Medallia Promote Improves Businesses’ Real Social Media Rankings

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 14, 2012— Medallia, the global leader in SaaS Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, today announced Medallia Promote(TM), which helps companies improve their social media standing by encouraging customers to promote their experiences on leading social media sites. A typical Medallia client will receive up to twenty times more survey responses than social media reviews. Medallia is able to drive customers to post reviews online so social scores become more representative of the actual customer experience.

“It is no secret that social reviews affect bookings and revenues,” said Borge Hald, CEO and co-founder of Medallia. “Medallia has found that social review sites actually underrepresent true customer experience scores around seventy percent of the time. It’s unfortunate for companies to lose so much business simply because their scores don’t reflect the true sentiment of all guests.”

Medallia Promote is the latest complement to Medallia’s Social Feedback solution, which enables companies to track and act on social media feedback. With Promote, Social Feedback customers not only monitor their social feedback, but also improve their scores by taking action when online sentiment is out of line.

Negative online sentiment–or no sentiment at all–can damage business’ reputations and bottom lines. Comments by a few vocal, disgruntled reviewers can misrepresent a company’s true customer experience, a problem exacerbated by the emergence of phony (often competitor-generated) social feedback. Companies that receive little to no online feedback also suffer. Search engines will punish businesses without a steady inflow of social feedback, and potential customers overlook them.

Medallia Promote is a great complement to customer experience programs like Medallia’s CEM solution. It mobilizes customers to broadcast, through the social media megaphone, improvements in customer experience that result from an effective customer experience program. “Companies that are proactive both in listening and responding to social media feedback and in activating genuine customer reviews will outperform the market,” said Hald.

Medallia Promote has generated a significant uptick in companies’ online rankings. One luxury hotel has tripled its positive social media postings using the solution. Other companies are successfully using the offering to get their customers to provide offline references, share promotions, build out Facebook community pages, and participate in online forums. Companies can also use Promote to develop marketing campaigns that specifically target their fans and detractors.