August 6, 2025
Too many survey tools today promise insight, but instead deliver frustration, friction and a few other f's not suitable for this blog.
Qualtrics is the poster child. From humble beginnings in 2002 - they quickly won favour over the incumbent monoliths - only to turn into one themselves.
Read on to learn more about their history and my prediction for Qualtrics in 2025 and beyond.
2002 – Humble Beginnings
Qualtrics was founded in Provo, Utah by Scott Smith, a business professor at BYU, his sons Ryan & Jared and Stuart Orgill. They literally started in the Smith family’s basement.
The goal? To make academic research tools more accessible via the internet. Back when putting anything on ‘the web’ was ground breaking.
2000s – Climbing the Ladder
Initially focused on academic and market research, Qualtrics expanded into corporate enterprise feedback. Including employee engagement, customer experience, and product research. It became known for powerful survey tools with high customizability.
By 2012, they’d raised $70 million in one of the largest-ever first rounds of venture capital at the time (Accel and Sequoia).
2017 – Unicorn Status
Qualtrics kept growing. They became a key player in the rising “experience management” (XM) category. They raised another $180 million, valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
2018 – The SAP Acquisition
Just days before its planned IPO, Qualtrics was acquired by SAP for $8 billion. SAP aimed to combine Qualtrics’ “experience data” (X-data) with its operational data (O-data), hoping to create a holistic view of customer and employee experience.
Ryan Smith remained CEO for two years post-acquisition.
2021 – The Return to Public Markets
SAP spun Qualtrics out again, taking it public on the NASDAQ (XM) in January 2021. The IPO valued the company at over $15 billion. SAP retained majority ownership.
By this time Zig Serafin is CEO and Brad Anderson is leading product. Both are ex Microsoft.
2023 – Silver Lake Takes It Private
In early 2023, private equity firm Silver Lake, along with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, acquired Qualtrics for $12.5 billion, taking it private once again.
This marked a shift toward tighter financial controls and a push to scale profitably including laying off roughly 15% of their 5,000 staff - impacting all departments.
Qualtrics competes with other survey tools like Medallia, Glint, Culture Amp, Survey Monkey, TypeForm and Google Forms. Organizations are also increasingly switching to AI-native, conversational alternatives like Joyous.
Qualtrics offers employee and customer surveys, basic text analysis, sentiment tracking, and integrations with tools like Salesforce, SAP, and Tableau.
It's used by large enterprises across industries. As of their most recent count, Qualtrics has over 19,000 customers globally. That includes 75% of the Fortune 100, plus a chunky presence across government, education, and health.
According to information on the internet - in 2022, they pulled in around $1.5 billion in annual revenue, most of it recurring. Since then they have not published actual revenue but reports indicate stabilising growth and increased margins.
Online sources speculate that as many as 1,500+ of the current staff, estimated at a total of around 5,700 are quota-bearing sales reps. If accurate, that’s a whopping 25% of the organisation dedicated entirely to sales, not including marketing and other associated sales support functions and roles.
The top goals for Qualtrics this year, according to information shared at their X4 2025 conference are:
1 - Connection is the New KPI
Qualtrics is calling 2025 "The Year of Connection." Their message? Building strategic, operational, and human connections across the enterprise. They want XM (Experience Management) to be woven directly into strategy, operations, and culture.
So, more human connection. Got it.
2 - Agentic AI & Experience Agents
At X4 2025, Qualtrics unveiled “Experience Agents” - AI-driven assistants that autonomously engage with employees and customers, resolve friction in real time, and act proactively based on past data.
Brad Anderson described the shift to a multi-agent AI future, where agents work across channels and domains to personalise feedback responses and act at scale.
So, less human connection then?
3 - Empathy at Scale
CEO Zig Serafin also emphasized during X4 that the next frontier is designing AI-powered interactions that are emotionally aware and empathetic - “delivering seamless experiences before users even ask” - from support tickets to surveys.
Call me a cynic, but anyone who says that with a straight face probably shouldn’t be in charge of your employee or customer relationships.
Especially when their top goal is more human connection.
In summary this is the most confused, contradictory set of objectives I’ve seen - possibly ever.
Along with a steady decline in perceived customer value and experience, as referenced in The Five Biggest Complaints from Qualtrics Customers, there is likely increasing pressure from Salt Lake to manage operating costs down while simultaneously increasing revenue.
As we know, most private equity firms have a clear intention to resell a business on a fixed timeline - usually within 3-5 years from purchase. Which means somewhere between 2026 - 2028 we may see another major Qualtrics liquidity event take place.
On top of applying AI like lipstick on a pig to all their crusty legacy code, they are also signalling a marked shift away from surveys towards AI-workflow orchestration.
Even for their most loyal customers, as time passes, the benefits of sticking with Qualtrics will be increasingly outweighed by the competitive advantage of shifting to faster, simpler and more effective alternatives - like Joyous.
My prediction is that the future sale will be at a flat or perhaps even lower valuation than the previous one in 2023.
Keen to read more? Check these out.
Ready to bring joy to your organization? Why not try Joyous? You can buy campaigns directly from our site (unlike Qualtrics).
Good design = more accurate and useful responses. Every question:
And yes, skipping a question is always an option. This keeps participants in control and increases survey completion rates.
The Joyous HR Engagement model is based upon an Open Source project that was released by Joyous in 2019, namely the EX Genome Project. This engagement model has continuously evolved and been regularly updated and revised since.
