Please welcome Medallia, CEO, Joe Tyrrell, (light upbeat music) (audience clapping)
Thank you so much for being here and welcome to Medallia’s Experience 2024 User Conference. I know for many of you, this is a first opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and peers in person in quite a while. It’s also should be a great opportunity for you to make new connections, to reach out and introduce yourself and to make those connections that’ll help you continue to drive your business forward.
I joined Medallia about 11 months ago, and when I first got started, I reached out to connect to many of the CEOs and executives for your companies. My intention there was I really wanted to find out what are we doing well and what are some things that we should focus on to do better to help your businesses grow? And as I reached out to connect to these leaders, I received the same consistent question from just about every one of ’em, which was, “Who are you?” (audience laughing) So they didn’t really say it that way, that’s probably the way that I heard it. Really what they were asking me was, tell me a little bit about your experience. What is it that you’re bringing to Medallia that’s going to benefit all of your businesses?
So it gave me a great opportunity to share my background in running software companies. I’ve been in and around Silicon Valley most of my career. It also gave me a great opportunity to talk about the importance of data in my experience in using a lot of data in my career. I mean, zettabytes of data. So if you’re not familiar with that term, it just means a lot. I also got the opportunity to talk about the importance of neural network machine learning and my experience using it to help companies get to that granular level of detail that provides that interesting insight to help them really personalize how they interact with their employees or with their customers.
And certainly I had to spend some time talking about my extensive experience using artificial intelligence and using it in really highly regulated and very compliance oriented industries with the responsibility for a lot of PII that we had to make sure that we were protecting at all times. So hopefully during my conversation with them, and hopefully what you’ll pick up in the next few minutes here on stage with me is just this passion I have for technology. And what I love about it is that you have these code bases and you can program these code bases to generate an expected outcome. And I love that aspect of it, but with all my experience, I have found that there is one code base that’s more programmable than even any of the innovative new technologies that kind of seem to grab the headlines and that highly programmable code base is us. You see, as humans, we are inherently programmable, but instead of adding lines of code to create expected outcomes, we are built through a series of experiences that create expectations for us.
And so as we’re experiencing our lives, it’s also important and very different from a technology perspective to recognize that not all experiences are created the same. In fact, in full transparency, I’ve had some absolutely terrifying experiences in my life. And all of those really center around the fact that I’m a survivor of raising four daughters. (audience laughing) It’s been crazy. So I’ve experienced kind of the formation of these new languages coming at me from them and I don’t really understand what they’re talking about. It’s been this spectrum of experiences living with my gens. So Gen X, Gen Y, and Gen Z, who have really different expectations from each other and maybe a little bit entitlement, which I can a hundred percent blame on my wife because she’s not here today. (audience laughing)
But the most impactful experience that I’ve had in being with these girls is really witnessing life through their eyes. You see, over the course of the last 29 years, my daughters have had some really incredible images flashed in front of them. They’ve seen images of shootings at shopping malls, at schools, movie theaters and churches. They’ve experienced a global pandemic just as you and I have. But for example, my daughter Grace started high school as a freshman right before the pandemic began. She didn’t return to be with her classmates until her junior year. But the big impact has been this ongoing barrage of information, not just these unprecedented attacks on their self-esteem caused by the pressures of social media, but all of this information hitting them every single day, all designed to tell them what they should think, what they should do, and ultimately who they should be.
It’s because these strings of experiences have come into their lives that it has generated this expected outcome in the fact that they expect bad things to happen. It’s no wonder that so many of our young men and young women deal with anxiety and depression given what they’ve lived through in the last several years. So as a dad, I’ve spent the last 29 years helping them understand how to wade through all this information coming at them. But specifically what I’ve really tried to focus on is to help them understand the difference between information that is interesting versus information that’s important So that when they see a posting of their friends at some concert, they can recognize, hey, that’s, that’s interesting. Or if the celebrity they happen to be following puts out on their feed that they’re at some exotic location or resort they can recognize that’s interesting. But I also need them to understand that none of that is important. You see, they have to determine for themselves what they should think, what they should do, and who it is that they’re going to become.
Now this is the exact same distinction that everybody in this room is actually paid to understand. To understand the difference of the information that you have that’s interesting versus that’s important. Because as practitioners of experiences, if you can string together a series of good experiences for your customers, your guests, your patients, your members, your students, then you are going to create a specific set of expectations that working with you actually produces good things. Now you have so much information coming at you, it’s kind of daunting sometimes to figure out how to wade through it all. In fact, just last year alone across the globe, there were 97 zettabytes of new information that was created that is more than a mountain of information. But the reality is only some of it is actually interesting.
