PALO ALTO, California, January 14, 2014 — Medallia® (www.medallia.com), the global leader in SaaS Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions, continues to build momentum after a stellar 2013 with its appointment of Chris Watts as Chief Financial Officer. The appointment of Watts, a technology industry veteran with over 20 years of financial and operations experience, adds significantly to Medallia’s world-class executive management team. Medallia enjoyed a very strong 2013 in terms of its customer portfolio, global presence, product line, and market impact.
“We are excited to welcome Chris to our team,” said Borge Hald, chief executive officer of Medallia. “By adding a CFO of Chris’ caliber, we’ve built a strong foundation for accelerated growth in 2014.” At Medallia, Watts will be responsible for overseeing all financial activities, including financial strategy, accounting operations, and investor relations.
Watts joins Medallia from Workday where, as vice president of finance, he held broad leadership responsibilities, including active involvement in the company’s highly successful initial public offering (IPO) in 2012. Prior to Workday, Watts held management and executive-level finance positions in Europe and the U.S. at eBay, Commerce One, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and VUDU. Watts’ appointment follows Medallia’s addition of Ken Fine in October 2013 as Chief Customer Officer responsible for Medallia’s product and services organization.
“The opportunity to join Medallia’s team and guide the company through this crucial stage in the company’s development was one that I could not pass up,” said Chris Watts. “I look forward to helping Medallia continue to grow and maintain its leadership position in the Customer Experience Management market, which serves all industries, from retail, to hospitality, to financial services.”
“We are thrilled by Medallia’s last twelve months and are excited by the prospects for the next twelve,” said Borge Hald. In the past year, Medallia experienced a greater than 95 percent customer retention rate and a commensurate reference ability rate, resulting in greatly accelerated customer acquisition and recurring revenue growth. Medallia added new companies to its customer roster in 2013, including 7-Eleven, Aaron’s Inc., AXA Insurance, Marriott, MGM Resorts, O2 Telefonica, Royal Caribbean, Shell, and Zurich Insurance. With the addition of these new customers across North America, Europe, and Asia, Medallia now serves more than 300 of the largest, most beloved Global 2000 brands, including Fidelity Investments, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, GE, Gold’s Gym, The LEGO Group, Nordstrom, and Sephora.
To support its growth, Medallia increased its workforce by approximately 50 percent, and grew its European headquarters in London. The company also received a further $20 million in venture funding in 2013 from Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s legendary firms, bringing Medallia’s total amount of institutional funding to $55 million. Medallia is using the investment to expand its product line and its operations in Europe and Asia.
Medallia launched many new products in 2013, including an expanded release of its Business-to-Business (B2B) offering designed to increase key stakeholders’ visibility into account feedback across B2B organizations to improve the customer experience, and a new smartphone application that pushes customer feedback and recovery actions directly to mobile devices for frontline employees to act on while on the go. The company also announced a partnership with TripAdvisor®, the world’s largest travel site, that expanded Medallia’s social media capabilities to enable seamless and timely engagement with guests.
Medallia and its customers also garnered awards in 2013, among them: Gartner & 1to1 Media’s CRM Excellence Award for customers Best Western International and Intuit; Forrester Research’s Outside In Award for LEGO; 1to1’s Customer Champion for Four Seasons; and Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Excellence Award for Intuit. Medallia was named Vendor of the Year by Gold’s Gym franchisees and secured a Best in Biz Award for Best New Product of the Year.
