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Can someone please genuinely explain the need of such software products to me? I work in VLSI engineering and such things sound like a total superflous bullshit

Can someone please genuinely explain the need of such software products to me? I work in VLSI engineering and such things sound like a total superflous bullshit-bingo to me (stats, dashboards, metrics, "value proposition", "targeting", "customer segmentation") I suppose I think so because I am a total layman in these fields. I'd greatly appreciate if someone could explain - is this a thing that acutally helps with some processes and how?

codingdave 8y ago
It may be helpful to look at one of the academic fields underpinning their work. Take a look at Industrial/Organizational Psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_... Qualtrics basically brings the concepts from that field down into SaaS products and makes them more approachable.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
It does depend a what level you are working at for example my main client is a major beverage supplier. They have 200+ brands sold over about the same number of markets. Its useful to provide high level dashboard summarising key metric.
Phemist 8y ago
I'm not so keen on the marketing fluff either, but there are definitely needs being met. The cases I'm most familiar with are in psychological research, which consists of having people fill in a lot of questionnaires (asking about mood, stress-levels, or testing cognitive skills). Qualtrics provides a service to easily build these questionnaires, send them out to respondents, and collect their response (and export the data for later analysis in packages like SPSS). With a little bit of extra work, you can even do highly interactive tasks like Stroop through Qualtrics. For the average psychologist this would simply be undoable without this type of software. Similarly, class-action lawsuits often require sign-in through filling in some sort of questionnaire. Previously, these questionnaires would be handled through live phone interview, which is obviously very intensive for both the interviewee and interviewer. The questionnaires are often quite interactive, with different questions being asked dependent on answers to previous questions, or aggregates of previous questions. It would take skilled interviewers a while to learn to interview for any one questionnaire. Qualtrics (and similar survey software) makes this process much, much simpler. You then also have your regular marketing research, the value of which can be debated... but it is obvious people are willing to pay for the creation and distribution of such questionnaires. Beyond this, I'm sure there are a bunch of other applications of the software.
- artemonster 8y ago
  thank you, that was very informative. this is really hard to understand all of this, when on a landing page of the product you see only markitng BS :)
  - lozaning 8y ago
    Ugh soo many companies do this now. They've since fixed it, but you used to be able to browse the entire HP Enterprise landing page and not be sure they actually sell computers.
- amelius 8y ago
  I think it's also the case that for a lot of people, sadly, having certain tools legitimizes their jobs.
CalRobert 8y ago
There's a few things involved, and they're not all BS! You want to build a couple new features. You have 60 person-hours at your disposal. Which one do your users want? Build two quick prototypes and see which one people actually use more. You need to convince people to give you money (aka "get customers"). You're not sure what the best way to convince them is. Try 3 different approaches (Landing page with tech details? Youtube ads with customer stories? etc) and see which one works before you spend all of your budget on something nobody uses. Out of a thousand people walking down the street, only one _might_ be interested in what you do. How do you make sure you focus your efforts on that one person? Or "we have a million f2p video game players. 99% of them will never spend a dime. 0.1% of them will buy a $100 package once. 0.01% of them will buy a $9.99 package three thousand times. When should we present this package to them? Will we sell more $100 packages if we ALSO have a $200 package? Will we sell more $100 packages to Jane Doe who takes the bus to college at 8:45 AM and plays for 34 minutes 5 days a week?" (obviously that one gets a bit more troublesome) The above comes with some severe implications re: privacy, filter bubbles, etc. but it's not there for no reason. Though there's plenty of people who just want pretty charts for their own sake; having worked in analytics the toughest question is "we have these charts.. umm... so what now?"
- lazyjones 8y ago
  So which parts of your example does Qualtrics provide/solve? Probably not the prototypes. Once I have these, logging/counting usage is simple. The decision is made with a one-page Excel sheet with the raw numbers. Where does Qualtrics come in? Perhaps it has similar data from competitors, so my decision making process does not require as much field-testing but then I'd have to worry about my findings being used to improve competitor's products as well?
  - Novashi 8y ago
    This is a hot take, but Qualtrics seems like one step lower than a full-blown CMS that collects the same data but doesn't manage web pages or content (this includes automated management and 'personalization' based on statistics you collect), e.g. Sitecore or Adobe Experience Manager, two big, leading CMS products.
arethuza 8y ago
"analyzing every aspect of the customer experience to drive loyalty and referrals" I guess as companies spend vast amounts to get visibility online (e.g. where Google and Facebook revenue comes from) they need to be able to measure what they are getting for all that money.
Dwolb 8y ago
How does your organization decide what the chip you’re designing does? Often for chips it’s a B2B transaction so you can probably mobilize some of your go-to salespeople or sales engineers and ask them what customers are saying about next gen. Now what if your customer base were 100x-1000x larger? You might need automated tools to ask your customers what they’re worried about, what issues they have, whether or not they like certain features, what what the relative make-up is of the customer base. We all know customers don’t always tell reality so this becomes one data point in many in determining product direction.
balls187 8y ago
"data driven decision making"
mdorazio 8y ago
Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branching questions. The surveys themselves are built in Qualtrics (something that it is quite good at), managed by Qualtrics (yes, survey management is a big deal), and the top-level data analysis of the survey results is done in Qualtrics as well to determine if there are problematic trends that need to be addressed, more issues than in previous years, segments of customers who are for some reason perceiving quality differently than others, opportunities to redesign or better market things in the future, etc. This data is directly used to update products, training, marketing, etc. at the company. This is, in my opinion, the biggest use case for Qualtrics - customer experience research based on surveys or data gathering methods managed from within the platform. You can think of it as Survey Monkey on steroids with some SPSS-lite data analysis functionality built in.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  >each with 20+ branching questions I just recoiled in horror at the thought of my car company asking me to fill out a survey like this and mentally closed the window on it.
