Pulseri vs enterprise experience suites

Two different kinds of buyer

Qualtrics and Medallia are experience suites. They are built for large programs, where researchers, product teams, support leaders and human resources all collect feedback on one platform. Qualtrics describes products for customer experience, employee experience and market research. Medallia lists employee listening. If your organization is shaping a program like that, these names will come up, and we think they suit that work.

Pulseri is smaller on purpose. Ask customers and colleagues a few good questions. See how scores move. Make sure a bad score reaches a person fast. There is no program office to set up first.

How you buy

Qualtrics shows a Request Pricing button on its products and prices by interactions for customer and research programs and by employee count for employee programs ¹. Medallia publishes no prices and charges per Experience Data Record in annual tiers ⁵. Neither publishes a price list, so you learn the cost by asking.

In our reading, that likely means a first conversation and a quote before you send a survey. The upside is a price made for your size.

Pulseri publishes its plans and charges by the number of People you track. You can sign up, add your People and send. Larger teams can talk to us about a plan built around their needs.

When you compare quotes, ask each vendor four questions. What will the first year cost at our expected volume? What happens to the price if we double the interactions or employees? Which parts of the platform are extra? Who on our side must run it every week?

What a small team gets in a week

Here is what matters on day one for most small teams.

Regular scores. Qualtrics describes an NPS solution ². Pulseri sends NPS, CSAT, CES and employee pulse surveys on a schedule, or when something happens, such as a ticket closing.

Team pulse. Qualtrics offers pulse surveys inside its employee software ⁴, and Medallia lists employee listening ⁶. Pulseri runs team pulse surveys in the same place as customer surveys and keeps the two sets of numbers apart.

Alerts. A Qualtrics workflow can message a Slack channel when a response meets conditions you set ³. Pulseri has this built in: a rule defines a low score and the right channel hears about it. We did not find Medallia's alert setup on a page we could read, so the table leaves that cell blank.

Themes. Medallia says it can surface emerging themes across text analytics ⁷. Pulseri tags comments with a feeling and a theme, and writes a weekly summary.

The picture shows the idea in Pulseri: a score dips, and the comments behind it explain why.

When a suite is the better choice

In our view, pick a suite when the question is bigger than a score. Research teams may need custom studies. You may need to join feedback with large data sources. Leaders in many departments may want their own dashboards. A suite gives you that room.

Someone has to build and look after what a suite does. If nobody has that time, a simpler tool may be used more.

Moving from a suite, or starting small beside one

If you already pay for a suite, keep it for research and add a lighter tool for the steady feedback nobody had time to set up.

If you are leaving a suite, take these steps.

1. Export your people and past scores before your contract ends.
2. Write down the three questions your team actually reads each month. Start with those.
3. Recreate your most useful alert first, and send it to the channel where people already talk.
4. Run the new program next to the old one for one cycle.

Your numbers may move when the audience changes. Run both programs for one cycle before you compare.

Keep reading

• Pulseri vs Qualtrics: the head-to-head page for the best known suite.
• Customer feedback surveys: what Pulseri does for customer feedback.
• The survey builder: the five built-in scores and how a survey is made.