Over the past few decades, the practice of gathering customer feedback data has been changing as new technologies have let marketers dig deeper. For example, take customer satisfaction surveys. A common scenario involves retail cashiers promoting online surveys to customers by pointing out links on receipts, often accompanied by enticing incentives such as gift certificates.

In fact, everywhere customers turn, retailers and brands are emailing, texting, and handing out links to online surveys in hopes that customers will provide them with valuable feedback.

But what most customers don’t know is that few if any of those companies are managing their own surveys. Instead, many marketers turn to a handful of experts to handle all aspects of online surveys and how such surveys fit into the bigger picture of their customer intelligence programs.

For companies like Lowe’s, Ford, Verizon, 3M, and Disney, the expert they turn to is Qualtrics—the leader of the fast-growing online survey industry. In fact, more than 8,500 of the world’s leading brands trust Qualtrics to power customer data collection, including 80 of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 business schools. But to characterize Qualtrics’s services as “online surveys” is an oversimplification. Ask anyone at Qualtrics what business they’re in and they’ll say it’s all about “experience management...........................

Questions 1. How does Qualtrics fit in with the big data trend?
2. Discuss how Qualtrics’s services facilitate the discovery of customer insights.
3. Which components of the marketing information system do Qualtrics’s tools facilitate?
4. Discuss Qualtrics’s tools in the context of research approaches.
5. What challenges does Qualtrics face in the future?