In 2025, the Joyous HR Engagement Model consists of a library of assets, including survey and campaign templates, all of which are available directly from the tool in the People & Culture category of the Campaign Templates Gallery.
These templates are highly customisable and configurable:
The Employee Experience Genome Project V1.0 was first released in 2019 after 18 months of research. Since then Joyous has incorporated the feedback and analysis of millions of responses in Joyous.
The purpose of the Employee Experience Genome project is to demystify the science of measuring employee experience and engagement - enabling a more transparent, productive workplace. And importantly: to make that science easy to understand and accessible for all.
The premise of the model is that Employee Experience is everything people encounter, observe or feel at work. Employee Engagement is the emotional commitment people have to their workplace.
The model breaks Employee Experience into three core categories that have the greatest impact on engagement: Culture & Environment, Fairness & Inclusion, and Wellbeing. These are complimented by a fourth category: Engagement.
Each category includes three topics. The first release included 25 question pairs offering two rated statements per topic, each with a related open-text question, often referred to as a conversation starter.
A few early adopters in the first two years saw great success with the conversational approach. The biggest success was a shift in the perception that 'nobody is listening' and 'nothing ever changes' as a result of feedback. For many, changes were personal, and therefore highly visible.
Leaders were responding directly to employee feedback. Ensuring a positive employee experience was no longer perceived as the sole responsibility of the HR team. Instead it became a shared responsibility across HR, leaders and the individual employee.
At the same time other adopters faced challenges. Not all teams or industries were ready for open dialogue between managers and employees. Our research discovered a strong correlation in drop off rates to manager engagement.
In all cases, repeated exposure to the same questions led to fatigue - similar to what occurs with traditional surveys - and participation gradually dropped off over time.
Participation rates dropped by 15% to 35% over a six to 12 month period until hitting a plateau.
Another challenge faced was skepticism from senior leaders that the scoring was accurate, due to the open nature of the feedback. Joyous later conducted an experiment which disproved this, however this skepticism remained.
In parallel, many customers started using Joyous for operational feedback. Their goal was to make people's jobs easier by reducing friction in their daily tasks. This not only improves employee experience but also has a positive impact on cost efficiency and productivity. In contrast to the employee experience use case, the operational use case found open and conversational feedback to be effective and universally positive.
Instead of conversations with managers, employees were engaging directly with Subject Matter Experts or Project Leaders right before or after they implemented significant changes in products, services, tools, processes or organisational structure.
Several customers correlated an increase in their employee engagement scores with the shift to using Joyous for operational feedback.
In 2021, Joyous released Employee Experience Genome Project V2.0.
The original question set was revised based on feedback from early adopters, employee comments and exhaustive analysis on the performance of individual questions. The model also expanded to 50 question pairs, enabling two sets to be rotated every six months. The adoption of the revised model saw an initial uplift in adoption and a slower drop off rate for new adopters over time.
In 2022, Joyous released a third version as the Te Reo Māori Employee Experience Genome Project V1.0. As a proudly New Zealand organization Joyous worked with our valued partner, Maurea Consulting, to adapt both the model and the Joyous product to support delivering the model in dual language side-by-side. This was the same 50 question pairs as version 2.0, with some further improvements to the english questions based on feedback and in-line Te Reo Māori versions to support our Kiwi customers in helping to uplift Māori cultural competency.
Over the course of 2022 to 2025, most Joyous customers shifted away from weekly conversations between managers and employees. Today, nearly all Joyous HR customers use a combination of quarterly surveys and action focused campaigns - following the current Joyous HR Engagement Model, outlined in this article.
The EX Genome model has been adapted and refined over the last three years to suit this approach and been renamed to the Joyous HR Engagement Model and action-focused campaign templates targeting specific topics were added to compliment the surveys. This version is not Open Source.
Joyous supports a variety of question types and features to suit different goals — from measuring engagement to collecting targeted, actionable feedback. Three core question types are used in the Joyous HR Engagement Surveys and Campaigns.
A 10 minute assessment (29 questions) of work experience, suitable for annual measurement across engagement, well-being, culture & environment and fairness & inclusion.
Download the template in an excel workbook here.
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A medium length (13 questions) assessment of work experience, suitable for six monthly or annual measurement across engagement, well-being, culture & environment and fairness & inclusion.
A short assessment (6 questions) of work experience, suitable for quarterly measurement.
Targeted conversational campaigns focused on specific improvements on topics such as: Environment, Growth, Role Support & Strategy.
Approach:
Action focused campaigns should only be run one to three months before the organization intends to take action on a focused topic. They are a fast and meaningful way to gather specific actionable ideas from people. This greatly helps improve the quality, awareness and adoption of the prioritised actions.
Download the template in an excel workbook here.
And there you have it! If you made it this far, well done! You now have a comprehensive understanding of how Joyous recommends approaching HR and Engagement with our Employee Experience (EX) product.
Rest assured, your account manager will partner with you on your journey and you will be supported at every step. We are here to work alongside you and will tailor our approach to suit your unique requirements and culture.
If you have any feedback or questions don't hesitate to reach out to your account manager directly.
Ruby is a comedian-turned engineer, previously leading product at two global tech companies, she has been CEO at Joyous for 4 years. Her passion for making a positive impact on people’s lives is perfectly matched with the mission of Joyous to make life better for people at work.