So when you think about interesting versus important, the key is what’s the information that’s important to help you attract your next new customer? What’s the information that’s important to help you grow and retain that relationship with your customer? And what information is important to help you significantly personalize and improve the experience that they have when interacting with you?
Now as you start creating those strings and you’re looking at that data, we also have to recognize that not all data is the same. And when we treat it the same, it’s very easy for us to find ourselves making mistakes. So let’s look at some interesting data just for a second. Let’s take a male and we’ll start to get a little bit more granular as we go through it. So with this male, we’ll say that he was born in 1948 and now we’ll start to apply some filters ’cause we’re trying to narrow in on a single individual. So this male born in 1948 was raised in the UK. Now we’ll get even more granular. We’ll say that this person has an income of over $3 million a year, and now we’re going to get really, really narrow. We’re also going to say that this person has been married twice. And now I’m going to get to the point where it’s got to be just one individual that we’re looking for because this last filter we’re going to apply is that this individual lives in a castle. So it might be obvious to us as we go through this criteria that we’re talking about King Charles, but in reality the person that I’m looking for that also fits this criteria is Ozzy Osborne. (audience laughing)
So if you think about your responsibility to engage these people, I suspect you would probably do it very differently based upon who they are. So while the data tells us that they’re the same, the reality is is that we know that these are two very different people, and that’s because there’s a lot of data that’s interesting, but only some of it’s important. That’s got to be the real focus, is to get to that data that helps us to truly personalize our engagements and our interactions with those that we serve.
And the reason why that’s so important, the reason why you’re going to hear Medallia constantly talk about personalized every experience is because once you can identify that data, now you can actually predict the experience that they want to have. So that’s our focus. This is what we’ve been marching towards for the last 11 months. To help us accelerate this journey, what we’ve been doing is really focusing on aggregating, organizing and tagging all of the data that we have in a much more granular way, because this allows us not only to identify the data that’s important, but also how we’re going to be able to take action on that data.
In just a few minutes, our chief product officer Simonetta is going to come on the stage with a number of our product leaders, and we’re going to introduce four new generative AI capabilities. This new AI is going to fundamentally change the way that you access, consume, understand, but most importantly, how you take action on your data. Now, whether you’re a public or private company, whether you’re trying to make sure that you can meet the expectations of your board of directors, investors, Wall Street analysts, or even just the internal bar that you’ve set high for yourself, we know that you want to engage AI in a meaningful way, but you should also do it without having to worry about introducing unintended consequences or worse, unintended bias, which is why all of the AI that we’re going to introduce you to over the course of the next two days is deployed with a framework, with a governance and with an understanding that you have to think through some questions for your own company before you start deploying AI in production or at scale.
So what are some of those questions that you should ask yourself? Well, the first one is, who in your company do you want to be able to ask questions of AI? You also have to answer what questions do you want to be allowed to be asked? You also have to figure out, do you care what the answers are? See, when you start playing around with generative AI and you start asking its questions, what you’re going to get is answers. So are you prepared for anybody in your company to ask your AI solution, which of our stores or locations are the most racist? Now I know that’s a jarring example, but the reality is, is if you ask a question, you’re going to get an answer. But the answer that you’re going to get is only going to be as good as the data that your AI has access to.
So that’s why at Medallia we’re focused on answering and asking business questions. What we’re looking to do is deliver a high level of value with a very low level of risk for your organization. We’re focused on business outcomes with our technology, and yes, it’s cool and it’s innovative, but there’s got to be a so what attached to it. And so what we’re looking to do is to deliver real business value to you. The AI that you’re going to hear about over the course of the next two days is designed to save millions of hours of time for your folks who are coming through all of these verbatims, trying to make sure that they’re reading them and understanding them properly. Are AI is intended to eliminate the misinterpretations of the feedback that you get from those that you serve. Our AI is intended to also deliver very specific suggestions for you and what actions need to be taken.
Now, in order to do this, we’re going to leverage our technology to pinpoint the exact reasons and specific causes of dissatisfaction and then return to you detailed findings with specific recommendations on what action needs to be taken to help that individual customer. The goal here is to significantly improve the experiences that your customers have when interacting with you because we’re personalizing it, it’s instant AI interactions that generate real-time personalized responses. And lastly, we’re going to answer the most important questions that you need to ask and give you the ability to engage both data and your customers in a whole new way.
