Medallia Institute Releases 2014 Customer Benchmarks: Companies That Give Customer Feedback to the Frontlines Achieve Higher NPS®

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 14, 2014 — Medallia® the global leader in SaaS Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, today released its annual Customer Benchmark Research Study. The free report shows that organizations where employees, from the C-suite to the frontline, engage with customer experience feedback simply achieve greater customer satisfaction. In addition, findings show that organizations that take action and close the loop with customers have happier customers than those that don’t.

To develop the benchmark report, the Medallia Institute, a unit of Medallia, analyzed hundreds of CEM programs in the Medallia customer portfolio. Companies fell primarily within seven industries: business services, manufacturing, software/internet, financial services, hospitality, retail, and telecommunications.

Below are some of the key findings:

Frequent employee engagement drives satisfaction:

• Frequent frontline engagement with voice of the customer data is associated with Net Promoter Scores® (NPS®) that are up to 20 points higher on average.
• Companies whose employees access customer feedback “on-the-go” via mobile devices achieve an NPS 11 points higher on average than companies whose employees don’t.

Companies that take action have more satisfied customers:

• Companies in the top quartile in terms of customer satisfaction close the loop with unhappy customer “detractors” 62 percent more than “laggard” companies, those in the bottom quartile.

Consumers are increasingly giving feedback via mobile:

• Customer feedback provided on mobile devices surged up to 60 percent of total feedback provided in 2013.

“Our annual benchmark study shows that companies that embed the Voice of the Customer into the fiber of their business, gathering feedback everywhere the customers is and delivering it to every employee to close the loop, get far better results than those that do not,” said John Abraham, general manager of the Medallia Institute. “Having the right systems in place to capture customer feedback, deliver tailored insights and prioritize actions to every employee drives measureable improvement.”

The full report is available for download here.

The release of the Medallia Benchmark Study is one of several announcements Medallia is making this week in conjunction with Experience 2014: The CEM Leadership Conference. The annual customer event is taking place at The Ritz-Carlton resort hotel in the scenic Northern California coastal community of Half Moon Bay. Representatives of numerous industry leaders—including American Express Travel & Lifestyle Services, Macy’s, Mercedes Benz USA, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, PayPal, Cox Communications, 7-Eleven, Tory Burch, and Zurich Insurance—are meeting to present case studies, share best practices, and explore the exciting future of CEM. See all recent news at medallia.com/press-room.