  - nine_k 8y ago
    Imagine that your car has a few things that bother you, and you'd like the car company to know about it. A link to a survey appears in email, and you think: "Aha! Now I'll let them know for sure, I'll tell them all I think about it!". Now you have 20 question to vent off your frustration, and likely a large text field for "anything more you might like to add".
    - TomVDB 8y ago
      It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.) The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.
wpietri 8y ago
You have the advantage that you are building for a very small number of people who are a) very like yourselves, b) highly trained, and c) strongly motivated to figure out and help you understand what they want. Even so, I'm sure figuring out what your customers want isn't trivial. I imagine you put a lot of work into it. But that work can involve long discussion with customers. What if none of those things were true? A more typical business is building for a wide variety of people from heterogeneous backgrounds and selling during relatively low-touch encounters. There if you want to know what is going on with customers you need ways to find out and ways to sift the data into useful forms. It's not an easy problem. I consulted for one company in a consumer-focused service business. They were very energetic users of Net Promoter Score [1] surveys as their default measure. New product? Everybody gets the 1-question survey option after using it. They'd see how that compared to their other products and to competitors. If scores were too low, they'd dig in with other research tools to find out why; new product revisions would be made and measured similarly. It worked very well for them, in that it kept people focused on actual customer experience and not on the HiPPOs [2]. It was such a core part of their culture that they went for related tools internally. When they were changing their software development process, they used NPS scores and other internal surveys to see how it was working for their thousands of developers. To my surprise, I saw the executives taking the numbers very seriously, well aware of the limitations and risks with surveys. I expected to be kinda BS-ish, but I didn't see that at all. As to your terms: Value proposition is basically, "What's in this transaction for the customer?" Customer segmentation is where you notice your customers respond differently to stimuli, so you divide them up into groups. For example, just yesterday we were talking about fancy LED Christmas lights. [3] One customer segment is general-audience consumers who want fancy light displays at the press of a remote. But our customer segment is people who like hacking things, the computer-skilled DIYer. So the value prop for the first segment is something like "make your Christmas tree interesting and different", while the value prop for the second is "this year, hack your Christmas tree!" There are other segments and other key value propositions, which is why there are more kinds of Chrismas lights on the market. Targeting is just taking particular actions in terms of a particular customer segment. For example, if were making hackable Christmas lights, I wouldn't buy a superbowl ad. I'd use very targeted advertising to reach my computer-skilled DIY market. As well as content marketing, where I'd have somebody write good blog posts about exactly how to hack the lights, so that the posts would end up on HN, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Is that helpful? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39633499 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39633499 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428566
hermanradtke 8y ago
The Experience Economy https://stratechery.com/2018/the-experience-economy/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-experience-economy/ post on stratechery provides just that explanation.
dkarl 8y ago
Imagine if the true performance of your chips, instead of being something you can validate through simulation or measure in a lab, could only be measured in the brains of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. For every chip you make, you have some expectation of how it will perform, which is its "value proposition." You want to see if your chips are performing as you predict (fulfilling the value proposition) so you need to interact with a large number of the people whose brains are measuring the true performance of your chips. Since you're dealing with thousands of measurements, you summarize them using math. That's where "stats" come into play. A "metric" is any quantity that is supposed to reflect a measurement, but it usually refers to one specifically designed to be useful. For example, for your chips, the 99th percentile power draw experienced by your users might be a metric you use to guide your design process. Imagine further that your chips perform differently for different groups of people. Figuring out the best way to divide people into groups to understand how your chips perform is "market segmentation." You probably care about some groups more than others, and depending on how well your chips perform for different groups, you may need to strategically change those priorities over time. That's "targeting." Meanwhile, different versions of your chips are continually becoming available to people, and you want to detect as soon as possible if a new chip has an unexpected performance regression (or an unexpected improvement!) So you make the latest metrics available in a way that's quickly visually digestible, usually at the expense of all subtlety, but hey, your brain's executive function finds it gratifying. That's a "dashboard."
roymurdock 8y ago
We (a market research/consulting house) use it pretty heavily to survey engineers to ask what types of technology they're using. I'm sure academics use it similarly - put in a list of emails, program and send out surveys, collect data, analyze said data, create reports. The alternative was some god awful platform without a WYSIWYG editor where you have to code surveys by hand, an enormous waste of time and very inflexible compared to Qualtrics.
pbreit 8y ago
It helps in delivering a superior experience to customers which ultimately is one of the only things that really matters in business.
jartelt 8y ago
Where I went to graduate school, it seemed nearly every Psychology graduate student used Qualtrics to administer their surveys. When you are sending surveys to 100s-1000s of people, having a tool that manages the survey and helps with running the statistics and analysis is really helpful.

