We (a market research/consulting house) use it pretty heavily to survey engineers to ask what types of technology they're using. I'm sure academics use it similarly - put in a list of emails, program and send out surveys, collect data, analyze said data, create reports.

The alternative was some god awful platform without a WYSIWYG editor where you have to code surveys by hand, an enormous waste of time and very inflexible compared to Qualtrics.