Navigating Unprecedented Challenges
Hello, everyone. I’m Sarika Khanna, Chief Product Officer of Medallia. What an unprecedented era we’re going through. Over the past few years, we all battled through a pandemic, global supply chain issues, a transition to a more virtual world, and remote working. Just as we were all getting a handle on things, the global economy decided to throw us a curveball. If we have learned anything in the past two plus years, it is this: the business environment around us will continue to change faster than ever before. We all are trying to do more with less, and yet consumers expect every single one of us to deliver the best products and services regardless of the problems we face. Consumers want to be delighted, or they will just switch brands. Consumers expect brands to know them across channels and provide connected and personalized experiences. The only way to meet the expectations of tomorrow’s consumer is to become an experience-centric organization today. Experience will drive business growth, customer loyalty, and talent retention. This is the pivot we must all make.
The Essence of Experience-Centricity
But what makes a company experience-centric? It’s not just running a simple survey or a market research study. It’s about understanding and analyzing your customer interactions across channels and delivering consistent personalized experiences. It’s about redefining your contact center from a cost center to an opportunity to delight center, with a healthy mixture of automation and human interaction. It’s about tying your digital experiences with the physical ones when a customer walks into your brand’s location. The time is now for you to redefine your customer and employee experience strategy to integrate more signals, accelerate your path to insights, and most importantly orchestrate a customer-driven journey across touchpoints. Doing all this requires sophisticated technology and a scalable platform. Today, I will share how Medallia is leading the industry by bringing it all together with our technology. I’ll kick things off with one simple sentence on what Medallia does for customer and employee experiences: We help businesses see everything, find insights quickly on what they’re seeing, and help orchestrate the next action along the journey.
Enabling Comprehensive Signal Capture
Let me go deeper on what “see everything” means. For our Medallia Experience Cloud platform, we have been focused on enabling the broadest signal capture to ensure brands are able to see everything across all channels. We added exciting new capabilities in three key areas. First, traditional feedback mechanisms; we continue to invest in this area by introducing new, easy-to-use features to gather feedback at the moments that matter; like elevated survey experience, addition of voice and video capabilities, and in-app ratings. Second, digital behavior. Last year we announced integration of digital behavior through our market-leading digital experience analytics offering. This integrates the voice of the silent majority who don’t take surveys. We see great momentum in the uptake of this. We added the ability to capture and integrate digital experience analytics on mobile apps, expanding our leadership in this area even more. Third, there’s a huge opportunity to understand directly from customers in a channel where there’s a human connection with the customer: the contact center. Customers interact via calls, chat, and email. And to tap into this, we built new prepackaged connectors to the leading CCaaS vendors such as Genesis, Five9, and Amazon Connect to ingest these rich signals. And there’s one more thing… Through the Mindful acquisition, we added capabilities to capture feedback from a channel that has seen significant growth since the pandemic, the IVR surveys. Now all this new investment has paid off. 80% of experience signals we analyzed this year came from non-survey data.
A Connected Experience in Action
Let’s take a look at one example of how a connected experience should look and feel like. Medallia serves as an early warning system with advanced alerting and notification capabilities, making it easy for all users to quickly understand what is happening within their business. I can see that call volume has increased by 31% over the last seven days. And with Medallia’s text analytics, I can start to understand any emerging issues that may be contributing to the increase in call volume. Automatic payments, late payments, and fees are all trending with negative sentiment, giving me a quick understanding of what might be going wrong. In addition to emerging issues, Medallia’s prescriptive analytics surfaces key focus areas across the entire organization, connecting emerging issues and company focus areas, all in one view. Now that I have an understanding of key focus areas, I can use Medallia’s omnichannel journey view to identify where in the business customers are experiencing friction. Immediately I notice a significant problem in the contact center around the billings process. Medallia’s native text analytics understands all customer and employee verbatim across all channels like digital, social, contact center, and agent notes. Going one step further, Medallia assigns a relative impact score to each of the topics, so my organization can get right to the impact each topic is having on the business. I can click into the focus area in order to learn more about the issues of automatic payments and how it’s affecting our business. Here I can start to learn that it is affecting key metrics like contact experience score and NPS. Additionally, operational metrics like call volume and call duration are also increasing, costing our organization additional money. I see here that customer experiences with autopay are negatively impacting many of our channels, especially our contact center calls. And with Medallia’s Athena AI models, I’m able to understand customer churn intent in each of these channels.
Understanding and Improving Customer Experiences
Pairing this with customer emotions, I’m able to pinpoint the impact this focus area is having on key business metrics, the channels it’s affecting, and how our customers are feeling.
Let’s click on calls to better understand the performance of this channel. Immediately, I start to see that key operational metrics are increasing significantly over the past week. When I look at text analytics, I see that an issue with autopay is commonly paired with and driven from customers updating their credit cards. These two topics are mentioned together 91.2% of the time with very negative sentiment, giving me the actionable insight to fix the customer experience.
If I want to learn more from specific calls, I can use Medallia’s quality management suite as it uses this data to prioritize the right calls for me and my team to QA, making our teams more efficient.
