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Medallia, Palo Alto, CA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Medallia, Palo Alto, CA
Entry Submitted By: Sterling Communications
Company Description: Medallia is the Customer Experience Management (CEM) company that is trusted by hundreds of the world's leading brands, including Four Seasons, GE, Gold's Gym, Nordstrom, and Sephora. We enable companies to survey and capture customer feedback across Web, social, mobile, and contact center channels, understand it in real-time, and take action to improve the customer experience (CX).
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Relationship Management Solution

Nomination Title: Medallia Promote

1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Social review sites like TripAdvisor have revolutionized the hotel and restaurant industries, both in the way consumers share social reviews and make booking decisions, and in the way companies must manage this new social voice.

Social review sites impact revenues: 35% of travelers who have already booked a room change hotels after browsing review sites like TripAdvisor, while 72% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Collecting feedback for hundreds of hospitality brands—including Four Seasons, Best Western, and Extended Stay America— Medallia occupies a unique position. It helps companies manage experiences via social channels and improve social reputation by ensuring that feedback posted online reflects legitimate experiences. This honest reputation should in turn ensure that hotels aren’t losing revenue to squeaky wheels that may be dominating the online conversation and deterring future consumers.

In March 2013, Medallia partnered with TripAdvisor, the world’s largest travel site, to expand its product Medallia Promote. Medallia Promote directs customers to post feedback on TripAdvisor and other review and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, thereby increasing the number of reviews per business location and making review data more reflective of true experiences. Medallia collects millions of surveys for its hospitality customers, and within the survey process drives those millions of consumers to post authentic feedback on TripAdvisor. The resulting higher volume of reviews massively impacts hotel and restaurant review scores.

Medallia Promote works so that when a customer takes a survey about a hotel or restaurant experience, it prompts the customer to post a TripAdvisor review as an embedded step within the survey itself. Medallia allows customers to post a full review without having to leave the survey or log into TripAdvisor. If the customer already has a TripAdvisor login, TripAdvisor validates the account with the user’s email address, attributing the post to that account. If the customer doesn’t have an account, the review is posted anonymously. Medallia’s seamless TripAdvisor integration capitalizes on customers’ captive attention, encouraging them to make their feedback public. Respondents can also immediately ‘like’ the property on Facebook or follow it on Twitter through Medallia Promote’s wider offerings.

Medallia Promote also complements Medallia’s Social Feedback for Hospitality product, which enables brand and property managers to monitor what customers are saying about them on social media sites and thereby improve customer satisfaction and online reputation.

Results:

Hotels and restaurants using Medallia Promote have seen TripAdvisor reviews double on average across their brands. TripAdvisor scores also improve, because higher review volume tends to drown out the occasional squeaky wheel.

• Best Western saw the number of TripAdvisor reviews increase by 64% after implementing Medallia Promote.
• Using Medallia Promote in tandem with Medallia’s Social Feedback for Hospitality product, Best Western saw 1,200 properties—31% of its global portfolio—receive TripAdvisor’s Certificate of Excellence, an honor reserved for only 10% of hotels on the site.
• Within the first four months of rolling out Medallia Promote, a luxury hotel brand saw the number of TripAdvisor reviews increase by 63%, and experienced a 3% increase in its average review score.

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Borge Hald is the CEO of Medallia, which he co-founded with his wife Amy Pressman, Medallia’s president. Prior to Medallia, Borge and Amy worked together to lead strategy and operational improvement projects for the Boston Consulting Group, where insights into the way consumer packaged goods used granular benchmarking data inspired the idea for a system that could measure granular benchmarking data for a variety of companies. The key was determining how to make that data relevant to many people across an organization. By democratizing the data, every person in the organization could play a role in driving improvement.

Borge earned his BBA from the University of Michigan and Amy earned her BA from Harvard University. Both received their MBA from Stanford University.