Customer relationship management is critical for a CX strategy to succeed — here are the benefits of integrating CRM data from Salesforce with Medallia.

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, such as Salesforce, contain a range of essential information about your customers’ relationships with your brand, detailing the interactions they’ve had across touchpoints.

But there’s one key piece that’s often missing: How customers feel about the relationship.

You may discover some clues as to which customers are more loyal than others based on transaction volume, spend totals, and repeat purchases, but CRM platforms are not inherently designed to shed light on customer experience (CX). CRM software doesn’t reveal the actions an organization should take to deep relationships. Instead, CRM platforms tell us what our customers are doing — not why they’re doing it.

Customer experience management (CEM) platforms, on the other hand, are designed to uncover the why, and Medallia’s partnership with Salesforce makes it possible for organizations to bring both CEM and CRM data together.

By seamlessly integrating your sales and relationship data from Salesforce with feedback and behavioral insights across channels from Medallia, you’ll gain a greater understanding of customers’ wants, needs, and expectations shaping sentiment. Overall, this provides the opportunity to prioritize CX and upgrade your customer experience strategy.

Salesforce Integration: Top Benefits of Combining CRM Data with Customer Experience Management

Being able to visualize what customers are doing and why — by bringing these two important and often siloed data sets together to create a holistic, 360-degree customer view — has the potential to be transformative for brands. It increases upsells and reduces churn, ensuring customers return to your brand and never think about switching to a competitor.

Here are the top benefits of the integration between Medallia and Salesforce for customer experience.

#1. Empower frontline teams with information needed to best serve customers

According to a recent study from the Medallia Institute, 95% of consumers want agents to understand why we’re contacting customer service and a similar amount (96%) say demonstrating empathy during a service interaction is important, but both are hard for agents to do when they don’t have the right information at their fingertips.

With the Medallia-Salesforce integration, agents and contact center teams have access to feedback — such as from calls, chats, SMS logs, emails, and social media interactions. It provides an accurate understanding of account relationships, empowering agents to tailor each customer’s experience to proactively meet their needs.

An agent can see that a customer has left negative feedback about being transferred too many times, repeating their issue to each new customer service representative on a previous call. Armed with this information, the agent makes sure any transition to another agent is smooth and that the customer’s history is explained without forcing the customer to repeat themself.

#2. Enable customers to share their experiences in the moments that matter most

Consumers want to share feedback after a customer service interaction, and pairing Medallia and Salesforce means that customer surveys are instantly (and automatically) triggered to be sent following an interaction — after sales meetings, onboarding, business reviews, or service interactions — through preferred channels. The experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind, driving better quality feedback and higher response rates.

#3. Identify at-risk accounts and perform service recovery

Some customer complaints and issues are to be expected and can’t necessarily be avoided. It’s how brands handle these instances through service recovery that set them apart from the competition.

Acting on feedback quickly is what helps industry leaders continually strengthen customer relationships.

#4. Ensure the right team members close the loop with customers in real time

Companies having Medallia integrated with Salesforce automatically assign follow-up steps in Salesforce once any of the triggers described above flag feedback that needs to be addressed — initiating an end-to-end feedback response and remediation processes in the platform — based on rules your team configures. 

This seamless workflow accelerates follow up, ensuring sales and support teams can prioritize and solve problems more efficiently, recovering potential detractors before it’s too late.

#5. Identify opportunities to nurture healthy customer relationships and accounts

Detractors aren’t the only ones your company can keep a better eye on with the Medallia-Salesforce integration. By pairing these CEM and CRM platforms, you get a more accurate picture of who your promoters are — to build champions within an organization and deliver more value to your customers. This is a strategy that can pay off since promoters are less price-sensitive, tend to buy more, and generate positive word of mouth.

#6. Drive a customer-centric culture

Pairing Medallia with Salesforce helps organizations democratize access to critical customer insights, giving everyone from the frontline to senior leadership a more complete view of the customer experience. That’s a tactic that customer experience leaders leverage to drive strategic action across the enterprise.

In fact, Medallia Institute researchers have found that companies with leading customer experience programs are 1.8x more likely to grant role-relevant insights to their employees and 3.5x more likely to say their employees use these insights to support their day-to-day decision-making.

#7. Identify and act upon upsell and cross-sell opportunities, personalizing and contextualizing interactions

Imagine a bank customer contacts customer support for help, and, during the interaction, mentions in passing that they’re looking to purchase a second home as an investment property.

This is the kind of customer insight from Medallia that can be leveraged within Salesforce to offer more personalized outreach going forward.

#8. Break down data and organizational silos

Promote a more productive workforce by breaking down data silos between Salesforce and Medallia, enabling your people to access core workflows seamlessly without having to jump back and forth between systems.

Plus, ensure the right teams have access to cross-organizational insights, such as when broken digital experience (DX) issues are preventing successful sales or renewals or are causing an influx of calls to the contact center or complaints on social media.

#9. Improve team training and performance

Sales and service team managers can easily view Medallia’s feedback insights to know where to focus their attention when coaching their teams. When employees have the chance to hear specific customer feedback about their personal performance, that has the potential to be more meaningful than sitting through generic training, particularly when any pointers are shared immediately following a customer interaction. This agile style of training can help teams improve customer experiences and satisfaction going forward.

#10. Quantify the value of customer satisfaction

Linking Medallia’s customer feedback with Salesforce’s revenue data makes it possible to track the financial impact of customer satisfaction (CSAT). In addition, Medallia’s integration for Salesforce gives sales executives valuable reporting on customer account health by segment, business unit, and region, insights that can help brands better identify risks and opportunities to fuel growth.

You Need Customer Experience Management & Customer Relationship Management Together

With teams under greater pressure to drive efficiencies, reduce spend, and generate more sales, connecting your CEM data from Medallia and CRM data from Salesforce is a savvy move that could help your organization lower the overall cost to serve, streamline workflows for and improve the performance of customer support and sales teams, boost upsell rates, minimize turnover, and strengthen customer loyalty.

Schedule a demo with a Medallia expert — and check out the Medallia for Salesforce integration to combine CRM and customer experience to create a true 360-degree view of your account relationships.