Medallia, Qualtrics and the future of feedback software
Customer experience (CX) industry leaders and practitioners are suggesting the recent financial challenges facing tech firms such as Medallia and Qualtrics may be a reflection the sector’s overall vulnerabilities and shortcomings.
Last week an article on Thomson Reuters cited unnamed sources who said private equity firm Thoma Bravo is nearing an agreement to turn Medallia over to its lenders, erasing $5.1 billion in equity. Meanwhile, Bloomberg said a group of banks led by JP Morgan Chase had paused a debt deal for Qualtrics amid reported concerns over the disruptive impact of AI.
At press time, all the facts in both stories had yet to be confirmed by the parties involved. However the perceived upheaval has provoked a rare level of speculation and attempts to analyze the market among CX professionals.
What should CX buyers do?
Colleen Fazio, a senior analyst with market research firm Forrester, cautioned CX leaders from snapping to quick judgments or being too hasty in changing their technology investment plans.
“My advice would be, ‘Don’t panic,’” Fazio told 360 Magazine in a phone interview. “Any decisions you make should really come down to what are you trying to accomplish, really looking at the goals of your program and finding vendors that meet them, and not just defaulting to the top names.”
Richard Owen, co-founder of OCX Cognition and the co-creator of Net Promoter Score, pointed out in a LinkedIn post that the business model for some of the funding partners in the CX tech space are based on taking costs out of low-margin software rather than making it better. Meanwhile, brands are looking for improved solutions to tackle their current challenges.
“While the industry was busy integrating, it was not busy innovating,” Owen wrote on LinkedIn. “The underlying technology of the category — survey design, distribution, response collection, dashboarding, NPS scoring — looks remarkably similar today to how it looked in 2003. The interfaces are prettier. The cloud bill is bigger. The methodology is the same. Disruption tends to find industries in this state.”
The CEO of analytics firm Uncrowd, Richard Hammond, added that economic pressures such as inflation and escalating fuel costs are forcing customer-facing organizations to think carefully about where they spend their cash.
“The question Medallia and Qualtrics and NPS had been tasked with answering still exists, and answering that question remains a financial imperative. What’s changed is the market’s confidence that feedback and NPS are capable of providing the answer,” Hammond wrote. “They aren’t. They never were.”
A referendum on survey software?
Nick Mehta, a board member with customer success software vendor Gainsight, seemed to agree in a post begging CX leaders to stop relying on survey-based feedback as strategic pillar.
“Not only are these surveys insufferable – they are also inaccurate,” he wrote. “They fall prey to the dichotomy between ‘stated preferences’ (what you answer in a survey) and ‘revealed preferences’ (what you actually do). We’re in an uncanny valley right now, where AI tries to help us but we still need to manually share our feedback.”
Fazio acknowledged the technology’s shortcomings but argued the issue goes beyond tools.
“There are a lot of organizations that have used survey scores to rank or raise employees, or just to provide vanity metrics that they haven’t been able to connect to outcomes,” she said. “That’s not a vendor problem, that’s a strategy issue.”
Henrik Liderfelt, a CX consultant and podcast host, said the fate of Medallia and Qualtrics reveal how ownership stability shapes product direction, investment capacity, and ultimately customer experience delivery.
“When companies enter restructuring phases, priorities inevitably change. Cost discipline increases, investment decisions become more cautious, and long-term product bets are often revisited,” he wrote. “None of this is unique, but in a category like CX, where continuity, trust, and data integrity are central, the implications can be more far-reaching than expected.”
In the near term, Fazio said it’s too early to say whether CX leaders will abandon surveys in favor of another feedback technique, and that most of the tech vendors in question offer much more than surveys.
“When organizations use these platforms, they’re also buying advanced analytics to take all that feedback and make sense of it,” she said, adding that there’s still room for a lot more capabilities to be introduced. “We still haven’t cracked the nut on how to effectively measure customer sentiment and emotions without surveys.”