The Power of Connected Experiences
Medallia connects and understands all the experience signals available to your business, allowing organizations to take swift, impactful actions on the moments that matter for your business and your customers.
That is the power of connected experiences.
Building on the foundation of this power, the next step is to gain faster insights from these experiences.
Faster Insights with Text Analytics
Over the last 10 years, we built up our native text analytics product from the ground up within our Medallia platform, with a singular purpose of helping customers get to insights quickly to make key business decisions. During the past year, we launched several core capabilities within text analytics, such as phrase level filtering, compound topics, event-driven analytics, and much more. We have processed over four billion interactions, and that number is growing faster every year. We processed one billion in the last year alone. Today, seven million active users rely on insights we generate.
Text analytics is embedded throughout our platform to help users continuously understand, take action, and introduce business changes, whether they are on the front line, the insights team, or the C-suite.
There’s a lot to be excited about with Medallia text analytics, especially with our recent placement as a leader in the Forrester Wave with the highest score for current offering. But, in true Medallia fashion, we always want to do more for our customers and innovate.
That is why I am so thrilled to share more about Athena Studio, which we launched earlier this year. Athena Studio enables business users and data scientists to create custom AI models and analytics without any coding. You can use these custom models to identify and understand trends in sources like feedback, email, chat, and call transfers. Then you can automatically trigger intelligent action across the Medallia ecosystem from customer recovery to employee recognition.
To unlock insights across all your enterprise data, Medallia has incorporated conversational and behavioral analytics alongside text analytics in a single view.
Conversational Analytics and Automated QA
Let me talk about conversational analytics first. Last year we introduced our contact center suite, which integrates Medallia’s best-in-class text and speech analytics, signal capture capabilities, and our own transcription engine. The suite also contains agent engagement, coaching, and quality management workflows.
I’m happy to report that we processed almost 300 million calls last quarter, 1 million manual QA assessments were also completed during the same time period, and over 100,000 agents actively use our platform to view feedback and receive coaching.
To that end, I’m excited to announce automated QA assignments to help contact center agents drive better customer experience. Contact centers today randomly review 2% of their calls to provide specific coaching examples to agents. With this launch, we surface the interactions that need to be reviewed and automatically highlight the areas of the interaction that need attention. Medallia now helps contact centers build a smarter targeted queue of these assignments automatically, so managers can provide specific feedback to help their agents improve.
Advancements in Digital Insights
Now let me shift gears to digital. We all witnessed the rapid shift during the pandemic. But, many of us made the transition without fast insights to optimize digital and its interactions with all other channels.
We made big advances in two key areas here. First, to get faster insights from digital interactions, we added exciting new capabilities like real-time digital experience analytics and page-level analytics, enabling our customers to optimize digital experiences based on real-time digital behavior detection. Wouldn’t it be great to not just identify opportunities to improve digital experience but to estimate and prioritize based on its revenue impact? That is exactly what we delivered through the revenue impact and opportunity capabilities.
Second, the faster insights through unified views. We introduced an out-of-the-box yet customizable dashboard to show insights from a unified view of digital feedback, digital behavior, non-digital feedback, and even insights from text analytics. With this, the digital experience signals are pervasive throughout the platform and enable powerful customer-centric workflows and even enriched total experience profiles.
We are proud to be the first and the only vendor to offer this capability in the market.
Digital Analytics Orchestrating Journeys
Let’s take a look at how digital analytics help orchestrate journeys. As Sarika mentioned, the digital team has a lot to review and prioritize, so we’ve made it easy for them to get a quick overview of their digital channels on the digital unified view dashboard. This dashboard helps prioritize actions based on both survey data (like digital satisfaction and NPS) as well as a complete view of customer digital behavior as they flow through your website or mobile apps.
Medallia’s Digital Experience Score
Medallia’s Digital Experience Score, composed of the five key pillars of engagement (form score, technical, navigation, and frustration), provides an easy way to understand the customer experience across all digital properties. This gives powerful insights from 100% of digital customer journeys. And here I can quickly see that over the last seven days, engagement is trending down, and customers are more frustrated.
Medalia’s text analytics is available for all users, so every single person can understand that “why” driving those changes in scores. With Medallia’s unified data model, digital teams can not only tap into data from digital surveys, they can also use analytics to understand what digital problems are surfacing across channels. Like the contact center via its call transcripts. Immediately I see across both channels that conversations containing account change are the top driver for positive experiences, while those mentioning product details and task completion are causing customers to have less than desirable ones.
Digital satisfaction and page group DXS are low for the checkout journey, and we can see that this particular one has high drop off leading to many support chats and increasing costs. Let’s take a closer look to determine what’s negatively impacting customer experiences and conversion opportunities. Medallia automatically surfaces revenue opportunities across the customer journey, meaning that digital teams can get straight to the places where experience issues are costing the organization money. Here, I can see the checkout page issues are causing a loss of revenue around $260,000 USD, with a high page importance of 73.79%. Satisfaction with the checkout page is low, and conversion is suffering as customers are experiencing pain at this point in the journey.
