Experience Intelligence Part 1: From Surveys to Signals — The Expanding Canvas of Experience Management

This is the first post in our three-part series exploring the emergence of Experience Intelligence — a new operating model for experience-centric organizations. In Part 1, we reflect on where XM began and how it’s evolving into a broader, more dynamic discipline.

For decades, surveys have been the heartbeat of experience management. They’ve enabled organizations to ask meaningful questions, hear directly from customers and employees, and drive improvement across products, services, and operations. At our firm, survey-driven programs remain central to the work we do. They’re not going away — and they shouldn’t.

But the canvas is expanding.

Today, experience leaders aren’t just collecting feedback — they’re listening to signals: voice transcripts, digital behavior, chat logs, in-app actions, and more. A retail brand, for example, might detect frustration not from a survey, but from a customer abandoning a checkout process midway through a mobile app. These real-time interactions reveal pain points and opportunities that traditional surveys alone might miss.

Experience insights are no longer episodic and retrospective — they are continuous, contextual, and increasingly real-time.

The Shift: From Asking to Listening at Scale

• Surveys help us ask the right questions.
• Signals help us hear what’s not being said.

Together, they create a fuller, more dynamic view of experience — one that enables organizations to predict needs, detect friction, and orchestrate interventions proactively.

This evolution marks the shift from survey-centric to signal-intelligent. Being signal-intelligent means organizations do more than collect structured feedback; they synthesize signals across platforms, analyze behavior in context, and act in the moment to shape better experiences.

Signal-intelligence is not just a technology investment — it's a mindset. It's about moving from episodic measurement to continuous understanding. It's about meeting customers and employees where they are, not where the business expects them to be.

Why It Matters Now

• Customers and employees engage across dozens of channels — not just one.
• Expectations for personalization and immediacy are rising fast.
• Businesses must detect and resolve issues before they escalate — not weeks after they surface.

Survey programs are evolving — not being replaced. They remain the structured heartbeat of experience management. But today, that heartbeat connects to a living circulatory system of signals, allowing organizations to react faster, personalize smarter, and improve continuously.

Experience Intelligence is about creating organizations that don't just measure moments — they anticipate them.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll dive deeper into how organizations can build the infrastructure needed to turn these signals into smart, scalable actions — and why the future belongs to those who can listen best.