News
The Gist
- Generative AI growth. Experience '24 introduces new AI capabilities in CX, showing rapid generative AI integration.
- Strategic focus. CEO emphasizes critical data analysis for customer attraction and experience improvement.
- Innovative solutions. Medallia debuts AI tools like Themes and Ask Athena, enhancing decision-making and customer support.
LAS VEGAS — Experience management software company Medallia kicked off its annual user conference, Experience ‘24, Monday here at the Wynn Las Vegas.
Its opening keynote Tuesday touched on many themes, including several announcements on new generative AI-supported product capabilities — the latest example of how quickly generative AI is spreading throughout the CX ecosystem.
Let's take a look at the happenings at Medallia's Experience '24 conference.
Medallia CEO Joe Tyrrell kicked off the morning by introducing the themes that will be present throughout the conference. Since he became CEO 11 months ago, he’s had a clear picture of the direction he envisions for Medallia. He stressed the importance of data and analytics, but also highlighted the fact that new data is constantly being created and that information overload is common for customers everywhere. CX professionals who want to be successful should know how to separate what information is interesting versus what information is important.
“Identify what’s interesting, but focus on the information that’s most important,” Tyrrell said, adding that it’s important to consider what information will help them attract new customers and improve the overall customer experience.
Related Article: What Is Customer Analytics? And Why It Matters
How Generative AI Fits Into Medallia’s Experience Management Solution
Other Medallia leaders used the keynote to introduce new platform capabilities to users — both features that directly benefit customer-facing employees and features for those in charge of marketing decisions and strategies.
According to the Harvard Business Review, almost half of organizations are already experimenting with generative AI, said Michael Mallett, vice president of product management for Medallia. But technology alone isn’t the answer, he added. He then introduced two new Medallia solutions that use generative AI to improve the ability of decision-makers to do their job.
Here's a look at those solutions and features:
Themes
One of these solutions is Themes, which was created to help organizations report on the feedback and product responses they get from customers. It can be difficult to go through all customer feedback and summarize the major ideas that arise, Mallett said, so Themes uses generative AI to sum up these ideas. With this capability, CX professionals can learn what areas of improvement to prioritize, based on what common complaints customers have shared.
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Ask Athena
Ask Athena is another solution created to help employees extract insights from data, Mallett said. “Data analysis can be intimidating for the average employee,” he said. This solution allows employees to ask questions and get on-demand insights based on customer feedback and data. It also has the capabilities to make next-best-action recommendations, Mallett added.
Intelligent Summaries
Meanwhile, Hadley Spadaccini, senior manager of product marketing for Medallia, explained the new features that help customer-facing employees create a better experience for customers. Intelligent Summaries is a solution that contact centers can use to summarize copious amounts of interactions in seconds, Spadaccini said.
If customer service agents are suddenly receiving an influx of requests, for example, Intelligent Summaries can help CX professionals find out what’s going wrong. If customers are coming in droves to ask about the same issue, then the organization could learn the crux of the issue and address it to decrease customer confusion.
Smart Response
Spadaccini also introduced the Smart Response solution, which uses generative AI to generate empathetic, contextual responses. Rather than using boilerplate language to update customers on their ticket, customer support employees can generate a personalized response that makes customers feel heard and appreciated.
These four AI-supported solutions will be available to all Medallia Experience Cloud customers, Spadaccini added.
Even More About AI to Kick off Medallia's Experience '24 Conference
Finally, CEO Tyrrell brought up some big picture topics around AI — ideas that have doubtlessly been on many CX professionals’ minds the past few years. Organizations should engage AI in a meaningful way but should also make sure to do it in a way that doesn’t introduce unintended consequences or biases, he said.
Some questions about AI that organizations should carefully consider include:
- Who in your company can ask questions of AI?
- What questions can be asked?
- Are you prepared to ask difficult questions?
- And, can you handle answers to questions that may not have the answer you want?
Finally, Medallia Chief Product Officer Simonetta Turek stressed that maintaining trust with customers is extremely important for companies as they adopt new AI technology.
AI Moderation Council
Keeping with this theme, she highlighted Medallia’s AI Moderation Council, which was created to provide oversight, guidance and security over the company’s usage of AI. The council is made up of members from Medallia’s legal, privacy & security, compliance, engineering, product and customer organizations. To take this a step further, the company is also launching an AI Advisory Board that will include participation from customer and partner communities.
Related Article: How to Pick the Right Flavor of Generative AI
Final Thoughts on Medallia Experience
Overall, this keynote set the scene for the topics that will be highlighted throughout the user conference. It also was a valuable reminder of the topics that have been trending in CX out of this hotel in Las Vegas — mainly, how much of a splash generative AI is making on CX teams everywhere and, equally important, how important it is to adopt the latest, trendiest technology carefully and thoughtfully.
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