Medallia Unveils Social Feedback Solution to Help Hotels Act on Social Media

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 31, 2011 — Medallia®, the global leader in SaaS Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, today announced Medallia Social Feedback for Hospitality, the most actionable social feedback solution yet. Packed with powerful features that go well beyond just capturing feedback from key review and social media sites, the solution includes customer-recovery workflows that make it easy for hotel owners to systematically respond to social media feedback. It also offers local and brand-level competitive set benchmarking that drive company-wide improvement. The solution is the first in the CEM industry to completely integrate unsolicited social media feedback with solicited feedback.

“The interest from our customers and prospects in this product is tremendous,” said Borge Hald, CEO and co-founder of Medallia, “They realize it’s not enough to just monitor social media feedback at the brand level; they also need to act on feedback at the property level. A company that fails to act on public feedback will be viewed as non-responsive at best, and inept or uncaring at worst.”

“It’s extremely important to manage social media channels because of the impact they have on our revenues,” said Michael Morton, Vice President of Member Services for Best Western International, “Medallia enables us to hold hotels accountable and help them manage their online presence directly.”

Medallia Social Feedback for Hospitality captures feedback from key review and social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Travelocity, Expedia, and other online sites. Unsolicited customer feedback is the fastest-growing source of customer experience data. In the last two years, the number of TripAdvisor reviews alone increased from 20 million to 40 million.

Once it captures social media feedback, the Medallia solution makes it easy for hotels to respond to guests with built-in workflows for answering every piece of feedback. The workflows are integrated into accounts hotels already have set up with the review sites, making it that much easier for managers to act. Responsiveness is critical because online reviews go straight to a hotel’s bottom line. According to the World Travel Market’s 2010 Industry Report, 35 percent of travelers change their choice of hotel after browsing a social media website.

Medallia Social Feedback for Hospitality improves an individual hotel’s social standing by identifying customer promoters from survey feedback and routing them to key review and social sites. By improving both the quantity and quality of authentic online posts, the hotel has a better chance of attracting additional business.

The Medallia solution includes local and brand-level competitive set benchmarking. It allows hotels to compare their aggregated social media feedback to that of competitors, without having to read through a mountain of reviews. In one dashboard, hotel managers can see where they’re ahead of competition, where they’re behind, and which topics are most important to guests.

The solution is supported by Medallia’s award-winning Text Analytics solution, which delves deep into unstructured data. Medallia Text Analytics automatically analyzes millions of customer comments and numerical scores together, and identifies and prioritizes the most burning issues so that companies can target the highest-impact improvement opportunities.

Medallia Social Feedback is the first in a broad range of social media products that will help global enterprises capture the Voice of the Customer (VOC). The new solution is already being recognized. According to Forrester Research, Inc., which recently named Medallia a Leader in its Q3 2011 WaveTM Report on EFM Satisfaction and Loyalty Solutions, “Medallia stood out with its internally developed social feedback and text analytics offerings, clear and compelling vision, and best-in-show usability and client satisfaction scores.”