Musings from Medallia Experience 2025
The Medallia Experience conference late last month offered a snapshot of an industry in transition. First, for Medallia itself, with an almost entirely refreshed leadership team—five of whom joined this year alone. And second, for the broader Voice of the Customer (VoC) market, which is actively moving beyond survey-centric programs. That shift was one of the main calls to action from the keynote stage.
Surveys capture the extremes—the very happy and the very unhappy—leaving the vast majority of customers unheard. Medallia is urging organizations to tap into unstructured data from the web and, notably, from contact centers. The numbers reflect progress: The company shared that it has processed 3.2 billion surveys and interactions in the last 12 months, with over a billion coming from contact centers. That’s more than I expected—and it explains the solid presence of contact center leaders in the expo hall, exploring Medallia’s capabilities.
Before going private, Medallia was one of the most aggressive players in broadening its platform beyond surveys. It made a series of strategic acquisitions to expand its footprint across customer experience—especially the contact center. These included Stella Connect (QA and coaching), Zingle (notifications and in-app messaging), Strikedeck (Customer Success Management), Voci Technologies (speech analytics), Thunderhead (Customer Journey Orchestration), and Mindful, formerly VHT (callbacks).
Medallia’s platform aggregates feedback at scale from multiple sources, with integrations across an average of 35 different systems. It pioneered text analytics to extract insights from surveys and identify root causes of issues. It has since expanded to ingest signals from contact center conversations, digital/web interactions, and even in-person engagements. Medallia has built a sophisticated cohort tracking capability that lets organizations create dynamic segments based on behavior, attributes, and experience—laying the groundwork for scalable personalization.
Medallia has also invested heavily in turning insights into action. It has layered workflow tools to trigger responses—whether it's following up with a dissatisfied customer, providing coaching recommendations to front-line employees, or routing issues like product defects to the right department. Last year, it processed 60 million of these actions, shy of 2% of the signals it gathered.
Like many in the space, Medallia’s technology has evolved ahead of its customers' adoption. Several new capabilities introduced at the conference focus on democratizing access to its software’s capabilities and leveraging AI to make the most of all data gathered.
As data takes center stage, VoC providers are increasingly positioned to consolidate customer interaction details, competing head-to-head with contact center, CRM, and data warehouse/lake providers to become the system of reference for conversational and signal data. The lines between categories are blurring fast. Ultimately, winners will be those who drive not just richer data collection but the adoption and effective use of that data.
You can access the recordings here.