Medallia Wins New Markets and Geographies: The 2022 CRM Conversation Starters

Medallia, a customer and employee experience management company based in San Francisco, spent a good part of the past year on both the giving and receiving ends of mergers and acquisitions cash flow.

It all started in October when private equity firm Thoma Bravo completed its acquisition of Medallia in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.4 billion.

Then the company, which was founded in 2001, went on a buying spree of its own, first acquiring Fields Healthcare Research, a data collection company specializing in patient healthcare experience research, in a move that will enable Medallia’s healthcare practitioner clients to capture real-time patient information and feedback.

Next up, the company acquired CXTeam, a customer experience consulting firm headquartered in Mexico, expanding its reach into Latin America.

But by far, its biggest acquisition occurred in mid-July when Medallia scooped up Mindful (formerly VHT), a callback automation solutions provider, from Alpine Investors, a private equity firm. Mindful’s patented technology enables customers to schedule callbacks when convenient for them and can transition customers to other channels when needed and provide automated call initiation based on signals from various channels.

Recognizing that feedback is only valuable when customers actually provide it, Medallia partnered with Rybbon to help companies reward customers for their participation in surveys and other voice-of-the-customer programs.

And through another partnership, rewards can also flow employees’ way after customers give positive reviews of their service interactions. Medallia integrated its Stella Connect engagement and performance management solution for contact center agents with Snappy Gifts, an incentive rewards platform for sending gifts to employees. Once agents receive enough positive feedback, the application automatically triggers the reward. With just a few clicks, companies can show agents how much they appreciate their hard work while increasing employee motivation and engagement.

Medallia’s already robust product portfolio also got a few significant additions, starting with the launch of the Medallia Digital Suite, which combines actionable user feedback metrics with complete behavioral data to help organizations understand and optimize their websites and mobile apps in real time. Artificial intelligence helps organizations get to the heart of digital issues by distilling more than 60 observed digital behaviors and tying them to critical business outcomes, like revenue impact.

Medallia’s new Athena Studio for building AI models and analytics for unstructured data without coding extended its AI and machine learning capabilities and is making data science and model customization more accessible to organizations of all sizes, allowing them to have text and conversation analytics up and running within hours and days, not months.

And finally, its new accelerator for Guidewire ClaimCenter allows insurers to collect data across significant moments in the claims process. Firms can send survey invitations, view feedback and sentiment data, initiate follow-up on policyholder input within ClaimCenter, and populate ClaimCenter policy and claims data in Medallia Experience Cloud to provide analytics and customer segmentation. The move marks a significant expansion into the financial services and insurance sector, along with the other geographic and vertical growth already initiated.