But most importantly, we have designed all of this technology to be incredibly flexible. So certainly you can leverage our large language models that are built with the capabilities of handling over 300 million parameters, but if you have your own proprietary LLM, you can simply plug it into our platform. If you have a desire to work with OpenAI’s enterprise LLM, we can plug that into our platform as well. Or if you tell us, “Hey, our company’s a little bit adverse to new technology, but we want to get started, can you give us our own LLM that we can train and it’s just our data?” We can do that as well.
So hopefully you can get the sense that we’ve been busy over the course of the last 11 months. And so before I bring up our product leaders to walk you through all this innovation, I did want to announce just one more thing. As I’ve had this opportunity to talk to so many of the companies that are here today, it’s been interesting as I’ve really seen two philosophies emerge and how companies think about engaging customers and getting insights. Certainly there’s one where it’s more market research driven and those companies are really looking to move quickly, iterate on questions to figure out what type of feedback they’re really looking for and constantly change the focus of their engagement with their customers.
On the other hand, I’ve also had a lot of conversations with companies that think about this more programmatically, where they’re looking to have a client retention, a customer loyalty program where they’re really tracking historical data so they can see the trends and any changes in customer behavior or customer satisfaction levels.
But the reality is is I’ve had an opportunity to talk to so many of you incredibly successful companies. Those most successful companies leverage both. They have a robust program that allows them to, on an ongoing basis, track monitor the impact of any changes that they’re making, but they also have the ability to move quickly when they need that flexibility of truly just running some research projects.
So today at Experience, we’re going to ensure that you have the best of both worlds. I’m excited to announce the introduction of Medallia Agile Research. This is now delivered as part of the Medallia Experience Cloud. So it’s already in the platform that you have. This is a completely self-service solution that allows you to move quickly to iterate in a very agile way. And once you’ve tweaked your programs how you want to engage your customers, you simply click one button and we’ll move all that information over and we’ll update the core program that you’re running in MEC.
So as you can see, there’s a lot of new capabilities that I’m really excited for you to experience over the course of the next couple of days. As executives and practitioners of creating experiences, we all have to figure out how to navigate through all the information that we have to really identify what’s interesting, but focus on the data that’s most important.
Just so you know, I intend for Medallia to move quickly as it relates to new innovation and constantly pushing the envelope from a technology perspective. But we’re also going to move thoughtful. And so over the course of the next two days, you’re going to learn about a lot of brand new capabilities we’re introducing here at Experience. And that new innovation is designed to help you be able to move your business forward with both speed and with strategy. You’re also going to learn about solutions that are not necessarily new, but maybe new to many of you simply because we’ve actually been innovating and introducing a lot of new capabilities over the last 16 months that you just might not be aware of.
So I’m excited for you to learn about those as well. And then lastly, you’re going to hear about some incredible journeys. Journeys of people who focused on what was most important to help them achieve accomplishments that a lot of people just didn’t think were possible. In a few minutes, you’re going to hear about an incredible journey of an award-winning actress, entrepreneur and author. And tomorrow you’re going to hear the unlikely journey of a Super Bowl winning quarterback.
So wherever you may be on your journey, wherever you may be in helping your company get to that next level of really personalizing experiences and focusing on the information that’s most important, I really encourage you to leave Experience with just even one or two things that you can start using today to help your company identify the important, to help you achieve the possible and to help make a difference for those that you serve. Because trust me, the last thing your customer wants is to hear you ask them who are you?
So welcome to Experience and welcome to the new Medallia, thank you. (audience clapping) <v Announcer>Please welcome Simonetta Turek.</v> (upbeat music) (audience clapping) <v ->Welcome everyone, today we bring you</v> the next set of innovations from Medallia, the pioneer in experiences that matter. We’re opening new horizons with generative AI where we unlock new experiences for customers, patients, guests, prospects, students, members, or any type of client that is being served. And while AI is reshaping our world now more than ever, we need to be asking questions about its implications.
We need to build trust into every experience, making sure that no one is left behind. So before we get into this exciting new generation of products we’re unveiling for you today, I think it is vital we start by addressing those questions about trust and the responsible use of AI. Here at Medallia, our products are built according to our core values. Every experience matters, innovation, customer centricity, inclusivity, and most important of all trust. Underlying everything that you will see today is that focus on trust.
