Company Close Up: The Medallia Story
The company specialises in CEM, expanding beyond hospitality to cover retail, banking, and travel Holiday Inn Club Vacation had to close 29 resorts in 2020 due to the pandemic. The club’s action plan required an immediate, effective business strategy to gain customer trust about safety. Using several solutions offered by customer experience management platform Medallia, […]
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The company specialises in CEM, expanding beyond hospitality to cover retail, banking, and travel
Holiday Inn Club Vacation had to close 29 resorts in 2020 due to the pandemic. The club’s action plan required an immediate, effective business strategy to gain customer trust about safety.
Using several solutions offered by customer experience management platform Medallia, the brand began to fully operate based on customer feedback. With an increase of 16 NPS points, a 41 per cent increase in customer satisfaction, and a 21 per cent increase in user engagement, the brand proved that voice-of-customer driven enhancements could result in fun and safe holidays even during the darkest of times.
Even Hilton uses Medallia to empower over 54,000 active users across 4000-plus properties in 90 countries with real-time guest feedback and actionable insights. The brand also used Medallia to link guest loyalty to revenue and test innovative practices to figure out the appropriate investments for the brand.
The various solutions offered by Medallia identify and analyse the customer and employee experience data and create actionable insights for the C suite leaders to take real-time action. With over 2000 employees across 15-plus global offices, Medallia serves over 1000 leading brands, including PayPal, Lexus, Mercedes Benz, Airbnb, and 7-Eleven.
The Inception
Decades ago, Medallia founders Borge Hald and Amy Pressman were consultants who had to travel frequently. Although regular customers at a particular hotel, they were dissatisfied with the experience offered. They even advised their friends to find other accommodations. Hotel management had no clue that they were unhappy.
Hald and Pressman identified a pain point — the gap between customer expectations and customer experience. Early in 2001, they knew it was a revolutionary idea. They wanted to develop an array of software applications that would target consumer behaviour and help create customer profiles. After intense discussions with Fortune 500 company executives about consumer and brand relationships, Medallia was finally established in California.
Ranked seventh on Forbes Cloud 100 list of 2017, today, the global company has offices worldwide, including Paris, Munich, Sydney, and Tel Aviv. The company specialises in CEM, expanding beyond hospitality to cover retail, banking, and travel. It has been gaining attention in recent times due to the sudden pivot into CX-driven business strategies.
Using its technology, the company, led by CEO Leslie J. Stretch, analyses around 4.9 billion experiences every year and conducts over eight trillion calculations about customers, products and brands every day.
Leslie J. Stretch, CEO of Medallia
Two Popular Solutions
The company’s award-winning SaaS platform, Medallia Experience Cloud, is a CEM leader. Using it, customers can reduce churn, turn detractors into promoters, and create in-the-moment cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. It helps drive revenue-impacting business decisions with potent results on investment.
Medallia captures experience signals created on digital channels and applies proprietary AI technology to reveal personalised and predictive insights to drive successful business results.
Meet Athena.
Using AI to uncover hidden insights in CX information, Medallia’s predictive AI engine, Athena, helps customers improve loyalty, increase satisfaction, and drive business growth. Athena helps determine the right action for each touchpoint and customer journey. Athena can also help customers understand qualitative feedback, uncover experience drivers, optimise customer interactions, and improve programme health.
Moreover, it is always learning. The tool continuously adapts and improves based on new feedback, associated customer data and usage patterns.
2021 Journey
Early last year, Medallia acquired Decibel, a digital experience analytics provider, for $160 million. The company’s CX and engagement solution would include always-on, unsolicited digital feedback through this acquisition. Bringing the contact centres and digital world into a single signal platform, Medallia could offer a single view of all customers and prospective customers at every point of their journey across all channels.
In August, the company launched Medallia Marketing Experience on the Salesforce AppExchange. It empowered customers to access customer sentiment, behaviour, and perception data and deliver better experiences across marketing channels.
Access to better information helps companies understand the needs and expectations of their customers by creating distinct segments, maximising their campaign budgets, and increasing revenue results. Hence, with this new addition, companies could leverage information flagged by Medallia, including potential churn risk, sentiment segmentation, and even AI-identified upsell opportunities, to engage with their customers in more personalised ways.
Last October paved a new path for Medallia. The company was fully acquired by a software investment firm Thomas Bravo. “The close of this transaction is an important milestone in Medallia’s history as we embark on our next chapter of growth as a private company. I am incredibly proud of all that we have achieved since our founding in 2001 and am confident that our new partnership with Thoma Bravo will catalyse Medallia’s ability to deliver continued innovation to the market, bolster our position as an innovation leader,” said Leslie Stretch, President and CEO of Medallia.
Pumped with new energy, the company continued to redefine the experience management market. The following month, Medallia acquired Fields Healthcare Research, a Centre for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) approved CAHPS data collection company specialising in patient healthcare experience research.
To provide the healthcare sector with the ability to use Medallia’s real-time signal capture capabilities Field’s comprehensive survey portfolio and deep CAHPS experience administering patient surveys, Medallia made this strategic growth acquisition.
“Not only do we make it easier for healthcare organisations to comply with CAHPS requirements and avoid reductions in their Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, we also offer robust data reports and benchmarking insights to help improve patient experience,” said Fields. “With Medallia, we can now accelerate those efforts and help even more healthcare providers improve the patient experience.”
During the same month, the company launched the integrated Medallia Digital Suite to combine actionable user feedback metrics with complete behavioural data to help organisations understand and optimise digital experiences in real-time.
“The Medallia Digital Suite delivers complete visibility into digital experiences,” said Medallia Chief Product Officer Sarika Khanna. “The ability to identify, quantify, and respond to customer issues with websites or mobile applications as a customer is using them is potentially game-changing and critical to preventing lost revenue, creating better experiences, and increasing share of wallet.”
Some of the use cases offered by the digital suite include the ability of businesses to identify digital issues and quantify their revenue impact; help customer service teams prevent lost revenue and lower overall costs; optimise mobile app experiences; and create smooth, complex multi-channel journeys.
It also helps businesses deploy AI and ML technology to understand customer buying behaviour better.
Entering 2022 with a bang
More recently, the global leader in customer and employee experience acquired Thunderhead, which offers enterprise technology for real-time interaction management and journey orchestration. This acquisition is expected to empower Medallia to power individualised journeys and conversations at scale across all online and offline channels.
Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch said, “We continue to blaze the innovation trail for the customer experience world. This latest acquisition is targeted at the needs of the most pioneering enterprise companies who are looking for new ways to make customers feel known, no matter where they are interacting. The combination of Medallia Experience Cloud and Thunderhead’s open technology for real-time interaction delivers feedback-driven personalisation on a massive scale.”
Raising industry standards worldwide, we believe Medallia will continue to work wonders for global companies in the complete CX-driven world we live in today.
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