Medallia vs Salesforce: Which Is the Right CX Solution for You?

On the hunt for a customer experience (CX) solution that helps you meet your customers’ needs, grow your customer base, and boost your bottom line?

If you’ve narrowed down your choice to Medallia, Salesforce, and CustomerGauge but don’t know which one to pick, we’re here to help.

Let’s look closer at these three CX management tools and find important differences that will help you whittle down your options, ultimately leaving you with the one that suits your business best.

Introducing Medallia, Salesforce, and CustomerGauge

Medallia

As one of the biggest brands in the market, Medallia is undoubtedly a heavyweight. It’s known for being both robust and flexible and boasts the highest number of functions when compared to its competitors.

Medallia’s ability to navigate and serve complex multi-divisional and multi-enterprise structures have led to its popularity among large enterprises. It mostly serves businesses working in the Financial Services, Technology, Telecommunications, and Retail Sectors.

Salesforce

As the name might suggest, Salesforce is both a sales analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Many users attribute an increase in sales to working with this platform.

Salesforce is known for how comprehensive it is and its versatility and extensive customization options (customers in smaller market segments can find this aspect of it overwhelming and confusing, however). Its tracking and dashboard functionality is highly regarded.

Salesforce primarily serves Mid-Market customers, though it does have a portion of Small Business and Enterprise customers, too. It typically works with companies operating in the Computer Software, Information Technology and Services, and Marketing/Advertising sectors.

CustomerGauge

It’s CustomerGauge’s impressive B2B features that really set it apart. So much so that it has been ranked by Gartner as the #1 voice of customer (VoC) platform for B2B.

CustomerGauge offers a complete end-to-end solution, helping companies to manage every part of their customer experience management (CXM) program, from surveying to closing the loop on customer feedback, and (most importantly of all) linking their CX data to revenue.

In connecting customer insights with revenue, and so helping businesses make meaningful decisions that affect their bottom line, CustomerGauge is one of a kind.

No other CX solution does this and it’s what makes the platform so valuable.

CustomerGauge focuses on Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, but complements these with other customer satisfaction and engagement metrics to provide a complete picture of customer activity and sentiment.

Medallia vs Salesforce vs CustomerGauge: What Gartner Says

In Gartner’s Critical Capabilities Report, the major tech research and consulting firm provide a detailed account of how vendors perform against real-world use cases.

The report details product capabilities like advanced case management, customer journey orchestration, and advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics from the world’s top B2B vendors and ranks them by use case.

In the report, Gartner ranks CustomerGauge with a score of 3.42, the highest performing product for a tool with a B2B use case, and Medallia second with a score of 3.38.

While Salesforce isn’t ranked in the top 15 for enterprise B2B, it is a leader in sales automation and CRM customer engagement according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant research reports.

Medallia vs Salesforce vs CustomerGauge: G2’s Verdict

G2, one of the most widely used online customer survey aggregators, provides a useful comparison tool between different providers.

Here’s how Medallia, Salesforce, and CustomerGauge stack up against each other:

What Users Have to Say

Looking for real-life feedback on these platforms? Let’s see what users say in their reviews on G2.

Medallia Customers Say…

Strengths

The majority of Medallia’s reviews are positive, with many praising how simple the platform is to navigate. Reviewers have also commented how well it integrates with Salesforce.

• “Medallia is the perfect tool for managing and ensuring a great customer experience. All customer feedback is in one easy-to-use platform and also integrated with SalesForce and our back-end system. The automation of the system and its closed loop process is key to our success and improving our customer retention. Having Medallia allows us to find the key drivers of customer loyalty and take action to improve.” (Administrator in computer software, mid market)

• “Great program to keep your customers happy. Very easy to navigate & helpful in answering guest/customer complaints. I love the word bubbles. I also love the pre written apologies that I can make my own.” (WAH remote customer service agent, small business.)

• “We felt that Medallia were more focused on $ after we signed the agreement with them than keeping their promises!” (Customer experience director, enterprise)

• “Not a reliable overall picture of your business reviews. The only people who took the time to complete the surveys had a bad experience, which skewed the overall score.” (Club manager, small business)

Salesforce Customers Say…

Strengths

Salesforce has more mixed reviews than either Medallia or CustomerGauge on G2, though it also has more reviews overall.

While most are positive, there are several hundred one and two-star reviews. Fans love how easy it is to use and how well it integrates with other platforms.