So to ensure that as we incorporate new AI technologies, we are protecting your data security and privacy. Internally, we’ve created an AI moderation council consisting of members from our legal, privacy and security, compliance, product and engineering, and customer organizations. The AI Moderation Council provides oversight, guidance, policy to ensure that, for example, we think about data control so that we respect security and data access policies and to ensure that we eliminate hallucinations and filter for bias and toxicity in our AI models. But we knew that wasn’t enough. An internal group can only go as far on its own, which is why today I’m pleased to announce that we will be launching an AI advisory board with participation of our customers and partners. This board will specifically focus on the responsible, safe and ethical use of AI, as well as creating a space where the exchange of learnings, challenges and best practices can be shared. Cultivating trust in AI is a shared imperative. And here in Medallia, we believe that enduring success will be enjoyed by those who adopt responsible AI proactively rather than reactively. So I look forward to this very important partnership as we navigate this fast changing landscape of generative AI. And while that landscape has indeed been changing incredibly fast over the last year or so, Medallia has been around to see and pioneer advances like these for over a decade. Starting with the early use of machine learning and natural language understanding for speech and text analytics, Medallia continued to push forward using AI to show customers where they need to take actions that matter.
And as we look toward the future, we want to make the training, testing, and deployment of conversational AI and model customization accessible to organizations of all sizes. Our products have always been at the forefront of technological innovation, in the service of delivering superlative experiences and empowering your employees, especially those on the frontline. From our roots and signal gathering and listening, we are now laser focused on taking those derived insights and generating prescriptive actions and automations. Today you’ll see how our generative AI solutions will make personalization possible across the entire customer lifecycle and their journeys, and empower your workforce to deliver better experiences with augmented intelligence, insights and actions. Up first, we’re so excited to show you an easy, elegant way to identifying, merging, and summarized trends and do root cause analysis with your qualitative data. Trust me, this is going to be loved by everyone in this room.
Spotlighting key areas of opportunity to positively impact your business and design for both your analysts and your operators alike. And then you’ll see a really new conversational way to answer your most pressing questions about your business with on demand relevant answers. And because Medallia is the hub for all of your experience data, we will be able to dig into lines of business down to regional or customer segments, and all the way down to detailed feedback records, all through easy questions that don’t require to form complex queries or understand complex data structures. There’s really nothing quite like we’re unveiling in the market today. To share more about these two new and incredible solutions, I’d like to introduce you to our VP of product management at Medallia, Michael Mallett. (upbeat music) (audience clapping) <v ->Thank you, Simonetta.</v> We’re now living in an incredibly exciting time where you can’t go a day without hearing something new about artificial intelligence. And companies like yours are certainly leaning in. According to Harvard Business Review, nearly half of enterprises are already experimenting with generative AI, but these experiments are not to make images of dogs and cats that are more cute. Come on, they’re cute enough already, right? No, businesses like you are looking for ways to unlock new levels of sustainable growth through better, more personalized experiences, just with a lot more efficiency. And artificial intelligence can help as it recognizes patterns, automates workflows and even generates content dynamically.
But technology alone isn’t the answer because who sees the patterns? Who makes the decision to automate or not for each use case and who decides what’s about to be sent is personalized enough? This is why at Medallia we believe the greatest opportunity to achieve both costs and growth with artificial intelligence is through activating your employees. Embedded dynamic intelligence created on demand will make the complex simple, the simple automated, and the impossible possible, all to benefit your customers. Now that’s a lot of promise. So I’d love to show you how this works. Let’s peek behind the scenes at AllMart, a large national retail store with grocery, clothing, home, electronics, and more. They’re known for a few things, quality items, friendly prices and services, and innovative customer experience solutions. And we’re going to experience the world from the life of Julien, the VP of store operations. Julien’s preparing for the quarterly meeting with his regional lead and their store manager’s team in the northeast. Now as part of their recent business move, AllMart just launched a new in-store brand product with special promotions online and by mail, end of aisle product placement and even mobile app marketing notifications because a lot of shoppers use it for in-store navigation and checking their shopping lists.
And Julien wants to let the team know how the product launch went from the customer perspective and if there are any operational actions to take. Now, normally Julien would engage the insights team, but their plate is full and Julien wants to build confidence in his team that they can all find insights too, which would lead to even faster outcomes for their locations.
So Julien starts on the dashboard that any of his Northeast managers would see. He checks the focus areas powered by text analytics to see if there are enough people talking about product pricing or product satisfaction, areas that have been concerns in the past. So they would typically appear in this report, but there’s nothing there about product at all, which is a surprise since he’s seen positive sales data that suggests customers should be talking about the product, which is when Julien remembers there’s new reporting available to all operational teams.
Exactly for this situation, this reporting is so adaptive, it’ll highlight what is recently being talked about, even if it’s happening right now. It’s Medallia’s new Themes enhanced with generative AI. Checking for recent comments in the last week, now Julien begins to see that there are actually a few themes around products, like customer services is not knowledgeable and new product is great, but there’s one that has the highest volume and share of negative sentiment, can’t find new product at the end of the aisle, which is way more specific than usual.
