I’m thrilled to announce that Temkin Group has been acquired by Qualtrics. Together, our goal is to create the world’s premiere center of excellence for all things experience management (XM).

This new center–the Qualtrics XM Institute–brings together the industry’s foremost thought leaders to help shape the future of experience management, establish and publish best-practices, drive product innovation, and enable certification and training programs that further build a community of XM professionals. The Institute will create industry benchmarks, drive groundbreaking thought leadership, and guide ongoing program optimization for customers. As part of the acquisition, I will be leading the Institute.

We have enjoyed every minute of every day at Temkin Group and we were not looking to be acquired. But this was an opportunity for us to join in the creation of an entirely new category and help the world master experience management.

Now to address a few key points:

 

Why Qualtrics

As you may know, we’ve worked with most of the large vendors in the space, providing advice on strategy and participating in their marketing activities. Throughout our eight years, Temkin Group has remained independent, helping our corporate clients make good decisions whenever they were choosing one of those vendors.

While we have enjoyed working with all of the vendors, during the last few years it’s become clear to me that Qualtrics has the strongest momentum in CX and XM. There is no doubt, Qualtrics has become and is on a trajectory to remain, the leader in CX and experience management with its robust XM Platform™. The Qualtrics XM Institute will play a big role in this trajectory moving forward.

As Qualtrics co-founder and CEO, Ryan Smith said, “The goal of Qualtrics is to power the world’s experiences. We believe every organization will have an experience team, and the XM platform makes it possible for those organizations to democratize customer, employee, product, and brand experience. The Qualtrics XM institute will sit on top of the XM Platform, allowing best-practice content, workshops, and benchmarking to be accessed by everyone.

We also felt a strong match between our cultures. When you walk into Qualtrics headquarters, there are five pillars that read, “Transparency,” “All In,” “One Team,” “Customer Obsessed,” and “Scrappy.” It’s how Qualtrics describes its culture, but it’s also an accurate description of how we built the Temkin Group.

Temkin Group could certainly have remained independent. Our business is as strong as ever. But we were excited about the opportunity to join forces and tap into Qualtrics’ growing scale, complementing its great technology with an equally great learning institution, the Qualtrics XM Institute.

 

Introducing the Qualtrics XM Institute

Experience management is the future. We live in an experience economy and organizations in the future will succeed or fail based on the experiences they provide. The Qualtrics XM Institute recognizes this new reality. Designed to help organizations create cutting-edge experience management programs, the Qualtrics XM Institute will complement the expertise of the Qualtrics Partner Network’s subject matter experts and consultants, as well as Qualtrics’ own XM scientists, product specialists and training and certification experts. By partnering with both internal and third-party experts, the Qualtrics XM Institute will support the most cutting-edge best practices found anywhere in the industry with research, benchmarks, training, and industry events, all leveraging the power of Qualtrics’ leading Experience Management or XM Platform™. The XM Platform is a single system of action for all experience data, allowing organizations to manage the four core experiences of business–customer, employee, product and brand experience—in one place.

The Qualtrics XM Institute will focus on several key areas. First, it will deliver industry thought leadership, including industry benchmarks and original research on experience management topics and trends. Second, the Institute will leverage an extensive team of subject matter experts—both from Qualtrics and the Qualtrics Partner Network—to assist organizations with program design, implementation, and optimization. Third, it will become a key influencer for product development, design, and adoption. Lastly, it will serve an ongoing role, helping organizations optimize and iterate on their experience management programs through training, product feedback collection, and customer and industry events.

As you can tell from the explanation, this will not be a rebranding of Temkin Group. Instead, we will take what we’ve learned, build upon it, and create a highly-scalable model for helping the world master experience management.

 

Leveraging what we’ve done in the past

To add a little bit of personal context, I love creating things.

When I was at Forrester Research, I established its current focus on enterprise customer experience and created its customer experience index. When I left Forrester in 2010, my wife Karen and I founded Temkin Group. During the past eight years, we’ve created so many new things that it’s impossible to list them all, including a variety of workshops, Temkin Ratings, Temkin Loyalty Index, Temkin Employee Engagement Index, and the CX Institute.

Late in 2010, Karen and I envisioned and architected the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA). We enlisted Jeanne Bliss to join us, and together we created the world’s leading association for customer experience professionals. During the five years that I was the initial chair of the CXPA, we grew from zero to almost 4,000 members and created many of the association’s current activities, including the Insight Exchange, CX Day, CX Experts, Mentor Match, and CCXP certification. I’m excited that Karen is also joining me, along with our entire team, on this next journey.

 

Looking forward

We are still working out some of the details, but I’ll continue to post updates so stay tuned. We are excited to have you to join us on this journey.