Customer experience management is an expanding space—which presents unique opportunities for Medallia’s Solution Consulting organization. For this Q&A Chief People Officer Susan Lovegren spoke with Director of Solution Consulting, Lauren Leland to discuss what first drew her to the company, how she approaches cross-team collaboration, and what’s most exciting about selling in the vertical space.
To start, tell us about Medallia and your role.
Medallia is a special place to work, and you can feel that energy from the moment you walk into one of our offices or engage with one of our customers. There is true excitement around impacting the customer experience and it’s amazing to see the value we bring through our platform. As the leader of the Solutions Consulting team in two of our verticals – Financial Services and Healthcare – I have the chance to engage with our existing and prospective customers in a presales capacity to bring the value of Medallia’s product and people to their most pressing business needs. My team fills a unique need in that they are both experts in their industries (healthcare and financial services) as well as experts in our product and value we deliver.
Why did you decide to join the team?
I joined Medallia four years ago because I was drawn to the incredible people, collaborative and learning-oriented culture, superior product, and continued growth of the Customer Experience Management space. I haven’t looked back since!
What else is exciting about your role, particularly at this moment in time?
The Solutions Consulting team is always an exciting place to be, as we often act as a bridge between the market needs and our product strategy to help the company continue to evolve. Working in the vertical space is particularly exciting because we see verticalization as a key strategy to our continued growth. Every customer fits into a vertical market and it’s our role to be the experts in each of them. Our goal is to focus on a few core verticals, uncover what is resonating, and scale repeatable processes. Both financial services and healthcare are seeing huge changes in how they think about experiences, and Medallia is well poised to help them. Our ability to work in a highly regulated environment, deal with data complexity, and deeply understand the nuanced needs of these two industries puts us in an exciting position to make a big impact.
You lead the Healthcare and Financial Services verticals; What are some of the challenges that your team faces today?
Our biggest challenge is to stay ahead of demand and changing trends in both of these verticals. As our product suite grows, there are so many places to have an impact that we often need to narrow down where to start. In healthcare, there is lots of interest to improve the patient experience across the inpatient, outpatient, ambulatory, and specialty settings, as well as a focus on tackling the challenge of provider retention and burnout through a focus on the provider experience. Not to mention the opportunity for payers to impact the member, broker, and employer experience, or medical suppliers to improve the account and user experience. In financial services, an industry where Medallia has long excelled, we are continuing to see opportunity across consumer banking, wealth management, and commercial banking and we are also seeing exciting new opportunities in the employee experience space, as well as journey analytics and machine learning.
If I am a financial services or healthcare industry professional, why do you think Medallia may be the right next step for me?
Joining this team is an amazing opportunity to bring your industry expertise to a company and set of clients that are eager to learn from you! We are helping leading edge companies in financial services and healthcare define what customer, patient, and employee experience should look like and how to use it as a business differentiator. Our clients want to learn from Medallia’s best practices across other industries, but we need experts to shape our point of view on how these best practices apply to financial services and healthcare.
How do Medallia’s sales teams collaborate with one another?
The Medallia sales ecosystem has a very team-oriented and collaborative culture. The Solutions Consulting team is a big part of this collaboration, often helping guide strategy and bring best practices to our conversations with clients. You will always find people willing to lean in to help, and a culture of continuous learning. We often talk about a growth mindset, meaning there is an opportunity to provide feedback to make one another better, and that we can learn collectively through our shared experiences.
What’s the culture like on your team?
We are a group that has self-selected to help shape Medallia’s vertical strategy. We are attracted to building something, and constantly trying to learn, grow, and improve. We deeply believe in Medallia’s ability to help shape the future of healthcare and financial services by enabling our clients to understand the experiences of their customers and employees. We are energized by solving our clients’ problems and we like to have fun while doing it!
Interested to know more about Lauren’s team? Visit us at https://www.medallia.com/careers/
