Top CX & EX Lessons from “Medallia Experience” You Need to Know

Top CX & EX Lessons from “Medallia Experience” You Need to Know

by | Mar 29, 2025 | AI, Technology and Tools, Company Culture & Employees

 I just returned from the Medallia Experience Event with a sobering realization: 90% of customer feedback never gets used. Think about that—businesses collect all this valuable information from customers, then let most of it gather digital dust. The event didn’t just reinforce what I’ve been teaching through my Doing CX Right® framework—it revealed practical ways any organization can transform both employee and customer experiences.

Having spent 25+ years leading teams in corporate environments and small businesses, speaking globally, and studying business and human behavior, I know firsthand how often organizations miss this opportunity. The facts revealed at Medallia Experience event validated what I’ve been helping people around the world understand:
When you get experience right, everything else follows.

I’m writing this article to summarize what I heard and my perspective on how you can apply the insights as a customer experience leader. And yes, YOU are a CX leader. Not sure what I mean? Please contact me right now!

 

The Hidden Link Between Employee Frustration and Customer Complaints

 

Beyond the Feel-Good Statement

Happy employees directly translate to happy customers. To deliver world-class customer experiences, it’s essential to prioritize and cultivate positive employee experiences.
This isn’t just a nice saying—it’s a business fundamental.

What You Can Do:

Look at your customer complaints and ask, “What might be happening with our employees that’s causing this issue?” For example, if customers complain about long wait times, your employees might lack the tools or authority to resolve problems quickly.

How Top Brands Connect Employee Experience to Business Success

The most successful companies are connecting employee experiences directly to customer outcomes in four key ways:

  • Individual Level: Looking at how specific employee fulfillment impacts their customer interactions
  • Team Level: Examining how department morale affects customer service
  • Process Level: Identifying how employee workflows impact customer journeys
  • Company Level: Understanding how overall company culture shapes the customer experience

What You Can Do:

Start small. Pick one customer journey (like returning a product) and talk to the employees involved. Ask what frustrates them about handling returns, then see if those frustrations match your customer complaints.

Why Chasing Satisfaction Scores Won’t Fix Your CX Problems: Moving Beyond Surveys

The event highlighted how traditional customer surveys are falling short. Even Fred Reichheld, who created the Net Promoter Score (NPS), acknowledged it’s often misused as a vanity metric rather than an improvement tool.

What You Can Do:

Don’t just track satisfaction scores. Also measure practical aspects like:

  • How quickly issues get resolved
  • How often customers come back
  • How customers actually behave (not just what they say)
  • What your frontline employees observe about customer frustrations

How to Spot Customer Problems Before They Happen: Looking Forward, Not Just Backward

The most innovative companies not only analyze past performance but also proactively anticipate future customer delight, positioning themselves ahead of the competition.

What You Can Do:

Look for early warning signs. If your employees are struggling with a new system or product, your customers will likely have problems too. Address employee concerns quickly to prevent customer issues.

The Data Doesn’t Lie: Why EX and CX Drive Real Business Results

The Medallia Experience Event revealed eye-opening statistics that show why this matters:

The Employee-Customer Connection

  • Companies with highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable
  • Businesses investing in Employee Experience see 2× higher customer satisfaction scores
  • There’s an 81% correlation between employee engagement and NPS
  • Organizations aligning employee and customer strategies are 2.5× more likely to meet financial targets
  • These companies are 2.9× more likely to be recognized as a Great Place to Work
  • They achieve 3.2× higher levels of retention
  • Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their jobs

Why Silos Are Killing Your CX Efforts: Working Together, Not Apart

One clear message from the event: customer experience isn’t just a job for the customer service team. It requires everyone to collaborate and align on solutions.

What You Can Do:

Create a small team with people from different departments (customer service, HR, operations, product, etc) to meet regularly and solve customer and employee problems together. Give them the authority to make fundamental changes.

The North Star: Your CX Strategy Might Be Missing

Fred and several speakers emphasized having a clear “North Star” to guide all employee and customer experience efforts.

What You Can Do:

Define what success looks like in simple terms that everyone can understand. For example:
“We want customers to solve their problems in one contact.”
or
“We want employees to have everything they need to help customers the first time.”

