Key Benefits
Enhanced brand perception
Multiple monitoring systems reduced to one
Every team building new capabilities uses AppDynamics monitoring
Challenges
Medallia delivers real-time customer insights to large enterprises that are passionate about customer engagement. By capturing customer feedback and insights at scale, Medallia empowers companies to understand and act on the voice of their customers.
“If your front line is constantly receiving feedback—and the front line of a major enterprise is enormous—how do you distill the data down into what’s relevant?” Stefan Krantz, Medallia’s senior director of engineering, is responsible for building data visualizations for customer feedback. It’s a big task, as Medallia’s enterprise customers have tremendous organizational complexity.
Medallia had been struggling with the number of systems needed to monitor customers accessing their platforms. “The data was disparate. It was difficult for us to determine who was using what,” said Krantz. “More importantly, we didn’t know exactly how well our product was performing.”
Medallia needed a single source of truth for monitoring that could handle parsing multiple terabytes of user and performance data in real-time. Simplicity and scale drove their decision to purchase AppDynamics.
“It's critical to be able to run queries fast, run analytics, test and surface relevant insights from the entire customer journey. AppDynamics really helped pinpoint our challenges and how to address them in real-time.”
Stefan KrantzSenior Director of Engineering @Medallia
About Medallia
Medallia helps enterprises manage and elevate their customer experiences with real-time insights. Feedback from surveys and customer comments is collected from multiple channels—social, web, SMS, mobile, connected devices—and distilled and visualized into easy-to-consume dashboards via both web and mobile applications. Medallia’s platform helps enterprises act with immediacy to address their customers’ concerns.
According to Forrester, 84% of companies aspire to be a customer experience leader, but only 1 out of 5 deliver good or great customer experience. Medallia's mission is to tackle this void: “to create a world where companies are loved by customers and employees.”
As Medallia grew, they needed tools and partners that could scale with their rapid growth of customers, users and data. While evaluating application performance management platforms, they knew they needed three things: a great user experience for their engineering and operations teams, real-time performance management, and the ability to optimize dashboards that measure customer-centric APIs. Further, they needed to monitor their data with a single application, a single dashboard, and a unified point of access.
“It's critical to be able to run queries fast, run analytics, test and surface relevant insights from the entire customer journey,” said Krantz. “AppDynamics really helped pinpoint our challenges and how to address them in real-time.”
Enterprise-level engagement
Engagement is key. Medallia’s clients want to better understand how their individual customers feel about their products. For example, if a major bank launches a mobile banking application, the bank’s internal teams would want to clearly understand customer satisfaction and areas for improvement across their entire enterprise.
No matter which channel a customer chooses to provide feedback, such as an online survey or social media post, Medallia delivers consolidated metrics to their clients in real-time, using Medallia’s web and mobile reporting applications.
“Our clients make major product decisions based on customer feedback. For us? That means Medallia dashboards must be fast and cross-platform. Our goal is to enable our clients to delight their customers. From web to mobile, our clients can visualize their customers’ feedback the way they want to and in real-time. The insights we get from AppDynamics help us ensure we are delivering the performance our customers expect and do it efficiently,” said Krantz.
“Right now, any team that is building a new product uses Business iQ during development to foresee potential issues. Real-time performance management is foundational to our business. We want to know if we’re going to have any hiccups during the software development lifecycle. That way, once deployed, our end user experience can be crisp, engaging, and snappy.”
Stefan KrantzSenior Director of Engineering @Medallia
“One of the primary ways we use AppDynamics is with workflows. AppDynamics allows us to visualize our own workflows and see bottlenecks.” Krantz continues, “Right now, any team that is building a new product uses Business iQ during development to foresee potential issues. Real-time performance management is foundational to our business. We want to know if we’re going to have any hiccups during the software development lifecycle. That way, once deployed, our end user experience can be crisp, engaging, and snappy.”
The power of Medallia lies in letting clients define their own KPIs. Regardless if it’s monthly active users or any other metric, their clients know their businesses and they know precisely what they want to measure.
“Every customer has different KPIs. Our customers can configure Medallia directly to their own KPIs. That’s one of our biggest strengths,” said Krantz.
“From initial surveys to our clients’ month-end reports, the end result, for us, is pure technical performance. Every single one of our dashboards must deliver a simple, yet thoughtful visualization of our clients’ KPIs.”
Krantz expands on how Medallia’s clients’ KPIs have a direct impact on their internal approach to development. “The insights we get from AppDynamics give us greater clarity on our clients’ usage data. We take those insights and use them to drive our own internal product decisions. Simply put, AppDynamics helps us translate our clients’ needs into our own performance goals,” said Krantz.
Smaller releases, greater agility
SaaS driven organizations have moved away from big, single releases to developing multiple releases concurrently. This paradigm shift allows development managers to prioritize and re-prioritize feature sets to meet their clients’ current needs.
Krantz integrates this shift into how he manages Medallia’s approach to innovation. “As a manager, it’s important for me to know how to innovate and manage my team, simultaneously. Multiple incremental releases offer greater control and agility,” he said.
The future of multiple incremental releases? Prediction.
“The next step? Before we have an incident, we want to be able to predict it—so we can take action before it happens. That’s why, if we build something new, like a new dashboard, we use Business iQ from the beginning, to better forecast the end user experience.” said Krantz.
Krantz went further, “The insights that we get from AppDynamics are key to us continuing to deliver a world class product as we add more capabilities to the Medallia Experience Cloud.”
“The insights we get from AppDynamics give us greater clarity on our clients’ usage data. We take those insights and use them to drive our own internal product decisions. Simply put, AppDynamics helps us translate our clients’ needs into our own performance goals.”
Stefan Krantz, Senior Director of Engineering, Medallia