And after drilling into the theme, the story immediately becomes clear to him that when he sees comments that highlight the product has actually been moved from its original location. Now this is clearly caused widespread confusion and frustration amongst both customers and employees. Of course, it’s common to move products after promotions end, but it’s clear that in this case the timing of the move could have been better since customers are loving it so much.
Well now Julien wants to make sure that he and his leaders are prioritizing the most important next best action here based on what customers need the most. So he checks the emerging Themes report. There he sees, can’t find new product, has the highest negative impact of the overall customer experience right now of all recently flagged themes. And the sentiment is trending negative. So he’s convinced the situation would only get worse if action isn’t taken swiftly.
And just to make sure he hasn’t missed anything that he and his team should be able to see, Julien hovers over the theme to see a summary produced by generative AI. Not only does it simply summarize everything he already knew, but there is an additional sub theme highlighted. The mobile app navigation is wrong too. Well for Julien, his recommended action plan for the Northeast is now very clear. He’s going to recommend moving the product back to its end of aisle location for a few more weeks, improving store signage and training around the product launch. Coordinating with the digital team to update in-store mobile app navigation so they can find the product. And he’ll even recommend a push notification mobile campaign to inform shoppers before their next trip where to find the product to keep both future and past purchasers happy because he knows promoters spend more and refer new customers too.
Julien now has everything he needs to enable his Northeast team to see what he’s seeing so they’ll be confident in immediately prioritizing action not only for this opportunity, but for the next one as well.
Using new machine learning techniques and generative AI, Themes will discover more granular and daily emerging patterns explained concisely with summarizations for mass adoption and engagement for all your users. Also, with our enhancements, we’ll enable new track and trend reporting to determine if experiences are repeating and eventually improving due to actions taken by your organization. We’ll even enable text analytics administrators and insight users alike to easily create a topic from a theme ensuring that consistent insights around any issue or opportunity are generated for the long term.
And now employees from the corporate office all the way down to the frontline can begin to confidently leverage the power of thematic analysis across any experienced text data like the sources in Julien’s story or others like social, voice, chats, and more.
So that’s Themes now with generative AI. (audience clapping)
Now we all know data analysis can still be intimidating for the average employee. It’s not always self-explanatory what the data is, where it came from, or even what it means, and of course what to do about it. And this is all assuming they even saw the data in the first place. Complicating the situation are the varied types of data that we now need to understand to deliver personalized experiences in 2024 from activities, behaviors, ideas, customer intent, preferences and actions.
And gathering all of this information together in one location is hard enough. Analyzing it takes time, training, and people resources that many organizations no longer have enough time of. But what if there was an easier way to centralize and deliver this data, intelligence, and enablement for all employees.
For that, let’s turn back to Julien at AllMart. Julien is now investigating the overall business health of the northeast region ahead of the meeting. He notices that store satisfaction is down recently compared to the past three months. Since there have been a lot of changes recently between product launches, technology updates, and staffing, there is any number of potential reasons for the drop in scores, so he doesn’t know where to look next.
Luckily, Julien remembers that the insights team enabled the organization with a new AI assistant that gives on-demand answers to questions from any employee from leadership all the way down to the frontline. It’s called Ask Athena, and it’s fueled by generative AI. (audience clapping)
So Julien seamlessly toggles over to Ask Athena and asks that very natural starting question, “Why are Northeast scores down in the last three months?” Knowing that the solution will find the right answer across all of AllMart’s entire experience program using generative AI. No matter what the data looks like, where it’s stored, and it’s even going to check Julien’s permissions to provide the right level of data and type of data as part of that answer.
And once Ask Athena is done preparing, Julien sees a simple summary generated at the top that illuminates the problem area, severely declining scores in checkout satisfaction. And from the chart and supporting detail, he can see that this started as an issue in December and continued through January. Now checkout has always been a problem for some reason or another for AllMart, but there’s been a heavy emphasis on improvement there. So he’s surprised about the recent sharp decline.
Once again, Julien asks the key question, “Why are checkout scores down?” Since this isn’t the first question in the chat, he gets straight to the point. No need to say Northeast, stores, or even mention a time period. Ask Athena remembers what Julien asked about last, saving itself and Julien time in the process.
