While Seattle-area publicly traded companies like Amazon, F5 and Microsoft continue to make headlines, customer and employee experience company Qualtrics International Inc. (Nasdaq: XM) has been steadily growing its Seattle presence.
Qualtrics, which has dual headquarters in Seattle and Utah, now has about 900 employees locally, just seven years after it first opened an office in Pioneer Square. The company has about 175,000 square feet on seven floors of office space at the 2+U tower downtown, in addition to six floors that it subleases.
"We have no signs of stopping or letting up," Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin said. "We have 170 posted positions that are open today. There are opportunities in engineering, design, sciences, analytics, customer implementation and delivery, professional services. It's a pretty well-rounded group of people that are here."
In 2019, Qualtrics had about 500 employees based in Seattle. It has more than 5,000 employees and more than 25 offices globally. Although there is a diverse range of roles in the Seattle office, Serafin said, the area is home to strong tech talent.
The 20-year-old company creates software for clients to improve customer and employee experiences. The technology compiles customer and employee data and analyzes it to find out what might be causing negative experiences, such as a cumbersome step in downloading a new app.
Qualtrics' clients include Amazon, T-Mobile, American Express and Disney. In its fourth-quarter 2021 financial results, released in January, Qualtrics reported full-year revenue of $1.08 billion, up from $763.5 million in 2020.
SAP announced plans to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion in November of 2018, four days before Qualtrics planned to go public. SAP closed the acquisition in January of 2019, but Qualtrics eventually spun out and went public on the Nasdaq in January of 2021. The company opened its office space at 2+U last year.
Qualtrics will adopt a hybrid work model. Currently, its offices are open but it's optional to work there. In the coming months, Serafin said the company will figure out what structure works best for what groups. Accounting employees, for example, find they work better together while engineering employees were actually more productive working from home, Serafin said.
"There's a yearning for people to want to be connected and to be able to interact," Serafin said. "That's the whole idea. Let's put people in control and focus more on the outcomes."
