Qualtrics has laid off 14 percent of its workforce as part of an organizational restructure.
The VoC stalwart follows many other CX tech juggernauts in making layoffs in 2023.
And Zig Serafin, CEO of Qualtrics, told a familiar story when announcing the news: the company’s organizational structure had become too complicated.
After a pandemic-driven business surge, Qualtrics seemingly grew too quickly - and somewhat unsustainably.
Salesforce, Zendesk, and many others have painted a similar picture when announcing their layoffs.
Another example is SAP, which acquired Qualtrics in 2018 and continues to own a majority stake in the company. Earlier this year, it announced plans to lay off 2.5 percent of its global workforce.
Soon after, Qualtrics was acquired by investment firms Silver Lake and CPP Investments for $12.5BN, including SAP’s remaining 71 percent stake in Qualtrics.
Going deeper into the rationale behind the job cuts in a memo to employees, Serafin explained: "Simply put, the organizational structures, work processes, and the way we made decisions previously don’t work for the company we’ve become or the company we aspire to be.
The result is an organizational structure that will enable our teams to work better together, bring new innovations to market faster, and make it easier for our customers and partners to do business with us.
Employees made redundant will receive a minimum of ten weeks of severance pay, health insurance, equity vesting, as well as outstanding quarterly bonuses.
Alongside these layoffs, the company is also planning to relocate hundreds of staff to new roles and locations. The aim is to streamline its go-to-market and product development activities.
Qualtrics is expected to have completed this restricting effort by the end of the year.