Medallia Transforms Employee Listening With Four Breakthrough AI Innovations

Medallia recently wrapped up Experience ‘24, where 1,500 experience leaders and professionals gathered in Las Vegas to discuss the future of customer experience, the growing urgency of employee experience, the potential for generative AI to shape both, and how the combination of advanced CX, EX, and AI capabilities are coming together to truly make personalization at scale a reality. 

Kicking off the conference was a keynote from Medallia’s leadership, including CEO Joe Tyrrell, that debuted four new Medallia AI features — Ask Athena, Intelligent Summaries, Smart Responses, and Themes — all designed to reduce analytical workloads and speed time to insight for all users.

Keep reading for a deeper look into how these new AI features will impact how leaders listen, understand, and take action on employee feedback.

1. Understand root causes of issues and get recommended actions in real time

With Ask Athena, managers will be able to ask any employee listening-related question and be provided with a short written answer, as well as a graph of the data supporting the answer.

For example, a manager receiving low communication scores in a business unit could ask, “Which of the departments in my business unit have the lowest communication scores?” To dig deeper, the manager could follow up by asking, “What are the negative comments made about communication in the low-scoring departments compared to the high-scoring departments?” This application of AI offers many possibilities to make it fast and easy for managers to understand the problem and how to solve it, without the need for advanced analytics skills. 

2. Summarize internal help desk transcripts to improve outcomes

With Intelligent Summaries, summarizations can be applied to call and chat transcripts — including those from HR and IT help desks, freeing those leaders from spending time trudging through records to understand what is happening.

For example, open enrollment is about to begin, and to ensure a seamless rollout, the head of the HR help desk wants a summarization of each of the calls that came in regarding benefits over the past 12 months. This information can be used to quickly understand how to improve the upcoming open enrollment — resulting in a reduction of calls, costs, and frustrated employees.

3. Take quicker action on employee feedback

Smart Response is an efficient way to help managers take quicker action on employee feedback. One of the most difficult parts of employee listening is knowing what action to take first. Smart Response will enable managers with suggested responses based on the feedback they have received. Responses are both editable and sent by humans, giving people leaders control over final responses. 

4. Get to the heart of emerging trends even faster

Themes, now enhanced with generative AI, is a quick way to understand what employees are saying, without having to read through thousands of comments. Generative AI can surface and summarize actionable insights and root causes from large volumes of qualitative data. Themes surfaces and summarizes these actionable insights for leaders.

For example, a leader of three business units would like to quickly understand what issues employees are raising in feedback channels in each of their three units without having to read through the comments in each unit. Summaries are generated on each Theme, so leaders can easily see which emerging ideas are coming up in employee comments. 

Without question, the greatest benefit AI brings to the employee experience is helping managers and teams get to action faster by unlocking the wealth of insights that lies within unstructured data sources. 

With Medallia, we have been bringing you actionable, AI-powered insights for more than 15 years. Our GenAI is just the next step in the journey to bring you even greater value from your employee experience programs. 

Want to learn more? Check out our AI Leadership page.