 

How to Use AI to Strengthen Human Connections (Not Replace Them)

Medallia showcased how artificial intelligence can enhance customer experiences—not by replacing humans, but by making them more effective.

What You Can Do:

Use technology to:

  • Find patterns in customer comments that humans might miss
  • Give employees real-time guidance during customer interactions
  • Recommend specific next steps based on a customer’s history

The Business Case: Showing the CX Financial Impact

Companies that connect employee and customer experiences aren’t just nicer places to work—they’re more profitable.

What You Can Do:

Track and show how improved employee and customer experiences affect your bottom line:

  • Lower employee turnover (and reduced hiring costs)
  • Higher customer retention (and lower marketing costs)
  • Increased repeat purchases
  • Fewer complaints to handle

Check out of my other article about the ROI of CX with helpful research to leverage in your business case.

 

Your Next Move: 

The Medallia Experience Event wasn’t just about ideas—it was about taking action. Through my Doing CX Right® framework, I help organizations put these principles into practice because they work. The data and stories shared by global thought leaders reinforced that this isn’t optional—it’s essential.

Congratulations to Eric Stoessel and Jenny Zehentner and the  entire Medallia team for creating such an impactful event. The insights shared by Mark Bishof, Sid Banerjee, Fabrice Martin, Will Guidara, Fred Reichheld, Shep Hyken, Jeannie Walters, Grace Black, Ellie O’Toole, Denise Lee Yohn, Jessica Shannon, Sasha Fard, Sri Narasimhan and others expanded our collective understanding of what’s possible when we connect employee and customer experiences the right way.

The question isn’t whether you should improve these experiences—it’s whether you can afford not to.

 

Want more actionable insights?

Listen to my conversations with some of mentioned leaders on Doing CX Right®‬ podcast.

Subscribe on your favorite channels (spotify, apple, audible, pandora, Youtube, etc)  for updates.

🎧 👉 Sid Banerjee

🎧 👉Shep Hyken

🎧 👉Fred Reichheld

🎧 👉Jeannie Walters

Free Gift From Me To You: 

Do you want to know if your customer experience creates loyal advocates who genuinely love your brand? Are your employees inspired to champion your mission as others in your industry view you as the gold standard they strive to reach?

Discover the:

  • Barriers limiting your brand’s growth and impact.
  • Factors that drive stronger customer connections and deeper loyalty.
  • Strategies to create meaningful experiences that set your brand apart.

Providing the right customer experience can transform your business and enrich the lives of the people you serve. Don’t leave it to chance.

Take FREE Assessment Now

Listen to my conversation with Sid Banerjee – Medallia’s Chief Strategy Officer

NPS Survey Question – Should It Be First Or Last?

NPS Survey Question – Should It Be First Or Last?

by | Aug 21, 2021 | Metrics & Measurements, Voice of Customer & Insights

Writing surveys is a science and an art. If you don’t do it right, the voice of customer data gained will be meaningless. In fact, I have seen cases where people made bad business decisions because of undefined goals and leading questions that influenced responder opinions.

Survey Design Best Practices

People often ask me…how much does survey question order matter? Does the question order create a bias?  Is it better to ask CX measurement questions like Net Promoter Score (NPS), “how likely are you to recommend” at the beginning or at the end of a survey? 

I have tried both ways and believe there are pros and cons to each scenario. For instance, if you ask the Net Promoter question at the end, and the survey is too long, responders may quit. You won’t get the quantitative results needed. On the other hand, if you ask the NPS question first, the answer may not reflect the person’s actual views.

To help solve the debate, I asked NPS pioneer, Rob Markey, his perspective. He argues in favor of it being the first survey question and has several explanations as to why. You can hear his answers and get actionable customer experience measurement tips on my DoingCXRight®‬ podcast. (Episode 2).

Listen to Podcast Now

Upon further research, I discovered another perspective that’s worth sharing. Zontziry (Z) Johnson explains: 

The Argument for Placing NPS Question First

“Putting the overall question first does a few things. According to research, it can actually act as an anchor by which a respondent answers the rest of the questions. So, if we ask an overall question first and get that knee-jerk reaction from a respondent that might be given if asked about their experience by a friend, as they take the rest of the survey, they tend to adjust their following answers to match the answer to the overall question. This is great for the researcher if the answer to that overall question is positive; this isn’t great if that answer is negative.”

