Experience leaders from world’s top brands – including Disney, Chipotle, and Delta – are using feedback, data, and analytics to build deeper relationships with their employees and customers and create breakthrough experiences in order to thrive in challenging times.

QUALTRICS X4 — Qualtrics (Nasdaq: XM), the leader and creator of the experience management category, today announced the winners of the 2023 XM Breakthrough Artists awards, recognizing leaders and innovators who are creating breakthrough experiences.

This year’s winners used Qualtrics to help them revolutionize car buying, improve restaurant experiences, and design a set of crayons that more accurately reflects the diversity of the world.

Disney, Chipotle, Delta, Rivian, Uber and Crayola were recognized on stage at X4™: The Experience Management Summit for their pioneering and inventive approaches to creating extraordinary employee and customer experiences, including investments in improving diversity, equity and inclusion, a category added in 2022. Each winner received a custom Yamaha Revstar guitar conceptualized by Qualtrics and laser-engraved by Big Secret in Richmond, VA. Its design proudly signifies the boldness and attention to detail our Breakthrough Artists exemplified.

“The world’s top brands aren’t known for what they sell, but how they make customers feel,” said Qualtrics Chief Category & Brand Officer Kylan Lundeen. “This year’s XM Breakthrough Artist awards recognize the brands that are driving business results through authentic & meaningful experiences by listening to customers & employees, identifying needs, and executing in spectacular fashion.”

Delta – Experience Management Breakthrough Artist Winner

Delta Air Lines, recently named the Top U.S. Airline of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal in its annual airline scorecard and one of Fast Company’s 2023 Most Innovative Companies worldwide, is dedicated to continuing to elevate the travel journey. The company is focused on delivering personalized journeys across both digital and in-person channels using in-moment feedback to further enhance the customer and employee experience. In January 2023, Delta announced free Wi-Fi for Delta SkyMiles members on most domestic mainline flights – listening, understanding and pivoting as needed based on how customers respond. Delta has long realized that providing humanity into the travel experience improves customer and employee outcomes; the data now being captured with Qualtrics will aid in reinforcing that.

Chipotle – Employee Experience Breakthrough Artist Winner

As the largest national fast-casual restaurant brand, Chipotle employs more than 100,000 people. Their “Chipeeps” – or Chipotle people – are at the heart of everything they do. Chipotle partnered with Qualtrics to gain insights on how each restaurant team’s experience affected customer perception.

From food taste to order accuracy and service speed, the Chipotle team discovered that customers are consistently more satisfied at restaurant locations where employees reported high levels of trust and respect for one another, good communication from the executive team, and involvement in decisions that affect their work. The project inspired additional efforts to better understand EX and CX connections to ultimately bolster both its employee and guest experiences.

Disney – Customer Experience Breakthrough Artist Winner

Disney+ worked with Qualtrics to paint a complete picture of their audiences’ needs before launching the direct-to-consumer streaming platform in 2019. The company leveraged Qualtrics DesignXM and CX alongside additional services from Qualtrics, including Advanced Survey features for collection of score and qualitative feedback, XiD for audience management, Stats iQ for analysis, and even Text iQ for text analysis. It worked - in less than four years, Disney+ has grown its reach to nearly 162 million subscribers globally.

Rivian – Product Experience Breakthrough Artist Winner

In order to enable extraordinary adventures, Rivian is revolutionizing the experience of buying a new vehicle. Rivian is moving away from a disparate, siloed purchase process – which customers had to navigate alone – to one that is seamlessly connected, simple to navigate, and where information easily flows between each stage of the digital experience.

Whether it’s reinventing the vehicle purchase process or upending how vehicle financing is acquired, Rivian is committed to providing customers an exceptional experience in their path to ownership. That’s why they are this year’s PX Breakthrough Artist Winner.

Uber – Brand Experience Breakthrough Artist Winner

The Uber team has been working with Qualtrics on their brand tracker for more than three years. They use Qualtrics to understand and track the health of the Uber and Uber Eats brands across global key markets. This program provides strategic insights to inform the roadmap for new research and product development, as well as marketing initiatives throughout the year.

With this program, Uber has been able to identify pain points and understand key drivers of brand favorability, consideration, preference and trust and take action. The team also uses the tracker as a starting point for new research and identifies gaps in their knowledge.

Crayola – DEI Breakthrough Artist Winner

A brand that’s still innovating after 120 years, Crayola believes kids should have the power to create their place in the world by coloring themselves into it. The company introduced Multicultural Crayons more than 30 years ago. Beginning in 2019, they partnered with Qualtrics through 4 rounds of feedback from more than 9000 consumers as well as industry experts both in product development and their own internal processes inside the company to ensure they were authentic, credible and transparent in the creation of Colors of the World.

In 2020, Crayola announced the new Colors of the World crayons, a line of 24 specially formulated crayons representing more than 40 global skin tones designed to meet the needs of today’s increasingly diverse world and promote the importance of inclusion and self-expression. For the role they play in empowering everyone with the ability to self-express, Crayola is this year’s DEI Breakthrough Artist Winner.

About Qualtrics

Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management category, is a cloud-native software provider that helps organizations quickly identify and resolve points of friction across all digital and human touchpoints in their business – so they can retain their best customers and employees, protect their revenue, and drive profitability. More than 18,750 organizations around the world use Qualtrics’s advanced AI to listen, understand, and take action. Qualtrics uses its vast universe of experience data to form the largest database of human sentiment in the world. Qualtrics is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah and Seattle, and operates out of 28 offices globally. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230309005835/en/