And this time Julien sees Ask Athena went in a different direction with the answer and found a treasure trove of related experience comments from those who shopped at various locations and provided feedback through either the in-store or digital channel programs. Ask Athena shares that the negative experiences are actually a result of the launch of the buy-now-pay-later payment checkout option, which is something that AllMart recently launched in store and online to provide flexibility to customers for the recent holiday season. And when he digs into the comments he sees, there’s actually more than one root cause behind score declines, which certainly explains to him why scores decline so much.
Signing up for the option while physically present in the store for the first time it’s too complex. Employees, they’re not fully enabled to guide customers through the screens, and customers are attempting to use this option at self-checkout, which is slowing down all the other customers.
Well, at this point, Julien has several recommendations for his Northeast team like refresh training, a dedicated point of sale for this payment option and even adding staffing during busy checkout hours. But he needs to check one more thing before he acts, the importance of solving this issue for the business. So he asks, guess who? Athena.
And knowing that Julien is a senior leader with access to data across locations and online and offline sales, Ask Athena gets to work on preparing him a detailed financial analysis of transactional data. And while Julien is given that detailed data table, he doesn’t even need to look at it to understand what’s going on. Thanks to the generative AI summary, which confirmed what he suspected by-now-pay-later customers spend more on average, especially in the Northeast where it’s expensive to live. I should know that’s where I’m from.
Northeast transactions though for this payment option are much lower than the average store across the United States by about 35,000 monthly transactions in fact. Which would mean if action is taken so that each Northeast store just got closer to the average amount of transactions seen for this transaction type in other stores, gross sales could increase by $6 million for each store.
Well now at the offsite, Julien is ready to share the complete picture of how they can raise overall store performance by improving the customer checkout experience, which he can do quite easily from Medallia’s mobile application, which has his past conversational history so he can access any insights he needs on the go. (audience clapping)
I’m proud to announce Ask Athena, our solution that leverages AI assistance to enable employees to answer their most pressing questions with on demand and relevant answers. With Ask Athena, any user of Medallia can feel empowered to be their own data investigator without any advanced training, using their own natural language.
Ask Athena even solves for the data and program silos that naturally develop over time. Leveraging APIs to retrieve that information from wherever it is, whether it’s within or integrated to the Medallia ecosystem. While respecting user permissions of course.
And users will be shown an actionable summary and supporting visualization, whether on desktop or on mobile.
And while Ask Athena, we’ll always have some prebuilt assistance to leverage for faster implementation and time to value for your organization like the ones we shared today.
Imagine with me a day in the not too distant future where you could build your own AI assistance to answer questions in specific ways with your resources, all specific for just your company. (audience clapping)
That’s right, like OpenAI, Salesforce, Google, and many more, Medallia is launching our own no-code, low-code studio application where services teams, partners and you, our customers can create, test, deploy, and manage your own experience oriented AI assistance on the Medallia ecosystem. (audience clapping) These AI launches will unlock a new level of creativity and productivity for your employees, and in turn, new levels of efficiency, cost savings, and sustainable growth for your organization.
Themes will enable true emerging trends to be discovered, summarized, and structured in a way to drive faster business change and experience delivery. And Ask Athena will enable any employee to feel confident with the most on demand, actionable trends, root causes, opportunities, suggestions, and even next best action recommendations. And remember, with all of this embedded intelligence, assisting your employees every step of the way, Medallia will make the complex simple, the simple automated and the impossible possible. Thank you very much. (audience clapping) (upbeat music)
Thank you, Michael. I’m sure you’re as excited as we are to get such in depth pertinent answers to questions about your customer’s experiences with such little effort. What seemed impossible and bound up in months of reports and siloed data is now a simple question away. But the thing I love most is the empowerment of your people to enable them to ask questions, explore, learn, act, to supercharge your business and customer experiences and operate at a truly elevated level unlike any ever before.
And while Themes and Ask Athena identify trends and opportunity at a holistic level, those of you working at that level aren’t the only ones creating memorable experiences. So next we’re going to the frontline and you’ll see how our new solutions can meaningfully deepen your employees engagement with your customers. First, you’ll see how our AI powered solutions intelligently summarizes information about your customers and delivers it in a way that is entirely catered to the experience and activation of your frontline employees. Then you’ll see how you can send personalized contextual communications to your customers, all tailored to their experiences and all generated in seconds with our AI powered solution. And to walk you through these momentous improvements for your workforce, I’d like to welcome senior manager of product marketing, Hadley Spadaccini. (audience clapping) (upbeat music)
Thank you, Simonetta. I’m incredibly excited today to talk about two brand new features we’re adding to Medallia’s AI capabilities. It’s no surprise to anyone here that Medallia has been the leader in customer experience analytics for more than 20 years, but on their own analytics can only take you so far. It’s employees that can actually put the data to work for you, and it’s their precious time spent on analysis that leads to better experiences but efficiently using that time, it’s both more important and difficult than ever before. And here are some potential reasons why.
