In the market for a new customer experience management platform? Medallia and Qualtrics might be on your list. In this article, we’ll compare Medallia vs. Qualtrics including:
- An introduction to these solutions and their features
- The pros and cons of each
- Alternatives you should consider for focused customer experience management
Qualtrics vs. Medallia: An introduction
Medallia is an enterprise experience management platform that combines all customer and employee experience data into one place, capturing every interaction so you know where to focus. It offers solutions for contact center, customer experience, market research, and employee experience. Qualtrics is a robust survey and experience management platform that helps enterprise brands capture, synthesize, and understand data for every experience. It offers sophisticated survey logic and in-depth analytics for customers, employees, and other trends.
Medallia: Enterprise-grade customer experience management
Medallia is an experience management platform designed to help large enterprises capture, analyze, and act on customer and employee feedback. Beyond traditional CX survey tools, Medallia’s comprehensive solution includes customer, employee, and contact center management products that collect and analyze feedback across multiple channels, including voice, video, digital, IoT, social media, and corporate messaging tools.
One of Medallia's key differentiators is the breadth of its feedback collection capabilities. While Qualtrics primarily focuses on surveys, Medallia offers a wider range of feedback collection methods, allowing organizations to gather insights from various touchpoints throughout the customer and employee journey. This comprehensive approach provides a holistic view of the overall experience to help users make data-driven decisions that drive meaningful impact.
Medallia’s Customer Experience solution is rated in the top 10 of the Experience Management category by G2. Reviewers cite the platform’s sophisticated customer feedback collection and analysis capabilities, real-time insights, customization, and integrations as benefits while calling out its complexity, poor text analytics, and implementation challenges as negatives.
Medallia: Features overview
Comprehensive feedback collection
- Collect feedback from customers, call centers, and employees from one platform
- Medallia captures and analyzes feedback from email, website, apps, video, mobile messaging, connected devices, applications, calls, chat, review sites, and more
- Analyze text and voice (including calls) to uncover customer sentiment and deeper insights
Customer experience management
- Medallia can capture customer feedback across every interaction via surveys, contact center transcripts, and online behavior tracking
- Analyze insights from every digital interaction from one platform
- Medallia has a large library of pre-built integrations plus APIs and ETL to support cross-departmental coordination
Actionable workflow automation
- Create personalized reports, intuitive workflows, and alerts tailored to individual employees
- Tie together the customer experience from customer journey mapping to CSAT and NPS
- Medallia uses AI to identify trends, patterns, and key drivers of customer and employee satisfaction to pinpoint areas for improvement and prioritize actions
Broad experience management
- Bring employee engagement into the same platform as your customer experience data
- Incorporate contact center data and management with Medallia’s built-in product suite
- Medallia also extends to market research, including surveys, video panels, competitive intelligence, and research services
Medallia: The downsides
High cost
- Compared to competitors, Medallia can be expensive
- In reviews, many customers claim that even simple configuration tasks require paid managed services due to limited user controls, adding to the high cost
Difficult to set up and use
- Medallia's complexity can lead to a steep learning curve and ongoing support
- Implementation is a lengthy process that customers say doesn’t get everything right on the first go
Limited performance in key customer experience areas
- Reviewers find Medallia’s text analysis and AI analytics capabilities lacking
- Functionality for monitoring reputation outside of the feedback collected in Medallia’s platform (i.e. 3rd party reviews) is limited
- Limited capabilities to turn positive feedback into a public review to drive earned growth
Medallia pros & cons
Pros
- Robust, enterprise-grade platform with scalability and security suited for large organizations
- Integrate feedback from multiple channels into one platform
- AI-driven real-time analytics
- Workflow automation simplifies CX processes
- Advanced customization options for tailored analytics and reporting
Cons
- High upfront and ongoing cost, often requiring additional consultancy services
- Steep learning curve, requiring significant resources to implement fully
- Limited user autonomy when it comes to customization
- Insights primarily geared toward high-level decision-making rather than direct action for frontline teams
- Integration with existing systems can be intricate
Qualtrics: The all-in experience management platform
Qualtrics is a versatile experience management platform that helps gather and analyze deep data on every human experience — customer and employee — across every step of the buyer’s journey. This comprehensive solution helps businesses understand their customers, employees, and products to drive better decision-making and improve performance. The Qualtrics XM platform includes Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and Strategy & Research.
Qualtrics offers robust survey features with extensive customization options, allowing organizations to tailor surveys to their needs. Advanced analytics tools employ AI to help uncover valuable insights from data. They also offer a contact center product and solutions for location-based businesses.
Qualtrics’ Customer Experience solution is rated in the top five of G2’s Experience Management category. Users praise its flexible research capabilities, extensive integrations, and powerful analytics and reporting, but do find the platform difficult to learn to use.