codingdave 8y ago

It may be helpful to look at one of the academic fields underpinning their work. Take a look at Industrial/Organizational Psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_... Qualtrics basically brings the concepts from that field down into SaaS products and makes them more approachable.

C1sc0cat 8y ago

It does depend a what level you are working at for example my main client is a major beverage supplier. They have 200+ brands sold over about the same number of markets. Its useful to provide high level dashboard summarising key metric.

Phemist 8y ago

I'm not so keen on the marketing fluff either, but there are definitely needs being met. The cases I'm most familiar with are in psychological research, which consists of having people fill in a lot of questionnaires (asking about mood, stress-levels, or testing cognitive skills). Qualtrics provides a service to easily build these questionnaires, send them out to respondents, and collect their response (and export the data for later analysis in packages like SPSS). With a little bit of extra work, you can even do highly interactive tasks like Stroop through Qualtrics. For the average psychologist this would simply be undoable without this type of software. Similarly, class-action lawsuits often require sign-in through filling in some sort of questionnaire. Previously, these questionnaires would be handled through live phone interview, which is obviously very intensive for both the interviewee and interviewer. The questionnaires are often quite interactive, with different questions being asked dependent on answers to previous questions, or aggregates of previous questions. It would take skilled interviewers a while to learn to interview for any one questionnaire. Qualtrics (and similar survey software) makes this process much, much simpler. You then also have your regular marketing research, the value of which can be debated... but it is obvious people are willing to pay for the creation and distribution of such questionnaires. Beyond this, I'm sure there are a bunch of other applications of the software.

artemonster 8y ago
thank you, that was very informative. this is really hard to understand all of this, when on a landing page of the product you see only markitng BS :)
- lozaning 8y ago
  Ugh soo many companies do this now. They've since fixed it, but you used to be able to browse the entire HP Enterprise landing page and not be sure they actually sell computers.
amelius 8y ago
I think it's also the case that for a lot of people, sadly, having certain tools legitimizes their jobs.