So, let’s look at the identified behaviors they are experiencing, how often they happen, and where within the page. The two most common identified behaviors impacting conversion are on-page search and tabbing, with 28.1% of all non-converted sessions identifying the on-page search behavior. Here, I can quickly determine the browser, the operating system, and the device where customers are exhibiting this behavior, as well as view three prioritized session replays. These are recordings which help me better understand exactly what’s happening as a customer engages with the website or app.
With Medallia, digital teams have full visibility into 100% of interactions, with the tools to help them quickly identify and prioritize sections of the website that need attention, reduce customer friction, and ultimately increase conversion and revenue.
Seamless Connected Experiences
Your customers interact with your business across multiple touchpoints, whether it’s digital, in-store, social, or contact center. Each of these interactions is an opportunity to delight the customer and make them a customer for life. The question is, how do we do that? How do we break down the business silos represented in different org structures? How do we drive the experience journey with a single view of the customer? The solution lies in providing seamless connected experiences through not only understanding the experiences across channels but also orchestrating experience across channels in a customer-driven manner at scale.
Earlier this year we announced the acquisition of Thunderhead, now called Medallia Experience Orchestration platform. This addition supercharges the power of Medallia by enabling real-time experience orchestration across channels with intelligent decisioning and next best action capabilities. This is a game-changer. You can now drive intelligent decisions, not just based on digital interactions but based on digital feedback, real-time digital analytics behavior, omnichannel interactions, and insights powered by Medallia Cloud.
One example of cross-channel orchestration is when a contact center agent is armed with the best offer while being on a call with a customer. Now, this is made possible by real-time decisioning models influenced by digital intent and feedback data. This is the power of orchestration. Now what if, as a customer, I’m able to get to the right contact center agent without being on hold, at a time convenient to me? That is what Mindful, our latest acquisition, brings to Medallia’s suite of products. With a combination of Mindful and Medallia, we can trigger an invitation for a customer to schedule a call with a contact center agent, for example, when we identify specific digital behavior in real time. Not only that, the agent is now provided with appropriate context to provide a delightful customer experience, with a single view of the customer, and next best action. For the customer, it means a delightful experience at the time of your choice. For the brand, it means an efficient call center and reduced costs by eliminating ghost calls and intelligent scheduling and routing. Now this is how you delight the customer.
Insights to Action
Let’s take a look at all these pieces together, insights to action. I’m on the website for my cell phone provider Mobilli. For demo purposes, we’ve added a preview widget of our real-time Digital Experience Score (DXS) to show what data is captured as I browse the website. This widget is only for demos and we don’t add this preview widget to live customer websites. I’m interested in upgrading my phone, so I’m going to check out the latest Samsung devices. As I browse the website, you can see DXS update in real-time capturing multiple signals about my session. As you can see from the preview widget in the bottom left corner, DXS has identified my frustrated behavior as I erratically move my cursor across the screen and offers me additional assistance to keep me on my digital journey. This orchestration currently uses real-time DXS to intercept a customer to get them onto a better path.
Now let me log in to the website to show you what happens when experience orchestration and Mindful are added into the mix for me as an identified customer. You won’t be able to see them here on the website, but these solutions are running in the background, pulling in information about me from Medallia’s total experience profile and matching it to the actions I’m taking on the site to try to figure out the best way to optimize my experience. I’m going to start my website interaction by looking at my contract expiration date. This behavior tells Medallia that I may be thinking about my upcoming contract expiration, a critical moment for Mobilli to understand, so they can optimize my experience and retain me as a customer. That additional context of contract renewal will yield a different result for the same Samsung shopping experience from earlier. This time when I go to the Samsung page on Mobilli’s website and exhibit the same behavior, Medallia Experience Orchestration decides in real-time to connect me with a Samsung device specialist through Mindful for human interception. This is different from the earlier FAQ notification, as experience orchestration proactively suggests the next best action for my session. In the Mindful widget, I can be called back as soon as possible or schedule a call for later that day or in the week. I’m going to select call me as soon as possible. Mindful intelligently routes the call based on the information collected during the previous interaction, sending the call directly to the best available specialist.
Now as the contact center agent, this is the platform where I manage my call queue and I see I have a customer waiting in my queue. Upon answering the call the most relevant next best conversation, powered by Medallia Experience Orchestration, are available to me so I can navigate this interaction in the right way. Next best conversations are always customer-specific and in real time; incorporating all captured behavior leading to the call, not just up to the time of scheduling. At Medallia, we’ve taken experience orchestration to the next level, reducing friction across the experience through tailored customer-centric journeys that drive operational efficiencies. The new business environment demands you to be an experience-centric organization. And to be that, you need to listen across all signals and drive action across channels, leveraging fast insights and orchestration. Medallia is the only platform that provides this signals to insight to action capabilities with enterprise scale and security. It has been an absolute pleasure to share our progress so far with you all, thank you so much for joining me today.