Qualtrics: Features overview
Comprehensive experience management
- Qualtrics can gather experience data from customers, employees, and non-customers
- Explore the whole customer journey to identify pain points before, during, and after the sale
- Build engaged, high-performing teams by tracking employee experience in the Qualtrics platform
- Conduct research to monitor product and brand perception
Advanced survey customization
- Qualtrics’ highly customizable surveys seamlessly incorporate your brand
- Create personalized survey experiences with advanced skip, display, and branching logic
- Capture the feedback you need with Qualtrics’ wide range of question types
- Omnichannel surveying including websites, SMS surveys, in-app, and more
Real-time analytics
- Pinpoint correlations and significant findings with sophisticated statistical analytics tools
- Qualtrics’ customizable reports help analyze your CX data with visualizations, filters, and cross-tabulations
- Analyze textual and open-ended data for sentiment and key themes
- Forecast trends and make decisions with data using Qualtrics predictive analytics
Automation and integrations
- Qualtrics offers a wide range of integrations with top CRM, marketing automation, and business intelligence tools to streamline workflows
- Easily build workflows that handle high respondent counts and large volumes of data
- Use real-time alerting to flag critical issues based on feedback thresholds
Qualtrics: The downsides
Difficult to implement and use
- Some customers find Qualtrics to be hard to use, with training and support needed to manage the platform
- Qualtrics’ platform doesn’t automatically tell you how to improve and grow - users need to build workflows and process data manually
Limited customer engagement capabilities
- Qualtrics does not include functionality to respond to customer feedback collected from surveys
- Frontline empowerment and locations-based features are limited
Enterprise product, enterprise pricing
- Some businesses find Qualtrics’ enterprise-grade pricing expensive
- 1:1 feature comparisons with comparable CXM products often show Qualtrics to be more costly
Qualtrics: Pros & cons
Pros
- Comprehensive experience management across customer, employee, product, and brand experiences in a single platform
- Advanced survey customization
- Real-time, AI-driven analytics
- Extensive integration capabilities
- Large library of ready-to-use survey templates
Cons
- Difficult to use with a steep learning curve
- High pricing may be a barrier for small to mid-sized businesses
- Complex integration process, especially when implementing experience management across multiple departments
- Focus on high-level analytics may overlook immediate, actionable insights for frontline teams
- Customization can be time-intensive
- Primarily focused on survey feedback
AskNicely: Customer experience management without the hassle
When it comes to choosing a customer experience management platform, AskNicely stands out by making feedback actionable and improvements faster. While Qualtrics and Medallia are powerful enterprise-grade solutions, they are designed for research teams and focus heavily on data collection and analysis.
AskNicely, on the other hand, is purpose-built for operations, marketing, and CX teams, helping you capture customer feedback in real-time, highlight issues that need immediate attention, and empower your service delivery teams to deliver better customer experiences. Unlike the complexity and high set up costs of Qualtrics and Medallia, AskNicely provides a fast to implement, user-friendly experience that ensures feedback isn’t just stored — it’s acted upon. The result? Happier customers, faster growth, and a CX solution that empowers your service delivery teams.
AskNicely is a top-rated experience management platform on G2. Our users love our user-friendly interface, quick setup, excellent customer support, and actionable insights. Our flexible platform helps businesses boost customer satisfaction and drive growth.
Only AskNicely puts the spotlight on customer experience to help businesses of all sizes collect, analyze, and act on feedback with built-in tools for frontline teams.
Automated customer experience management
- Generate net promoter score (NPS), CSAT, or other customer feedback automatically to close gaps in your understanding of customer needs
- Build your CX mission control with all your data in one place, customized for every member of your team
- Use AI to go beyond sentiment analysis and identify themes and trends from survey and textual feedback
- Customize dashboards and segment data by location, service standard, theme, customer profile, and more
Close the loop faster
- AskNicely proactively identifies critical feedback and assigns it to the right team for response with automated workflows
- Real-time feedback monitoring, internal collaboration, and response templates help address every situation
- Track SLA compliance directly in AskNicely
- Make feedback instantly accessible via AskNicelyTV, Slack and Teams
Drive earned growth without enterprise pricing
- Unlimited user accounts keep your whole team — from executives to frontline staff — aware of CX imperatives
- Built-in feedback management helps identify your strongest champions and automatically turn their praise into public reviews
- Our focus on customer experience drives earned growth at a lower cost than broader experience management platforms like Qualtrics and Medallia
Improve customer experience across locations
- Analyze customer feedback by location and receive automatic recommendations for improvement
- Identify inconsistent service delivery across locations in real-time
- Segment data by location, team, individual, or customer demographics and compare via crosstabs to uncover statistically significant trends
- Location managers and their teams get sent CX digests on areas to improve and what’s going well
To learn more about why AskNicely is the best customer experience management platform, book a demo today.
