Feature
The 2010s have been kind to Medallia.
The 400-employee Palo Alto, Calif.-based customer experience management provider quadrupled both its employees and revenue, secured a major capital investment and scored some big clients.
And it’s been cited by at least one major research firm as a leader: In 2011, Forrester highlighted Medallia and MarketTools as leaders of the enterprise feedback management (EFM) pack because of their comprehensive solutions for managing Voice of Customer (VoC) programs.
“We want to set a precedent in organizations that the customer should be part of every conversation,” said Michelle de Haaff, vice president of Marketing for Medallia. “We embed the customer in every decision a business can make.”
Why Medallia?
CMSWire heard some buzz about Medallia at the Adobe Summit Digital Marketing Conference last month. So why has the company become so hot in the past few years?
De Haaff credits the surge to the empowerment of the customer in the omnichannel world. Customers are everywhere, and they're talking. Platforms that enable companies to do something about those conversations win.
But why Medallia? Why 250,000 log-ins into the Medallia platform per month at Toyota? Why are 30,000 Hilton hotel employees logging into Medallia? What’s the wow factor?
“The first one is the company is set up to capture feedback everywhere,” de Haaff said. “It wasn’t just a one-off, siloed thing. We’re developing the business natively to capture feedback across many listening points.”
Medallia is also available to everyone in an organization. It connects professionals and produces who's who data.
“You can’t just give a maintenance guy analytics charts and graphs to slice and dice,” said de Haaff, who added Medallia's analysis comes in real time. “He doesn’t care. He needs a distillation of analytics that’s relevant to him.”
Customer at Business Table
The premise behind the Medallia platform? The customer must always have seat at the decision-making table.
“The customer should be a part of every conversation,” she told CMSWire. “We embed the customer into every conversation the company is having.”
How?
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In “old” ways: Medallia distributes surveys to customers.
And in “new" ways: Its platform includes “listening posts” at different points of the customer journey: in a store, on social media, a mobile device.
“We’re listening to their behavior but also getting real-time feedback,” she said. “We’re embedding listening posts inside mobile apps to ask customers a question or two as they’re engaging with mobile content.”
From the listening post data comes insights and actionable data. For example, the maintenance guy at the Hilton ensures the lobby is in prime shape on Thursday nights: he knows the Friday business-meeting crowd arrives that night based on data.
“They’re able to access a to-do list as a result of the feedback,” de Haaff said.
CX on the Move
Timing of course helps. Customer experience is red-hot, and the bigger cats know, too.
Marketo took advantage of the trend by releasing earlier this month its customer experience platform that offer marketers the chance to oversee their entire digital marketing and campaign strategy in real-time from a single point of view.
And even-bigger cats IBM and SAP have each dove into customer experience in the past year.
Medallia says it’s simply taking advantage of the shift in organizations to focus on customer experience and reputation management. When the company started around 2002, it was “getting over the ERP hangover.” Companies zeroed in on process improvements.
“We had financial data but not customer data,” de Haaff said. “… We’re now focused on winning competitively as a result of customer experience.”
