenue will continue to grow at an annual rate of 40% before counting its benefits from synergies with SAP (CNBC; TechCrunch on 11 November 2018).

Qualtrics organises its research methodologies and tools by context under the four experience domains aforementioned. The flagship survey software, PER, allows for data collection through multiple digital channels (e.g., e-mail, web, mobile app, SMS and more), and is accompanied by a collection of techniques and tools for data analysis and visualisation. The company emphasises that its tools are so designed that use of them does not require one to be a survey expert or a statistician.

Qualtrics provides a range of intelligent assistance and automation capabilities; they can aid, guide and support the work of users according to their level of proficiency. Qualtrics has developed a suite of intelligent tools, named iQ, among them Stats iQ for statistical analysis, Text iQ for text analytics and sentiment scoring, and Predict iQ + Driver iQ for advanced statistical analysis and modelling. Additionally, it offers ExpertReview for helping with questionnaire composition (e.g., by giving AI-expert ‘second opinion’). In a marketing context, the company offers techniques for ad testing, brand tracking, pricing research, market segmentation and more. Some of these research methodologies and tools would be of less relevance and interest to SAP unless they can be connected directly to customer experiences that SAP needs to understand and account for through the services it offers.

The methods and tools by Qualtrics are dedicated to bringing the subjective perspective of customers about their experiences. Under the topic of Customer Experience Qualtrics covers customer journey mapping, Net Promoter Score (NPS), voice of the customer, and digital customer experience; user experience is covered in the domain of Product Experience, and various forms of customer-brand interactions are addressed as part of Brand Experience. The interest of SAP especially in Qualtrics, as stated by the firm, is  complementing or enhancing its operational data (O-data) with customer-driven experience data (X-data) produced by Qualtrics (no mention is made of Temkin Group). The backing and wide business network of SAP should create new opportunities for Qualtrics to enlarge its customer base, as suggested by SAP. The functional benefits for Qualtrics are less clear; possible gains may be achieved by combining operational metrics in customer analyses as benchmarks or by making comparisons between objective and subjective evaluations of customer experiences, assuming clients will subscribe to some of the services provided by the new parent company SAP.

Temkin Group operated as an independent firm for eight years (2010-2018), headed by Bruce Temkin (with wife Karen), until its acquisition by Qualtrics in late October 2018. It provided consulting, research and training activities on customer experience (at its core was customer experience but it dealt with various dimensions of experience beyond and in relation to customers). A key asset of Temkin Group is its blog / website Experience Matters, a valued resource of knowledge; its content is largely in place (viewed January 2018), and hopefully will stay on.

• Update (July 2020): Temkin informed readers lately that Experience Matters in its current form is being terminated. However the blog under the same title re-appears in a new form as a blog of Qualtrics XMI (see below) where new content will be published. Content accumulated in the old Experience Matters will be eliminated soon yet some of the content is made available at XMI’s site/blog.

Bruce Temkin developed several strategic concepts and constructs of experience. The Temkin Experience Rating metric is based on a three-component construct of experience: Success, Effort and Emotion. The strategic model of experience includes four required competencies: (a) Purposeful Leadership; (b) Compelling Brand Values; (c) Employee Engagement; and (d) Customer Connectedness. He made important statements in emphasising the essence of employee engagement to deliver superior customer experience, and in including Emotion as one of the pillars of customer experience upon which it should be evaluated. The more prominent of the research reports published by Temkin Group were probably the annual series of Temkin Experience Rating reports, covering 20 industries or markets with a selection of companies competing in each.

Yet Temkin apparently has come to a realisation that he should not go it alone any longer. In a post blog on 24 October 2018, entitled “Great News: Temkin Group Joins Forces With Qualtrics“, Temkin explained as the motivation to his deal with Qualtrics a recognition he had reached during the last few years: “it’s become clear to me that Qualtrics has the strongest momentum in CX and XM“. Temkin will be leading the Qualtrics XM Institute, built on the foundations of Temkin CX Institute dedicated to training. The new institute will be sitting on top of Qualtrics XM platform. In his blog announcement Temkin states that the Qualtrics XM Institute will “help shape the future of experience management, establish and publish best practices, drive product innovation, and enable certification and training programs that further build the community of XM professionals” — a concise statement that can be viewed as the charter of the institute Temkin will be in charge of at Qualtrics. Temkin has not taken long to adopt the framework of Experience Management and support it in writing for the blog.

