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| Ryan Smith, founder and CEO of Qualtrics, speaks during a press conference at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel, Thursday. / Courtesy of SAP Korea |
By Baek Byung-yeul
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| Ryan Smith, founder and CEO of Qualtrics, attends a press conference, with Jennifer Morgan, left, president of SAP's cloud business group, and Samsung SDS CEO Hong Won-pyo at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel, Thursday. / Courtesy of SAP Korea |
The survey company, which was established in 2002, has been expanding its business into the global market other than its home soil since it was acquired by SAP for $8 billion in November 2018. Qualtrics is especially showing impressive growth in Asia-Pacific, witnessing its sales in the region increase eight-fold compared to 2015.
Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, said Hyosung Group is its first Korean customer company as the energy and textile-focused conglomerate will use its survey software to estimate how its products will be received in the market. The company will also soon sign a memorandum of understanding with Samsung SDS, an IT service arm of Samsung Group.
"We are working with Hyosung, Samsung and other Korean companies. They will start to see a big splash with Qualtrics," Smith told reporters during a press conference at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas hotel.
"For Hyosung, they do a lot of research. When you launch a lot of products, two-thirds of your products that are launched in the world fail. We help organizations understand their products will work with all of you before launching," he said.
Samsung SDS CEO Hong Won-pyo said using Qualtrics' software will help the firm keep moving forward.
"We have been conducting surveys of our customer companies about how satisfied they are with our service, solutions and platform. We also conducted a survey of our employees to know how satisfied they are in their workplace. By combining Qualtrics' tool with ours, I think we can earn more valuable insights that can help us move to the next level," Hong said.
Jennifer Morgan, president of SAP's cloud business group, emphasized the growing importance of "experience management," which is finding new ways for companies to secure customer loyalty, and this is why SAP decided to acquire Qualtrics.
"We see so many of our customers investing quite a bit in digital transformation to step into their own experience of customer base. Our customers said they have a lot of different data about their business and we knew that the combination of the data with our customers' understanding better what was happening outside them, we have something very special and that's where experience management comes in," she said.
Starting his speech with "annyeonghaseyo (hello)" in a perfect Korean accent, Smith also shared his special experience about Korea confessing that he once worked as an English tutor for executives from conglomerates here such as Hyundai and Samsung for a year.
"My first business experience was in Korea," he said. "I didn't know Qualtrics would be here. When I was working as an English teacher, I lived in a gosiwon ― low-cost single-room type of accommodation. I only ate ramyeon noodles because I didn't have money, but it was one of the happiest moments in my life."
