Transformative approach
helps businesses achieve true customer–centricity
September 2014 - TNS, the global research consultancy,
has entered into partnership with Medallia, the leading software firm in
customer experience management (CEM), to help companies become truly
customer-centric through a new offering that combines best practices, insights and
technology. The partnership is set to redefine the role of market research in
CEM by making customer insights central to daily decision-making.
The partnership fortifies TNS’s customer
experience strategy and services with Medallia’s real-time customer feedback
solution, which gets entire organisations – from the c-suite to frontline staff
– engaged in improving customer experience.
Medallia’s CEM platform gives companies
complete visibility of the daily performance of their customer touchpoints by
delivering timely and targeted customer feedback and enabling them to resolve
issues as they emerge. When the solution is delivered in combination with TNS’s
industry-leading research and benchmark-based best practices, companies gain a
systematic process that ultimately helps them create a truly customer-centric
organisation.
“TNS and Medallia’s combined solution
will trigger a paradigm shift in how organisations use customer feedback data,
moving from just understanding customer insights to driving real operational
execution of customer experience improvement,” said Stefan Schmelcher, Global
Head of Customer Experience Management at TNS. “The solution goes beyond
traditional approaches, where insights were often kept to small groups and only
delivered in standard reports. Instead, it brings the voice of the customer
into organisations’ daily operations, uniting teams around customer success and
ultimately driving company performance and transforming businesses.”
With the explosion of customer
experience data available online, a platform that captures live feedback across
all channels is critical to businesses trying to understand their true performance
in the market. Medallia’s CEM platform collects customer feedback across every interaction
and touchpoint – including digital channels, mobile apps and social media. It
transforms the data into critical insights and automatically distributes closed-loop,
recovery workflows and personalised action plans to everyone across the organisation,
empowering thousands of employees company-wide to deliver improved experiences
for the customer.
“For businesses, every customer
interaction is a learning opportunity – and putting customer insights and
actions into the hands of employees across an organisation ensures they all benefit
from those opportunities as much as possible,” said Michelle de Haaff, VP of
Marketing at Medallia. “Our partnership with TNS allows us to jointly deliver solutions
to organisations that combine years of research in best practices around
customer experience with our platform that enables organisations to
operationalise those best practices.”
Medallia and TNS’s partnership helps
companies leverage customer experience data to identify impactful and
profitable areas of investment. By combining customer feedback with financial
and operational information, the solution helps businesses determine how
different aspects of their experience affect company performance so they can
allocate resources accordingly.
Medallia’s CEM platform works in
conjunction with TRI*M, which has been TNS’s successful flagship product within
its Customer Experience practice for over 20 years. During 2013, TRI*M was
comprehensively renovated to meet the modern challenges clients face. New TRI*M
cracks the complex code governing the strength of customer relationships and the
sustainability of a business by identifying gaps between customer needs and the
company performance. As competition intensifies, it is essential to get smarter
about the experiences that matter, and deliver return to the bottom line. TRI*M
provides the analytics needed to understand customer priorities, along with benchmarks
and norms that can make Medallia’s CEM system even more effective in daily
practice.
TNS’s new solution offering for CEM is supported
by the recent launch of the TNS Customer Insight Survey, a comprehensive study
of 40,000 customers across 20 markets. The study reveals that many companies
are failing to convert strong performance into customer preference. The new
Medallia partnership will help correct this, offering immediate insights into
the customer experience and allowing clients to build customer preference by responding
directly to critical needs.
