ServiceNow Inc. said today it’s teaming up with the experience management provider Qualtrics International Inc. to bring more sentiment data from customers into its customer and information technology workflows.

The partnership is all about improving customer service through “empathy,” ServiceNow said. The idea is to help companies to act quickly on customer insights, which in turn should translate to increased employee productivity and enhanced customer loyalty.

Qualtrics sells cloud-based experience management software that companies can use to collect feedback from stakeholders, for example by measuring customer satisfaction with new products and services they offer. ServiceNow said this feedback will dovetail nicely with its cloud automation platform that helps enterprises to automate various aspects of their business that involve service delivery.

The companies will offer two new products for enterprises. The new Experience-led Customer Service offering combines with ServiceNow Customer Service Management, giving customer service agents and managers tools to automatically trigger new workflows based on customer feedback and uncover more insights on drivers of customer satisfaction, ServiceNow said.

ServiceNow President and Chief Executive Bill McDermott that empathy at mass scale will become a critical business differentiator. “The digital world demands tailored, seamless, and integrated experiences for every customer and employee,” he said. “Our partnership with Qualtrics will help customers turn insights into action and redefine the experience economy.”

Meanwhile, Experience Management for IT is a new offering that combines the Qualtrics EmployeeXM product with ServiceNow IT Service Management. It will be used to connect “business critical data” from ServiceNow with employee feedback on a company’s internal technologies and platforms.

It will enable information technology teams to better understand the effectiveness of the technologies their workers use internally. That way, ServiceNow said, they can then optimize service management processes and create a more “seamless digital experience” for employees.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said enterprises need additional insights beyond what their transaction data provides in order to see how their prospects, customers and employees really feel about the services they offer and the tools they use. “It will be interesting to see how enterprises will use this partnership and whether or not it really delivers a better IT experience, which most employees will say is certainly not great,” Mueller said.

ServiceNow said the new products will be made available to joint customers through a “phased joint product and go-to-market strategy,” starting in the second half of the year.

In addition, the companies said, they plan to expand their use of each other’s platforms in order to foster more productivity among their own employees.

Photo: ServiceNow/Facebook