The teams of Temkin and Qualtrics (CEO and co-founder Ryan Smith) may co-operate more closely in developing research plans on experience for clients and initiating research reports similar to the ones Temkin Group produced so far. Bruce Temkin should have easy and immediate access to the full range of tools and technologies of Qualtrics to continue with research projects and improve on them. Qualtrics should have much to benefit from the knowledge and training experience of Temkin in the new XM Institute at Qualtrics. It seems easier to foresee beneficial synergies between Temkin Group and Qualtrics than their expected synergies with SAP.

However, there is a great question arising now, how all this vision and plans for Temkin and Qualtrics working together, and particularly their project of Qualtrics XM Institute, will be sustained following the acquisition of Qualtrics by SAP. One cannot overlook the possibility that SAP will develop its own expectations and may require changes to plans only recently made or modifications to Qualtrics CX Platform and XM Solutions so as to satisfy the needs of SAP. According to TechCrunch (11 Nov. 2018) Qualtrics will continue to function as a subsidiary company and will retain its branding and personnel (note: it may be gradually assimilated into SAP while keeping Qualtrics associated names, as seems to be the case of Israel-based Gigya). Much indeed can depend on giving Qualtrics + Temkin Group autonomy to pursue with their specialisations and vision on XM while they share knowledge, data and technologies with SAP.

Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, is looking high in the sky: as quoted in the company’s news release from 11 November 2018, he describes bringing together SAP and Qualtrics as “a new paradigm, similar to market-making shifts in personal operating systems, smart devices and social networks“. But it is also evident that SAP still sees the move through the prism of technology: “The combination of Qualtrics and SAP reaffirms experience management as the ground-breaking new frontier for the technology industry“.

Temkin’s viewpoint is much more customer-oriented and marketing-driven vis-à-vis the technology-driven view of McDermott and SAP, which may put them in greater conflict with time about priorities and future direction for XM. Qualtrics headed by Ryan Smith will have to decide how it prefers to balance between the marketing-driven view and technology-driven view on experience. Temkin, for example, has reservations about the orientation of the technology known as Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM), suggesting instead a different focus by naming this field “Customer Insight and Action (AIC) Platforms”. In his comments on the acquisition of Qualtrics by SAP (16 November 2018) he explains that organisations “succeed by taking action on insights that come from many sources, combining experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data)“. In his arguments in favour of joining SAP with Qualtrics, Temkin recollects an observation he made in an award-winning report from 2002 while at Forrester Research: he argued then that “widespread disappointing results of CRM were a result of a pure technology-orientation and that companies needed to focus more on developing practices and perspectives that used the technology to better serve customers”; he claims that much has changed in the field since that time. Yet it is hard to be convinced that technology has much less influence now in shaping organisational, managerial and marketing processes, on both service side (e.g., SAP) and client side.

• As a note aside, if SAP gets the upper hand in setting the agenda and does not give sufficient autonomy to Qualtrics as suggested earlier, the first sector at risk of having most to lose from this deal would be ‘marketing and customer research’.

SAP and Qualtrics are both involved in development and implementation of technology, yet SAP is focused on information technology enabling overall day-to-day operations of an organisation, whereas Qualtrics is focused on technology enabling experience and marketing research. Qualtrics and Temkin Group are both engaged in domains of experience: Qualtrics specialises in the technology that enables the research, while Temkin Group brought strengths in conducting research plus strategic thinking and training (education) on customer experience. In order for their joint forces to succeed they all will have to find ways to bridge gaps between their viewpoints, to ‘live and let live’, and at the same time complement one another in areas of shared understanding and expertise.

Ron Ventura, Ph.D. (Marketing)