CalRobert 8y ago

There's a few things involved, and they're not all BS! You want to build a couple new features. You have 60 person-hours at your disposal. Which one do your users want? Build two quick prototypes and see which one people actually use more. You need to convince people to give you money (aka "get customers"). You're not sure what the best way to convince them is. Try 3 different approaches (Landing page with tech details? Youtube ads with customer stories? etc) and see which one works before you spend all of your budget on something nobody uses. Out of a thousand people walking down the street, only one _might_ be interested in what you do. How do you make sure you focus your efforts on that one person? Or "we have a million f2p video game players. 99% of them will never spend a dime. 0.1% of them will buy a $100 package once. 0.01% of them will buy a $9.99 package three thousand times. When should we present this package to them? Will we sell more $100 packages if we ALSO have a $200 package? Will we sell more $100 packages to Jane Doe who takes the bus to college at 8:45 AM and plays for 34 minutes 5 days a week?" (obviously that one gets a bit more troublesome) The above comes with some severe implications re: privacy, filter bubbles, etc. but it's not there for no reason. Though there's plenty of people who just want pretty charts for their own sake; having worked in analytics the toughest question is "we have these charts.. umm... so what now?"

lazyjones 8y ago
So which parts of your example does Qualtrics provide/solve? Probably not the prototypes. Once I have these, logging/counting usage is simple. The decision is made with a one-page Excel sheet with the raw numbers. Where does Qualtrics come in? Perhaps it has similar data from competitors, so my decision making process does not require as much field-testing but then I'd have to worry about my findings being used to improve competitor's products as well?
- Novashi 8y ago
  This is a hot take, but Qualtrics seems like one step lower than a full-blown CMS that collects the same data but doesn't manage web pages or content (this includes automated management and 'personalization' based on statistics you collect), e.g. Sitecore or Adobe Experience Manager, two big, leading CMS products.

arethuza 8y ago

"analyzing every aspect of the customer experience to drive loyalty and referrals" I guess as companies spend vast amounts to get visibility online (e.g. where Google and Facebook revenue comes from) they need to be able to measure what they are getting for all that money.

Dwolb 8y ago

How does your organization decide what the chip you’re designing does? Often for chips it’s a B2B transaction so you can probably mobilize some of your go-to salespeople or sales engineers and ask them what customers are saying about next gen. Now what if your customer base were 100x-1000x larger? You might need automated tools to ask your customers what they’re worried about, what issues they have, whether or not they like certain features, what what the relative make-up is of the customer base. We all know customers don’t always tell reality so this becomes one data point in many in determining product direction.

balls187 8y ago

"data driven decision making"

mdorazio 8y ago

Here's a real-world example from a client who uses Qualtrics heavily. At regular intervals following vehicle purchase, an automotive manufacturer sends surveys to vehicle owners asking about their perception of the quality of the vehicle, issues that may have come up, features that were not explained properly or don't work as expected, etc. We're talking hundreds of thousands of surveys a year, each with 20+ branching questions. The surveys themselves are built in Qualtrics (something that it is quite good at), managed by Qualtrics (yes, survey management is a big deal), and the top-level data analysis of the survey results is done in Qualtrics as well to determine if there are problematic trends that need to be addressed, more issues than in previous years, segments of customers who are for some reason perceiving quality differently than others, opportunities to redesign or better market things in the future, etc. This data is directly used to update products, training, marketing, etc. at the company. This is, in my opinion, the biggest use case for Qualtrics - customer experience research based on surveys or data gathering methods managed from within the platform. You can think of it as Survey Monkey on steroids with some SPSS-lite data analysis functionality built in.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
>each with 20+ branching questions I just recoiled in horror at the thought of my car company asking me to fill out a survey like this and mentally closed the window on it.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Imagine that your car has a few things that bother you, and you'd like the car company to know about it. A link to a survey appears in email, and you think: "Aha! Now I'll let them know for sure, I'll tell them all I think about it!". Now you have 20 question to vent off your frustration, and likely a large text field for "anything more you might like to add".
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.) The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.

