Medallia’s clients seek real-time feedback

Friday, February 19, 2010

Medallia is using technology to speed market research by helping companies monitor customer and employee sentiment about products and services.

Instead of waiting for a consultant’s report that could be out of date by time of delivery, Medallia customers get a suite of web based tools that aggregate live feeds from sources like online surveys or social networks like Twitter or Facebook. Borge Hald is co-founder and CEO of Medallia, a fast-growing “voice of the customer platform” company based in Menlo Park.

Customer feedback data remained in strong demand last year, and Medallia’s revenue grew 38 percent, up for the seventh straight year to between $20 million and $30 million, Hald said. New business picked up particularly late in the year, he said.

The 70-plus person company is hiring and has five jobs listed on its website in various capacities, including marketing, product management and engineering.

To fuel growth, last year Medallia opened a second international office in Toronto in addition to one it already had in Oslo, Norway, which opened in 2006.

In the fall, Medallia also released what it said was its industry’s first iPhone application, and a week later it opened its application programming interface to allow third party developers to build applications on top of Medallia’s platform.

Hald and cofounder Amy Pressman, both formerly of the Boston Consulting Group, originally pitched a prototype customer case management system to Hilton on Sept. 10, 2001. Hald figured their chances were nil after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center the following day, but Hilton expressed interest and with no venture funding a skeleton team built a service and signed the hotel giant as a customer in 2003.

Since then, Medallia has grown to some 55,000 licenses subscribed, with customers in hospitality, financial services, retail and high-tech. Hilton alone has more than 10,000 licenses. Customers include the Four Seasons, Gold’s Gym, eBay, Chase and Fidelity.

Despite the tough economy last year, the explosion of social media underscored for corporate executives that customer experiences have become a public matter, with people increasingly posting reviews of businesses on websites like Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

Source: http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/02/22/story12.html