Emre Manager

Responsibilities:

Leading projects from start to finish. I’m responsible for understanding customer needs, configuring our solution to meet those needs, communicating the needs to engineering (when required), and managing the customer relationship after implementation.

Initial appeal of Medallia:

It shared my vision about the future of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Vision for the future of customer satisfaction data:

To make it available online—instantaneously—by leveraging the best possible technology. Market research is about collecting and analyzing data. But for market research to have impact, people need to know the data and need to use it. It made sense to automate the process, having computers do the analysis and on-the-spot reporting.

Background:

Market research. I have a master’s degree in marketing science with a focus on market research and am especially interested in customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and international marketing.

Master’s thesis topic:

The effect of culture on the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Thesis findings:

If a service provides socialization, then cultural characteristics are salient. If a service does not provide socialization, then culture doesn’t play a role.

I collected two sets of data—from bookstores and supermarkets—from seven countries, which I categorized according to Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede).

I found that culture impacted loyalty in bookstores, where people’s goals were to socialize, get books, and get coffee, but not in supermarkets, where people’s goals were to go in, get products, and leave.

This is an important lesson for international companies. If their service provides socialization, they need to know that culture matters. If it doesn’t provide socialization, they can standardize the service across cultures.

Favorite parts of job:

Data analysis, client interaction. Our customers are highly intelligent people with a lot of industry knowledge who come up with some great ideas. It is very exciting to me to understand those ideas and use them to improve our products.

Medallia team:

Very down-to-earth and intelligent. For example, we have great engineers with brilliant minds. I like them because not only are they really good at what they do, they’re reachable.

Medallia culture:

Very egalitarian. Everyone’s opinion is considered equally important. There are no people trying to impose power over others. Everyone’s focused on a purpose, not on exerting power.

The most important traits for working at Medallia:

Integrity, intelligence, and energy. By integrity, I mean someone who is honest, humble, and has leadership skills. If person doesn’t have integrity, the other two don’t matter. Intelligence is necessary because the learning curve is steep. Quantitative skills help. Energy and being positive in relationships with customers are also needed at this job.

Extracurricular activities:

Avoiding being idle and pursuing excitement. Excitement to me is when you can’t sleep thinking about it. Sometimes it’s a research idea or a solution for a customer’s needs; sometimes it’s rock climbing, cycling, or taking my motorcycle from zero to 130.