Medallia

What is Medallia

Medallia is a comprehensive Experience Management (XM) software platform designed for large organizations. Its main purpose is to capture feedback and experience data from customers and employees across all possible touchpoints. The platform then uses powerful analytics and artificial intelligence to process this data, providing businesses with actionable insights to improve experiences, increase loyalty, and drive growth. Founded in 2001 by Borge Hald and Amy Pressman, Medallia has established itself as a leader in the XM industry. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves global brands across various sectors including retail, finance, healthcare, and hospitality.

Medallia Features

Medallia offers a wide range of features to manage the entire experience journey.

• Omni-channel Data Capture: Collect feedback from every channel where you interact with customers and employees. This includes web, mobile apps, email, SMS, social media, contact centers, and in-person interactions.
• Athena AI: Medallia's proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine analyzes unstructured data like open-text comments and call transcripts. It performs sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and predictive analytics to uncover deep insights automatically.
• Role-Based Dashboards: Provides customized dashboards and reports for every employee, from frontline staff to C-level executives. This ensures everyone gets the right information to make decisions relevant to their role.
• Action Management & Automation: The platform can automatically trigger alerts and workflows based on specific feedback. For example, a negative review can create a case for a manager to follow up, ensuring issues are resolved quickly.
• Employee Experience (EX): Includes tools for conducting employee engagement surveys, pulse checks, and 360-degree feedback to understand and improve the workplace environment.
• Digital Experience Analytics: Capture and analyze user behavior on websites and mobile apps. Features like session replay and heatmaps help identify points of friction in the digital journey.
• Contact Center Experience: Analyze voice and text conversations from your contact center to understand customer sentiment, agent performance, and reasons for calls.

Medallia Pricing Plans

Medallia's pricing is tailored for enterprise-level clients and is not publicly listed. The cost is determined through a custom quote based on several factors.

• Custom Enterprise Plans: Pricing is based on the specific needs of the organization. This includes the number of modules required (e.g., Customer Experience, Employee Experience), the volume of data to be processed, the number of users, and the level of support and services needed.

Prospective customers must contact the Medallia sales team to schedule a consultation and receive a personalized pricing proposal.

Medallia Free Plan

Medallia does not offer a free plan. It is an enterprise-grade platform designed for large, complex organizations. However, interested businesses can request a personalized demo from the Medallia team. The demo showcases the platform's capabilities and how it can be configured to meet the specific challenges and goals of the organization.

How to use Medallia

Getting started with Medallia involves a structured implementation process.

1. Discovery and Planning: Work with the Medallia team to define your experience management goals and identify key customer and employee journeys.
2. Integration: Connect Medallia to your existing business systems, such as CRM (e.g., Salesforce), helpdesk software, and HR systems, to create a single, unified view of the customer and employee.
3. Configure Feedback Collection: Design and launch feedback collection programs across various channels. This could be a post-purchase email survey, an in-app feedback form, or a text message after a support call.
4. Analyze Insights: Use the platform’s dashboards and AI tools to monitor feedback in real-time. Identify trends, understand the root causes of problems, and discover opportunities for improvement.
5. Take Action: Empower your teams to act on insights. Frontline managers can use alerts to perform service recovery with unhappy customers, while leadership can use high-level data to make strategic business decisions.

Pros and Cons of Medallia

Medallia is a powerful platform, but it has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.

Pros:

• Comprehensive Platform: It covers all aspects of experience management, from customer and employee to digital and contact center.
• Powerful AI Analytics: The Athena AI engine is excellent at analyzing unstructured text and voice data to find meaningful insights.
• Highly Scalable: Built to handle massive amounts of data for large, global enterprises.
• Action-Oriented: Strong focus on 'closing the loop' and enabling employees to take immediate action on feedback.

Cons:

• High Cost: The platform is a significant investment, making it unsuitable for small and medium-sized businesses.
• Complexity: The platform is very powerful and can be complex to set up and manage, often requiring dedicated staff or professional services.
• Long Implementation Time: Due to its complexity and need for integration, the initial setup can be a lengthy process.

Medallia Integrations

Medallia offers extensive integration capabilities to connect with other enterprise systems, enriching feedback data with operational context.

• Salesforce Integration: Sync feedback data with customer records in Salesforce to give sales and service teams a complete view of customer health.
• Adobe Analytics Integration: Combine behavioral data from Adobe Analytics with feedback data from Medallia to understand the 'why' behind user actions.
• Microsoft Dynamics Integration: Integrate with Microsoft's CRM to embed experience data into your customer management workflows.
• Slack & Microsoft Teams Integration: Send real-time feedback alerts and insights directly to your team's collaboration channels.
• Genesys & NICE Integration: Connect with contact center platforms to analyze call recordings and chat transcripts for sentiment and key topics.

Medallia Alternatives

Several other platforms offer similar experience management capabilities.

• Qualtrics: The most direct competitor to Medallia, offering a similarly comprehensive XM platform. Qualtrics is often noted for its strong roots in research and academic-grade survey tools.
• Forsta: A powerful platform that combines customer experience, employee experience, and market research tools. It is a strong choice for companies that need deep market research capabilities alongside their XM program.
• InMoment: An enterprise-level XM platform that focuses on integrating feedback with business data to provide strategic intelligence. It offers a strong combination of technology and professional services.
• SurveyMonkey (Momentive): While known for its simple survey tool, its enterprise offering provides robust feedback management solutions that are often easier to deploy than Medallia, making it a good fit for mid-market companies.

Medallia API

Yes, Medallia provides a comprehensive set of APIs for developers. The Medallia API allows businesses to programmatically interact with the platform. This enables custom integrations, pushing external data into Medallia, pulling experience data into other business applications like a data warehouse, and automating workflows.

API keys and access are provided to customers as part of their enterprise license. Developers can find documentation and manage their API credentials through the Medallia developer portal.

Here is a conceptual example of an API call to fetch survey response data:

{
  "method": "GET",
  "url": "https://api.medallia.com/v2/surveys/12345/responses",
  "headers": {
    "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY",
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
  },
  "params": {
    "startDate": "2024-01-01",
    "endDate": "2024-01-31"
  }
}

Medallia Affiliate Program

Medallia does not offer a public, self-service affiliate program in the traditional sense. Its business model is focused on direct sales to large enterprises. However, Medallia runs a Partner Program for consulting firms, technology providers, and resellers who work with enterprise clients. This program involves co-selling, implementation services, and technology integrations. Companies interested in partnership opportunities should contact Medallia directly through their official website to inquire about the specific requirements and benefits of their partner ecosystem.