The (mostly) new Medallia executive team showed up to its inaugural Experience World Tour 2025 in London with a bullish vision for an AI-fueled, predictive CX management platform that puts the insights that frontline employees need directly into their hands.
The question is less so about whether Medallia can build out its vision (it probably can) and more about whether clients are ready for it (they probably aren’t).
Some strong use cases from large, complex, and reassuringly European organizations such as Decathlon, DHL, Jaguar Land Rover, Three, and Volkswagen Group highlighted what determined CX teams can achieve by building beyond feedback and insights to put a platform like Medallia at the heart of their CX efforts. But the feel I got from most conversations I had with users is that the level of executive support, proactivity, investment, and certainty of business case needed to hit those mainstage highs is still aspirational for most CX teams.
In terms of Medallia’s vision, three messages stood out:
A drive to action. Medallia’s rallying cry of “data to insight to action” resonates with our own predictions and continued advice. CX teams must move beyond being passive insights providers to help solve problems that result in driving revenue, saving money, or reducing risk. And they need to be able to measure the results in terms that the C-suite can understand.
A clearly articulated AI strategy. Medallia CPO Fabrice Martin showcased a range of existing and future roadmap AI tools that all aim to drive simplicity and put actionable insights into the hands of business owners like contact center agents, store and regional managers, and product development teams. It all fits together and aims to solve problems, rather than just be AI for AI’s sake.
A bias toward predictive CX. The mantra of “stop looking backwards at lagging metrics and start building predictive models to head off issues” came across in Medallia’s roadmap and case studies such as those from Generali’s business in Australia. But thoughtfully, none of this was positioned as “easy.” The need for robust data governance, carefully built algorithms, and strong governance was apparent. No one positioned AI as magic, more as an accelerator.
Emotion Is The Golden Thread
But happily for me, having spent three days last week at Forrester’s own CX Summit EMEA championing the importance of emotion as the key driver of CX quality, the same story came out here. Julia Murphy, head of CX at Three, talked about evoking emotion in storytelling around key customer moments to build executive support. Gabriela Vargas from Decathlon shared how certain approaches — such as offering video chat appointments to explain complex products like exercise bikes or a thoughtful rewards program that offers perks like coaching sessions or nutrition advice to customers who they can identify as marathon runners — cement emotional engagement in digital experiences.
If anything was missing, it was a reminder of the importance of journeys. Customers’ experiences come to life through journeys. Journeys help us understand, and focus on, customer goals. They illuminate the “why” of why customers come to us. The focus of the day was firmly on fixing problems, removing detractors, and even anticipating who might become a detractor — fixing broken moments. Journeys help us see moments in context, and more specifically, future-state journeys propel us beyond just fixing problems and into a divergent space of innovation — designing new things, the world of “what if.”
So yes, proactively fix the issues, but CX teams: I beg you, don’t forget to dream.