wpietri 8y ago

You have the advantage that you are building for a very small number of people who are a) very like yourselves, b) highly trained, and c) strongly motivated to figure out and help you understand what they want. Even so, I'm sure figuring out what your customers want isn't trivial. I imagine you put a lot of work into it. But that work can involve long discussion with customers. What if none of those things were true? A more typical business is building for a wide variety of people from heterogeneous backgrounds and selling during relatively low-touch encounters. There if you want to know what is going on with customers you need ways to find out and ways to sift the data into useful forms. It's not an easy problem. I consulted for one company in a consumer-focused service business. They were very energetic users of Net Promoter Score [1] surveys as their default measure. New product? Everybody gets the 1-question survey option after using it. They'd see how that compared to their other products and to competitors. If scores were too low, they'd dig in with other research tools to find out why; new product revisions would be made and measured similarly. It worked very well for them, in that it kept people focused on actual customer experience and not on the HiPPOs [2]. It was such a core part of their culture that they went for related tools internally. When they were changing their software development process, they used NPS scores and other internal surveys to see how it was working for their thousands of developers. To my surprise, I saw the executives taking the numbers very seriously, well aware of the limitations and risks with surveys. I expected to be kinda BS-ish, but I didn't see that at all. As to your terms: Value proposition is basically, "What's in this transaction for the customer?" Customer segmentation is where you notice your customers respond differently to stimuli, so you divide them up into groups. For example, just yesterday we were talking about fancy LED Christmas lights. [3] One customer segment is general-audience consumers who want fancy light displays at the press of a remote. But our customer segment is people who like hacking things, the computer-skilled DIYer. So the value prop for the first segment is something like "make your Christmas tree interesting and different", while the value prop for the second is "this year, hack your Christmas tree!" There are other segments and other key value propositions, which is why there are more kinds of Chrismas lights on the market. Targeting is just taking particular actions in terms of a particular customer segment. For example, if were making hackable Christmas lights, I wouldn't buy a superbowl ad. I'd use very targeted advertising to reach my computer-skilled DIY market. As well as content marketing, where I'd have somebody write good blog posts about exactly how to hack the lights, so that the posts would end up on HN, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Is that helpful? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39633499 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39633499 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428566

hermanradtke 8y ago

The Experience Economy https://stratechery.com/2018/the-experience-economy/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-experience-economy/ post on stratechery provides just that explanation.

dkarl 8y ago

Imagine if the true performance of your chips, instead of being something you can validate through simulation or measure in a lab, could only be measured in the brains of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. For every chip you make, you have some expectation of how it will perform, which is its "value proposition." You want to see if your chips are performing as you predict (fulfilling the value proposition) so you need to interact with a large number of the people whose brains are measuring the true performance of your chips. Since you're dealing with thousands of measurements, you summarize them using math. That's where "stats" come into play. A "metric" is any quantity that is supposed to reflect a measurement, but it usually refers to one specifically designed to be useful. For example, for your chips, the 99th percentile power draw experienced by your users might be a metric you use to guide your design process. Imagine further that your chips perform differently for different groups of people. Figuring out the best way to divide people into groups to understand how your chips perform is "market segmentation." You probably care about some groups more than others, and depending on how well your chips perform for different groups, you may need to strategically change those priorities over time. That's "targeting." Meanwhile, different versions of your chips are continually becoming available to people, and you want to detect as soon as possible if a new chip has an unexpected performance regression (or an unexpected improvement!) So you make the latest metrics available in a way that's quickly visually digestible, usually at the expense of all subtlety, but hey, your brain's executive function finds it gratifying. That's a "dashboard."

roymurdock 8y ago

We (a market research/consulting house) use it pretty heavily to survey engineers to ask what types of technology they're using. I'm sure academics use it similarly - put in a list of emails, program and send out surveys, collect data, analyze said data, create reports. The alternative was some god awful platform without a WYSIWYG editor where you have to code surveys by hand, an enormous waste of time and very inflexible compared to Qualtrics.

pbreit 8y ago

It helps in delivering a superior experience to customers which ultimately is one of the only things that really matters in business.

jartelt 8y ago

Where I went to graduate school, it seemed nearly every Psychology graduate student used Qualtrics to administer their surveys. When you are sending surveys to 100s-1000s of people, having a tool that manages the survey and helps with running the statistics and analysis is really helpful.