 

The Argument for Placing NPS Question Last

According to  “Order Effects in Customer Satisfaction Modelling,” from the Journal of Marketing Management, “…customers’ overall evaluations are more extreme and better explained when provided after attribute evaluations.” By asking the specifics before asking the overall question, respondents will be thinking more about how the specifics add up to their overall level of satisfaction. Arguably, this could mean they are giving a more thought-out answer to that overall question. When should you put the overall question last? When you want your audience to remember various aspects of their experience and give a more thoughtful response. You may also want to consider placing it last if your respondents will be answering awhile after the experience you’re asking them about. That way, you can remind them of the particulars about the experience before asking them to give their overall impression.

 

I asked other CX professionals their opinions and was surprised to hear many place important questions at the beginning AND at the end to capture BOTH the initial opinion and impressions they are left with after being reminded of the details.

Conclusion:

Based on varying opinions, I recommend testing all scenarios and let the data guide decisions. What is your view?

Why COVID-19 Can Be The Catalyst For Enhancing Your VoC Program

Why COVID-19 Can Be The Catalyst For Enhancing Your VoC Program

by | Sep 5, 2020 | Voice of Customer & Insights

Voice of the Customer, commonly referred to as VOC, can be YOUR company game-changer WHEN DONE RIGHT! I speak a lot on podcasts about VOC and the art and science of getting feedback from customers to inform business decisions, and employees (VOE) too. This is the theme of my recent Customer Experience book.

Getting customer feedback and applying VOC best practices is essential especially during a pandemic because people’s expectations are constantly changing. MyCustomer asked a variety of experts, including me, about how to enhance customer experiences through a VOC program during tough times. Below is a summary of our conversations and tips about making VOC surveys more compelling.

Research Tells Us:

In 2016, in what was possibly the most meta consumer survey of all time, a 2016 OpinionLabs study revealed that 72% of consumers didn’t like being surveyed by brands.

More explicitly – respondents felt surveys interfered with their experience with a brand, while the same study found that 80% of customers had abandoned a survey halfway through because it was soporific.

It’s long been a catch-22 situation for businesses seeking to gauge the opinion of their customers – how to survey in a manner that’s not intrusive or damaging to the relationship they’ve fostered whilst also gleaning enough information to make the process worthwhile.

“To know how satisfied your customers are, you need them to tell you. The trouble is, customers aren’t playing ball with surveys anymore,” explains Sophie Leaver, marketing operations for Customer Thermometer.


Voice of the Customer (VOC) 

In recent years Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs have helped apply science to the art of surveying customers.

By asking for feedback at different points in a customer journey, and then applying some real-time thinking and a closed-loop system, VoC is aimed at removing some of the more painful or unnecessary elements of other longer-form surveys, which are often pushed to customers at the point of transaction.

“A VoC program enables leaders to understand customers and target audience perceptions and expectations,” explains Stacy Sherman, Head of Customer Experience for Schindler Elevator Corp. in North America, and the founder of DoingCXRight.

“It’s essential when building new products and developing market messaging or service processes.

“Developing the right questions to validate peoples’ needs are what I call ‘heart and science’. For example, if customers say that ‘communication’ is important and it turns out to be a key factor for dissatisfaction, then surveys need to incorporate reasons WHY communication is a pain point. You may start with high-level themes but then need to revise surveys to dig deeper so that feedback is actionable.”

 

Surveying During Coronavirus

This need for making surveys actionable is what drives VoC programs, and has taken on a renewed purpose since the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe at the start of 2020.

One organization that has felt the weight of COVID-19 as heavily as most is Stagecoach, which, as a provider of buses, coaches, and trams across the UK and other parts of the world, saw its customer base slashed almost overnight, as the result of the pandemic.

Keith Gait, who heads up the company’s customer service operations, was overseeing a trial of a new VoC program for Stagecoach which was due to be rolled out the week the UK went into lockdown in March. The company decided to hold back on the rollout, and despite an “almost total drop-off in passenger numbers for 2 to 3 months”, discovered something new about their customers that fed back into their VoC program design.

