Medallia introduced seven AI products, officially unveiled its new look corporate ‘dream team’ and pledged to reinvigorate customer relations at its global conference last week. Mark Bishof, just three months into his role as CEO at the software vendor, used his keynote at Medallia Experience to outline the firm’s pivot away from surveys and signals, to conversations, automation and clear business outcomes.
“You have my commitment that we are going to put customer experience back into Medallia,” Bishof told a packed auditorium at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas.
Bishof, formerly chief business officer with Qualtrics and CEO of Clarabridge, joined Medallia in January. He is the third chief executive since 2023.
During the 30-minute keynote, Bishof sought to draw a line under a period of corporate uncertainty. It was now time to focus on creating a “world class company at the intersection of customer experience and artificial intelligence”, he said.
Bishof didn’t shy away from some of the criticisms levelled at the experience management software vendor.
“Over the last 90 days I’ve spent time talking with a lot of you [clients]. I got an earful just to be totally frank. I can’t do anything about the past, but I can fix the future,” said Bishof.
“What I heard is we’re slow to innovate. So we’re announcing seven AI innovations and solutions,” he added.
In the last year, Medallia has released more than 100 features designed to help users extract insights and action from its enterprise platform. Medallia can now help organisations make sense of their unstructured data, to go alongside its traditional survey capabilities.
“I’m happy to report that we’re the first and only CX provider that has AI solutions for both structured and unstructured data. So, calls, chats, all the things that matter. 100% of the data that you bring in, we can process on a single platform, across all channels and data,” Bishof told the audience.
Committing to greater executive engagement
Revamping the firm’s product is just part of the issue. Customers have also been grumbling about a lack of executive engagement. Bishof pledged that his recent flurry of customer visits wasn’t an aberration, but a new model of behaviour.
“We need to get back in front of you,” said the CEO. “We need to spend time with your teams, get closer to the flame, understand where you’re at,” he added.
Bishof’s executive commitment went further, pledging to make himself and the senior team available to any clients, no matter the problem. “I’m open 24/7, 365 days of the year. If you’re not getting value, I want to know about it. Our team wants to know about it and we want to do something about it,” he added.
To further improve communications with clients, Medallia has committed to bi-annual company roadmaps. Recently appointed chief product officer Fabrice Martin (another Clarabridge alumni), will be visiting clients to bring them up to speed.
Since joining Medallia, Bishof has reassembled much of the old leadership team from Clarabridge. As well as Martin, Sid Banerjee, founder and chief strategy officer with Clarabridge has also joined the team. He will head up the vendor’s AI innovation agenda.
“This is the best team I’ve ever seen. It’s definitely the best team in the CX space,” said Bishof.
“Sid [Banerjee] he is the best of the best. He helped found customer experience.”
Other former Clarabridge staff who’ve joined the team include chief transformation officer Ram Ramachandran, chief financial officer Bas Brukx and Karl Knoll who joins as general consul.
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