• “Terrific solution for pipeline management. Salesforce Sales Cloud has been essential for our Sales and Marketing team to track, manage and analyze our sales pipeline. The adoption has been significantly higher than other tools used in [the] past. Competition is nowhere near to the ease of using this solution for our CRM goals.” (Manager, enterprise)

• “You need this to stay relevant. Only way to track the myriad of people your sales/CS team are interacting with daily. Once reports are built to your satisfaction, gaining insights is incredibly easy and efficient. I do love that it integrates with so many tools that we're using already so that we can rely on SFDC as a single source of truth.” (Senior commercial account executive, mid-market)

• “Probably powerful but lacking in usability. Usability is just bad. What seems simple is not. The very large complexity of the whole environment is astonishing. Initial setup is relatively easy but, as there are so many possibilities, it is hard to know if you are starting things right.” (Administrator in furniture, small business)

• “Poor service; unhelpful account managers. Our Salesforce-certified partner failed to implement the solution. The Salesforce account management team was not helpful at all. Salesforce wasted 6 months of our time without being able to deliver any value. The Salesforce team suggested that we sign a second contract that overlaps the first contract to access the same product. I have not seen or heard of a less customer-centric and less professional service.” (Executive sponsor in computer software, mid-market)

CustomerGauge Customers Say…

Strengths

CustomerGauge users highlight its impressive NPS capabilities and the customer service support they receive.

• “Great support from CustomerGauge. Implementing CustomerGauge has allowed us to develop a sophisticated customer feedback program that is easy to manage and report on. The best part of our experience with CustomerGauge has been the ongoing support and collaboration they have provided for helping us to continually improve our program. Easy integration with our CRM and a variety of reporting tools within the platform have also allowed us to customize our process and get important data to the right people within our organization.” (Administrator in industrial automation, enterprise)

• “We found working with CustomerGauge was like a partnership, rather than onboarding another supplier. Using CustomerGauge, we quickly rolled out their Net Promoter program to start collecting customer feedback at many transactional touch points across the customer journey, as well as with periodic relationship and product surveys.
  
  We optimized our CX program by adding multi-language NPS surveys, which allowed us to tap into a wider audience and increase the amount of valuable customer feedback.” (Customer success specialist, mid-market)

CustomerGauge has never received a one or two-star review on G2.

The Pros and Cons of All 3 CX Solutions

In any decision, good old-fashioned pros and cons list are essential. We’ve drawn one up for you on Medallia, Salesforce, and CustomerGauge.

Medallia

Pros

• Robust and flexible. Medallia’s primary strengths shine through when it comes to how it handles complex company hierarchies. Even in large organizations where things change frequently, Medallia’s strength and opportunity analysis is intuitive and easy to understand.

• Impressive features. Gartner scores Medallia highly in terms of its analytics and insight, automated action, and data collection capabilities.

• Enterprise focus. Medallia is specifically tailored for large businesses.

• Expensive. Medallia is among the more expensive CX solutions out there.

• Stronger for B2C. Medallia scored highest in Gartner’s ranking for B2C enterprises, making it a worthy contender if this is your business model.

Salesforce

Pros

• Flexible, customizable, and scalable. Salesforce is an incredibly flexible tool and can be customized to meet the workflows of almost any organization. It also scales easily, and can grow as your business grows.

• Integrates well. Salesforce is widely regarded for integrating well with other tools that businesses might already be using.

• Good support. Users enjoy the support that Salesforce offers, as well as its educational platform.

• Expensive. Some users find Salesforce a bit too expensive.

• Not tailored to small businesses. Small businesses find the platform cumbersome and overly complicated.

CustomerGauge

Pros

• Customer revenue analysis. CustomerGauge helps you to understand how your customers feel about your business, demonstrates how often they engage with you, and shows how much value they bring to your business. This link, between CX and revenue, is unique to CustomerGauge and is designed to reduce customer churn, encourage upsells and cross-sells, and promote new business.

• Live automated surveying. CustomerGauge offers a comprehensive solution that involves automatically capturing and distributing customer feedback in real time.

• Closing the loop alerts. CustomerGauge helps you act on the feedback you receive by helping you to set targets and alerts for closing the loop.

• B2B focus. CustomerGauge is specifically designed for B2B brands, rather than for those operating in the B2C space.

If you’d like to find out more about CustomerGauge’s novel approach to B2B CX management, we’d love to hear from you.

Request a demo today!