We all know self-service is an essential cost saving strategy in the contact center. But that doesn’t change the fact that 95% of customers say they want to speak with a human when they have an issue they can’t easily resolve themselves. And yes, AI chatbots are handling more of the simple interactions, but this has led to agents handling 50% more interactions that are labeled as difficult and due in part to these issues, agent turnover continues to rise with averages as high as 45% in 2023. And this is after seeing record highs in 2021 and 2022.
So agents are not only handling massive volumes, they’re getting more complex issues all while having to handle them with greener teams. Time is everything and it’s more important than ever to ensure that valuable human effort is spent in the right places at the right time to inspire loyalty and increase satisfaction. And that’s something that AI might just be able to help with. Let’s see how this is taking shape with Jane and her team over at a FinTech company called dimund.
As the contact center leader, it’s Jane’s job to understand the customer experience at every level. She surfaces concerns and solutions to improve operational efficiency and she gives guidance and direction to dimund’s contact center teams guaranteeing everyone is working towards the same goals at the same time. But this is especially important when things go wrong. Unfortunately, today is one of those days, dimund’s marketing team just sent out an email promoting a new credit card offer. Within minutes, ticket volumes have spiked and it’s all hands on deck. Agents are doing their best to explain the fine print on phone calls and live chats, but customers are confused about the offer and Jane needs to figure out why. Finding the root cause of this confusion could take her hours reading through ticket transcripts for hundreds of interactions. But not anymore because Jane has intelligence summaries. Our new generative AI summarization tool that makes hundreds of interactions skimmable in seconds. (audience clapping)
So in the background, Intelligent Summaries have been hard at work generating concise, relevant summaries of these conversations, empowering Jane to understand exactly how and why customers are struggling faster than ever before. Turns out customers are confused by the phrasing on the email and website. Now Jane can bring this information to the marketing team so they can adjust their future outreach, but Jane can’t stop there. She needs to know what exactly is confusing to customers directly from them. So she calls over Selena, a QA reviewer at dimund. As a QA reviewer, Selena spends her time evaluating conversations between customers and frontline agents. So when Jane asks her to look for conversations where customers are confused, she knows she’s in for a long day of scrolling through interactions, hunting and pecking for the right ones to review.
And to be honest, more often than not, she’s spending all her time looking for the right interactions rather than actually reviewing them. But Selena can use intelligence summaries to get the gist of these interactions within seconds. Now she can strategically filter and read short interaction summaries for each agent. She knows that Jane is looking for customer confusion, so she searches for summaries with the word confusion and drills right down to two specific interactions she can review and go back to Jane with. Again, this would’ve taken her hours to listen through real time snippets of interactions, hoping to find any that held information about customers being confused. Now with Intelligent Summaries, she can find interactions that are worthwhile and meaningful in just seconds.
Now, dimund also needs to make sure their agents respond to the situation the best way possible. But Aaron, a frontline manager, feels like closing the loop with his agent on issues like these can be an insurmountable challenge. But Intelligent Summaries make even coaching sessions more efficient. As Aaron prepares for his upcoming one-on-one with his team member. Rather than listening in real time through recent conversations to find discussion topics, he instead reads some intelligence summaries that highlight what his agent has been up to, how things have gone and relevant context to add to his talking points. Now his one-on-one is ready to go in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
Down the road, for managers like Aaron, we hope to even have Intelligent Summaries on agent KPIs so coaches can quickly see which agents need support and close the loop on improving service in record time. And in the future, we hope to further expand Intelligent Summaries across Medallia to provide summaries on entire journeys, signals and programs. So that’s just some of the power of intelligence summaries, activating employees at every level in the contact center, showing you where to focus and dramatically cutting down precious time spent going through verbatims for every team. (audience clapping)
So now generative AI has our back when it comes to ingesting interaction data like this, but what about all the time and effort spent in these interactions? If you’ve spent any time in the contact center, you know the countless hours that go into writing unique, personalized follow-up emails to often unhappy customers. But we know that time spent on this critical task does not go to waste. Consumers are loud and clear about their desire for personalized service.
71% of customers prefer personalized service when interacting with a brand. 76% say they get frustrated when they don’t receive personalized interactions. And 80% of customers say that customer service is just as important as the products and services they’re receiving. But with limited resources and more stress on the contact center, how can time and effort be best spent to meet dissatisfied customers where they are, with the personalized attention and care they deserve? Back at dimund, Aaron is trying to handle the spike of email and chat volume from customers coming from this new credit card offer, but especially their business customers who have higher expectations for a prompt response.