“We were still getting interactions from our previous feedback program at this time and we found that whilst our customer base was diminished, those people that were still traveling really, really valued the service, and our NPS went up a further 13 points during a lockdown,” Gait explains.

“It made me realized that we needed to re-evaluate the VoC program we were about to roll out, and so during a lockdown, I spent a lot of time talking to people about how to improve it and make it more actionable.

“The view was we needed to make it more human, so that’s where we have focused. The feedback requests needed to be much more personable, much more about the human characteristics – of the driver, of the cleaners, of the welcome, of the safety – and generally less corporate. But whilst trying to still keep it very short. Our VOC program is all customer-led, it’s proactive on their part, delivered to them while they are actually on a bus, so we need to be mindful of the short attention frame we have with them.”

“The feedback requests needed to be much more personable, much more about the human characteristics.”

Stacy Sherman’s team at Schindler also took a similar approach to their VoC program during the COVID-19 lockdown, acknowledging that a much more ‘human’ approach was necessary to stay in contact with customers during a period of unprecedented uncertainty, and gauge their thoughts and feelings in a more direct manner:  

“My survey team pivoted to “peace of mind” phone calls. Instead of asking traditional questions that don’t apply right now, we contacted customers to express empathy and inform them that we’re here for them. We authentically asked customers how we can be of help, which has fuelled loyalty. As Maya Angelou says, ‘people will forget what you did and said, but never forget how you made them feel’.”

In a recent post for MyCustomer, Claire Sporton, customer experience innovation lead at VoC specialists Confirmit, believes the pandemic should reset the way every business thinks about surveying customers, and their Voice of the Customer program:

“People have changed. The research and insight you gathered six months ago is out of date; it relates to a whole different world. What is important to us has changed. The things that mattered before have been replaced by new concerns and this impacts our perceptions, expectations, and priorities. We need to ensure our insights reflect this new reality. 

“This surely means it’s time for a raft of new surveys! Hurrah! Or does it? What insight do you hope to gather and what exactly do you think you will be measuring? Have a well-defined plan before you open up your feedback tool and start hammering out a new survey.”

 

Boring Questions

Whilst the pandemic may be an opportunity to reset and refine VoC programs, it also offers an opportunity to ask yourself what makes for an interesting survey that can glean insight above and beyond the data being fed into your VoC program before COVID-19.

As an author of The Grid and founder of experience design agency Methodical, Matt Watkinson quipped in a post on LinkedIn in late-July: “I recently received a customer/brand survey that included these questions:

– You’re invited to take the first manned flight to mars but there is no guarantee of return. Do you take the flight?
– You can take a pill that guarantees you’ll live for a hundred years. Do you take it?
– Do you think you’d be better equipped to survive if you travelled 50,000 years into the past, or 50,000 years into the future?

“It was totally engrossing. I completed the entire thing — sixty questions or so. And it really got me thinking…why are surveys in general so f***ing boring? Is there an unwritten rule I’m not aware of? Don’t we want customers to engage with us and share interesting stuff?

“Why can’t we ask questions like, ‘If you were CEO for a day what one thing would you change?’ Or ‘If our brand was a band, who would we be and why?’”

Why Your Customer Surveys Suck and What To Do About It

Watkinson makes a valid point, and one which taps into Keith Gait’s ascertain that customer surveys need to be more human, and tap directly into how a customer might be able to elicit actual change as a result of completing a VoC survey.

“It’s been so striking how much has changed about the feedback we’ve received since [the start of the coronavirus pandemic].

“It has been much more personal from customers, valuing the drivers and the key role they have played in keeping them moving. They have also been generally more understanding about delays and factors outside the company’s control. But we need to keep asking them relevant questions and making sure we resolve issues that arise as we move out of lockdown and customers’ tolerance levels change.”

And this is where the true challenge lies – can you start asking more interesting questions of your customers, and can you facilitate action? Stacy Sherman says this is where the benefits of VoC will become most apparent for businesses.

“I believe customers are actually starting to expect surveys more than ever, because the focus on customer experience has exponentially increased across industries.

“Boredom is not the issue but rather knowing what companies do with their information is what drives their actions to share feedback. The magic happens when companies “close the loop” and tell customers about improvements made because of their responses. People are then more motivated to spend their precious time to help your brand in those instances.”