XM for Employee Experience is the Qualtrics line for surveying and analyzing an organization’s workforce. The Product Terms of 10 June 2026 note that it was formerly called XM for People Teams.[1] Two sets of documents describe what is sold: the current XM for Employee Experience Product Terms, organized around an Employee Experience Suite,[1] and the EX Use Case Descriptions, which list individual use-case products and their limits.[2] The principal pricing unit is Employees, defined as the total number of employees, contractors or other personnel directly employed or engaged by the customer’s organization.[1]
The Employee Experience Suite
The Suite includes People Engage, People Lifecycle and Continuous Employee Listening.[1]
People Engage has three Cloud Services: Employee Engagement, Employee Pulse and Employee Research, each permitting unlimited surveys of the customer’s Employees, of the engagement, pulse and basic ad-hoc kinds respectively.[1] See People Engage.
People Lifecycle covers Employee Onboarding and Exit (unlimited surveys of employees’ experiences at onboarding and exit), Candidate Experience (unlimited surveys of all candidates for open positions) and Employee Retention Analytics (unlimited analysis on the other use cases included in the customer’s Cloud Services).[1] The terms add that Candidate Experience is priced on the number of Employees, not the number of candidates.[1] See People Lifecycle.
360 Development Feedback is an add-on that permits unlimited 360 feedback surveys of target employees, called Subjects, in which several individuals, including the Subject, are surveyed on the Subject’s performance. It is priced on the number of Subjects, not Employees, and appears as a separate Order Form line item.[1] See Subjects.
Each section ends with a use restriction that the customer will use the Cloud Services only as permitted.[1]
Continuous Employee Listening
Continuous Employee Listening processes unstructured sets of data related to Employees, measured in Interactions, and the customer is entitled to 10 Interactions per Employee purchased under the Employee Experience Suite.[1] The Interaction types are Chat, Email, Online Review, Response, Ticket and Voice.[1] The definitions differ from the customer experience terms in several ways. A Chat means 15 chats of any message type, including posts and responses in large public community channels. A Ticket means a written feedback response from individual employees to an internal service desk process such as HR or IT. A Voice is a transcript or a recording of up to 120 minutes of a call or voicemail into an HR, IT or other internal service desk.[1]
Fair-use terms say that an Email or Online Review thread consumes a single Interaction however many employees are involved, that excess over a length limit counts as one additional Interaction, and that separate Interactions must not be connected to circumvent that rule.[1] Limits mirror those of XM Discover functionality: an Annual Loading Limit equal to the Order Form number, a Monthly Loading Limit of one sixth of it, an Access Limit equal to the first-year annual number that applies across the whole Subscription Term and excludes Responses, and a Concurrent User Limit of 10,000 users by default; at the Access Limit the oldest Interactions are deleted.[1] Historical Interactions, the Export API (not more than one full export per month), website monitoring and training inclusions are the same as in the customer experience terms; see that article.[1]
EX use-case products
The EX Use Case Descriptions, dated 2 April 2026, define the individual products. Except for Candidate, using these Cloud Services to survey people who are not Employees is prohibited.[2] Products listed include:[2]
| Use case | Entitlement | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement | One engagement or pulse survey of Employees per annual subscription period | Base product |
| Pulse Add-on | Unlimited engagement or pulse surveys per annual period | Must be bought after or with Engagement |
| Lifecycle | Unlimited surveys at milestones such as onboarding, promotion, return from leave and exit | |
| Candidate | Unlimited surveys of internal and external candidates | Usage Metric is still Employees |
| Foundational | Access to Engagement, Pulse Add-on, Ad-Hoc Employee Research and Compensation and Benefits Optimizer | |
| Employee Technology Experience | One program per annual period; the Enterprise version allows unlimited programs | A program is a single internal survey on internal technology and services |
| 360 Feedback | Unlimited 360 surveys | Priced on Subjects |
| Compensation and Benefits Optimizer | Unlimited surveys on preferences for potential benefits | |
| Ad-hoc Employee Research | Unlimited basic ad-hoc surveys | Maximum of 10 project administrators |
| Employee XM Discover | Processing of unstructured employee data | Priced on Feedback Records per annual period, not Employees |
Employee XM Discover points to the XM Discover Product Terms for the definition of a Feedback Record.[2] Those terms define a Feedback Record as unstructured data of no more than 2,048 characters, with longer records counted in multiples and very short or empty values counted at 25%.[3]
Administrative roles and counting evidence
Qualtrics support documentation describes how Employee Experience users appear in the platform. An EX Administrator is a user with any of the 360, Employee Engagement, Employee Pulse, Employee Lifecycle or Ad Hoc Employee Research permissions enabled, and Participants are users created automatically when people are added to the Participants section of an Employee Experience project.[4] The support documentation says the Report tab is the primary resource for usage of the license and shows graphs of responses, surveys and users across Survey Platform and Employee Experience projects.[5] These are platform views and the Order Form still decides the contractual unit, which for most Employee Experience lines is the Employees count and not the number of administrators or participants.
Counting guidance
- Use the whole organization’s headcount definition: employees, contractors and other personnel directly employed or engaged.[6]
- Candidates do not add to the Employees count, and surveying other non-employees is restricted.[1][2]
- Keep 360 volumes by Subject and Discover volumes by Feedback Record, because these two lines do not scale with Employees.[2]
- Under the Engagement use case, check how many engagement or pulse surveys ran in each annual period before the Pulse Add-on is needed.[2]
Out of scope
Prices, discounts and part numbers are not published in the cited documents. Survey Platform licensing for non-EX projects, participant import mechanics, data access controls, and partner-led implementation services are not covered.