In an effort to speed up responses, Aaron’s team begins using a classic canned response for bug reports. You’ve probably gotten this one before. The one that lets customers know that they’re aware and that the team’s looking into it. And when the issue gets resolved, he plans to send another mass templated communication, letting customers know the issues have been fixed and apologizing for the inconvenience. Some clients are absolutely fine. People understand that these things happen, but the impact is felt harder by others.
Like the customers who reached out earliest before dimund had a firm grasp of what was going on. Unsurprisingly, the lackluster customer satisfaction survey feedback begins to roll in. And while many complaints are similar, each is still unique in its own way, but crafting a unique response to everyone would take hours, something that would simply be impossible, especially when putting out a fire like this. So how can we turn these detractors into promoters? And that is why I’m excited to introduce Smart Response, a brand new way to send personalized responses while saving countless hours for your frontline. (audience clapping)
So Aaron looks at Kate’s feedback and needs to reply. When he goes to respond, Smart Response helps generate a specific reply to Kate’s individual feedback, allowing Aaron to assure his clients that they’re heard. In moments he gets an AI generated response addressing all of the points covered in Kate’s feedback. He can review the message and hit the send button with confidence. But what about VIP or business customers, like Kate who were impacted by the less than stellar rollout?
How can Aaron make it right for them? Instead of crafting a message from scratch, Aaron can take a quick moment to add a special touch by editing the AI generated Smart Response offering Kate and her team 10 consulting hours to make up for their frustrating experience. Now it’s an incredibly personal and empathetic message, one that inspires customer loyalty, composed and sent in a matter of seconds. So that’s Smart Response, helping you create the personalized responses your customers want and deserve in way less time than you could ever imagine. (audience clapping)
To round us out at Medallia, we know that artificial intelligence can’t replace the human touch, but working alongside AI, humans can do what they do best, connect. Our customers are people after all, and they deserve all that we have to offer them. I’m sure they won’t mind that we got a little help along the way. We’re so excited to bring Intelligent Summaries and Smart Response to you soon. We can’t wait to see what you can do with all the time you’ve saved, thank you. (audience clapping) (upbeat music)
Thank you, Hadley and Michael for giving us a look at these powerful new solutions. These AI driven solutions are able to be so powerful because of our dedication to trustworthy Medallia tune models and our commitment to ensuring your experience data is always private and secure. Impactful solutions like Themes will make you even more effective with summarized data that lets you see precisely what’s popping up across your intricate organization.
And I look forward to seeing how you will use Ask Athena to drill into those themes using simple conversation to find answers that allow you to make better decisions faster for positive business outcomes. But perhaps the most valuable of our innovations is enabling your frontline to be most impactful exactly when your employees are actively engaging with your customers. Our new, incredible Intelligent Summaries is going to empower your frontline to bring new dimensions of personalized customer experiences and fuel their loyalty.
And Smart Response will keep those personalized experiences and bright impression strong while saving immense time for your frontline. This is empowerment and personalization at scale. The underlying fuel to our solutions is that which is unique to you, your experience data, which is why as you heard earlier from Joe, the release of Medallia Agile Research is so important now, bringing you the ability to iterate quickly on market research, bring sophistication to your signal capture, and a complimentary new dimension of understanding of your customers.
I simply cannot wait to see how these solutions will impact all of you. And I do mean all of you because I’m extremely pleased to announce that these new solutions will be included with our Medallia Experience Cloud, Agile research, yes… (audience clapping) Agile Research, Themes, Ask Athena, Intelligent Summaries and Smart Response will be available to all MEC customers. We are thrilled to bring in all these new solutions that we know will help you go beyond what you ever thought possible before.
Shaping your customer experiences and impacting your business performance. If you’d like to learn more and demo any of these new solutions or any of our solutions for that matter, you can get a closer look with one of our product experts at the Product Theater. I also encourage you to attend our session on building AI responsibly with security and compliance on Wednesday to learn about our commitment and practices in the responsible and ethical use of AI.
And as amazing as this morning has been so far, these next two days are jam packed with even more. You’re going to hear from insightful brands, from inspiring achievers, and some truly brilliant peers. The Experience Hub is full of Medallia Partners, eager to make sure you are maximizing every customer experience to your fullest. I encourage you to soak up every moment, meet new people, and explore new experiences with me during this exciting week. Thank you so much for joining us today. (audience clapping)
