TNS and Medallia partner to help companies revolutionise their customer experience

Transformative approach helps businesses achieve true customer–centricity

TORONTO, Aug. 21, 2014 /CNW/ - 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.

Notes to Editors

About TNS

TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and customer and employee relationships, based on long-established expertise and market-leading solutions. With a presence in over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world's consumers than anyone else and understands individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of the world.

TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world's largest insight, information and consultancy groups. Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.

About Kantar

Kantar is the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world's largest insight, information and consultancy groups. By connecting the diverse talents of its 12 specialist companies, the group aims to become the pre-eminent provider of compelling and inspirational insights for the global business community. Its 27,000 employees work across 100 countries and across the whole spectrum of research and consultancy disciplines, enabling the group to offer clients business insights at every point of the consumer cycle. The group's services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500 companies. For further information, please visit us at www.kantar.com

SOURCE: TNS

Paul Pacheco, Senior Vice President, Client Service, Customer Experience, 416.924.5751, [email protected]