An organization's success goes beyond traditional operational data. To truly understand people's experience and improve it, it's essential to combine different types of information data (O-Data and X-Data) to build a model that allows us to make better business decisions.

In this context, experience management (XM) has become a key discipline for companies seeking to drive significant improvements in the experience of customers, employees and other key players.

As I said Craig Mundie, Senior Advisor at Microsoft, “data is becoming the new raw material for business.”

What is O-Data?

Organizations regularly collect and review the information generated by their operating systems, including business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), finance, and supply chain.

These systems produce large amounts of operational data (O-Data), which is what organizations have traditionally used to make most of their decisions. However, while this information may reveal what has happened in the past, they often lack information about why something happened or what is likely to happen in the future.

This is because O-Data lacks a critical element: people. Information that reflects how people (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, or potential customers) think and feel about their interactions with an organization is called X-Data.

What is X-Data?

X-Data, also called”Experience data”, allow us to know the perceptions and attitudes of people towards a company, and are essential for understanding business operations and making appropriate adjustments to improve people's experiences. In addition, because people's perceptions and attitudes are often a leading indicator of their future behaviors, they allow companies to identify and resolve potential problems before they become major problems.

Given their importance, organizations need develop more systematic mechanisms to capture and analyze this type of datas. The ability to collect appropriate experience data and combine it with operational data forms the basis of Experience Management (XM).

6 Types of X-Data

1. Expectations of the Experience

This is data about how people think and feel about a future interaction with an organization. For example, if an employee expects a new process to be annoying or if a customer believes that an online service interaction is possible.

2. Perceptions of Interaction

This is data about how people view a specific interaction with the company. For example, if a customer was satisfied with a call from the contact center or if an employee found an internal meeting valuable.

3. Journey Insights

This is data about how people perceive a set of activities that they have encountered along their journey to achieve a specific objective. For example, if an employee is satisfied with the process of resolving a problem with the IT support service or if a customer found it easy to switch to a new product.

4. Relational Attitudes

It's data about how people feel about an organization. For example, if a customer is likely to recommend the organization to others or if an employee is planning to look for a new job.

5. Choice Preferences

This is data on how people classify the different alternatives based on their preferences. For example, what benefit options an employee would like most or what product features a customer prefers.

6. Ad Hoc Diagnostics

This is data about how people feel about a specific problem or opportunity, which is collected based on other findings. For example, to understand why a brand's message has not resonated with potential customers or why there has been a sudden drop in the accuracy of a supplier's forecasts.

Six Types of Information on X-Data and O-Data

While each type of data can provide organizations with valuable information on its own, the true power of Experience Management comes from the ability to combine both types of data for richer, more impactful information.

El XM Institute Of our Qualtrics technology partner, has identified six categories to combine both types of data:

1. Causes

When you find something unexpected or significant in your O-Data, look for an explanation underlying the X-Data. For example, if O-Data shows that customers who have a certain product don't renew it, you can examine their feedback in the survey and find that they don't like the new features of the product.

2. Drivers

When you find something unexpected or significant in your X-Data, analyze the O-Data to diagnose the operational cause. For example, if early data shows that employees feel less connected to the company's mission, you might dig into operational data and discover that this decline is mainly occurring among new employees who received new, abbreviated onboarding training.

3. Predictions

It combines X-Data and O-Data to project information onto a wider population of people or to predict likely future behaviors or events. For example, you can combine employee operational data with experience data to predict the future abandonment of specific employees.

4. Personalization

Combine the two types of data to personalize the experiences you offer to individuals. For example, you could personalize the contact center experiences of high-value customers whose attitudes have tended to be negative, automatically directing them to more qualified agents who are empowered to do what is necessary to solve their problem.

5. Alerta

For example, the CEO of a B2B company could set up an alert to receive personalized account information whenever there are negative comments in the experience data of one of the 100 most important accounts to be renewed, which come from operational data.

6. Valor

Use X-Data and O-Data to calculate the expected or actual business value of improving an experience. For example, you can calculate the value of improving the employee onboarding experience by measuring the extent to which new employees who are more satisfied with the experience (X-Data) get better performance scores and stay with the company longer (O-Data).

Take Action

How should you use experience or operational data in your organization to measure and improve the experiences you offer to your customers? Here are some tips:

Treating X-Data as an Asset

Large organizations would never manage their critical human resources, customer, financial or supply chain data through a series of disconnected spreadsheets and applications, but that's how many today deal with their X-Data.

There is no single source of truth for this critical data. Given the increasing importance and quantity of experience data, organizations need to establish the business capabilities to standardize, share and control this key corporate asset.

Beyond the polls

Historically, experience data came almost exclusively from surveys, but it can come from other sources such as voice analysis in contact center conversations, text analysis in social media posts or review sites, or sentiment analysis in chat transcripts.

Therefore, while surveys are still a valuable source of information, you should also capture X-Data using new types of analytical methods.

Select the data properly

Organizations tend to be rich in O-Data and poor in X-Data. To determine what operational data to combine with experience data, use both a data-driven approach and your own business acumen.

Design for action, not for metrics

Organizations often start collecting X-Data for the sole purpose of establishing measures such as net promoter scores or employee engagement.

While metrics can help push an organization in the right direction, they don't achieve that benefit on their own. The true value of X-Data and O-Data does not come from the measurements themselves, but from actions that organizations undertake based on the information generated by the data.

Adapt knowledge to different audiences

XM professionals must adapt information to the needs of specific people with specific functions.

Design the content and schedule of dashboards, alerts, reports, and any other distribution mechanism to explicitly support the specific types of decisions people make. The ideal is to integrate both experience and operational data into all existing operational processes.

If you need us to help you improve your experiences thanks to Qualtrics technology, feel free to write to us at this form and we'll be happy to hear from you.