Medallia

Medallia runs staff surveys inside a platform built for customer feedback. It can link the two. You pay by survey record, through a sales call. Generative AI is a separate signed tier. Before you sign, get record retention and the uptime figure written into your agreement.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 28 Oct 2026 Last updated 28 Oct 2026

Medallia counts survey records and sells generative AI apart

In one line

Medallia Employee Experience runs surveys and reads comments with AI. It sits inside a platform that also collects customer feedback.

Buy it if

You want staff and customer feedback in one platform. You want to set how private answers are. You can plan a contract around a count of survey records.

Do not buy it if

You need a price list before you talk to sales. You want generative AI in the base price. You need records kept past three years without a clause in your agreement.

Price

Medallia asks you to contact sales. UK public sector buyers can see annual G-Cloud 15 prices from £21,262 for 20,000 survey records, excluding VAT.

It runs surveys, reads comments and routes alerts inside a customer platform

Medallia gives you one platform for staff and customer feedback. You decide how private staff answers are. Customer Experience, Contact Center and Market Research solutions sit next to Employee Experience. That is why Permanent TSB could compare employee scores with customer scores.

Your team designs the surveys and chooses how they reach staff. Medallia lets you customise the design, questions, translations and targeting logic. It sends surveys by email, on mobile, by automated phone call and by messaging such as SMS and WhatsApp. It runs engagement and pulse surveys. It also runs surveys for candidates, onboarding, exits and diversity and inclusion. Surveys can start from your operational systems.

Who can see an answer, and whether it traces to a person, is your decision. Confidentiality ranges from full anonymity to administrator access to demographic data. Surveys sent with unique links let answers trace back to individual employees. An open link with no identifier is also available. Anonymous respondents have no stored personal information. Report tables and dials hide results below a minimum sample size that is set for your account.

AI reads the comments so your team does not have to read each one. Text Analytics uses non-generative AI to group comments into topics and themes. Themes with GenAI and Intelligent Summaries add generative summaries of comments. Medallia’s text and speech analytics detect emotion, effort, sentiment and intent. Result quality can vary by source and language. Insights Assistant is a chat tool that answers open questions about your data. It respects hierarchies and access permissions.

Results then move to the people who act on them. Alerts reach users by organisation hierarchy or by fields in the invitation file. Users can start action plans from any report and track their impact. Medallia works with HR systems in both directions. Its partners include Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Adobe. Data leaves through an API, which is a standard data connection, or through packaged integrations. Staff can sign in through your company identity system. Two-factor sign-in is available.

Our guide to employee engagement software covers how the rest of this market handles these choices.

Where Medallia gives you real control

Team leaders see their own results

Confidential feedback reaches each team as soon as a survey closes. Team leaders get direct access to their team’s results. Only leaders and administrators get the higher-level analytics and filtering. Users sit in reporting roles. Each role has its own reports and access permissions.

Staff can answer by text, email or phone

Medallia supports email, mobile, automated phone, SMS and WhatsApp. One customer reports a much higher response rate from text messages than from email and phone calls. Text surveys run on outside messaging services such as SMS. Message transport fees are not included in the price.

Sensitive data has several controls

Settings include role-based access, data masking and field-level encryption with your own keys. Access can also be limited by IP address. Medallia’s security credentials include SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HITRUST. Experience Cloud runs as a private cloud with a single-customer design on Medallia-owned hardware. Storage and processing sites include the UK and the European Economic Area. Customers can control the location.

Expert help is offered

Medallia and its partners offer design services, implementation services and training. Its people science and employee experience experts help set up, grow and tune programmes. Subscriptions include the Standard Success plan. You can ask for implementation and support services.

A bank, a coffee chain, a tax firm and a patent office

A bank linked staff scores to customer scores

Permanent TSB has 3,000 employees and over 1.2 million customers. It used Medallia for customer and employee experience. It reports employee Net Promoter Score up 19 points between 2020 and 2022. That score asks whether staff would recommend the employer. Culture rose eight points, engagement seven and trust 10. It made more than 1,000 changes on employee feedback. Its linkage analysis showed a 30-point gap in customer Net Promoter Score. The gap was between branches with lower and higher employee engagement.

A tax firm, a coffee chain and a city

H&R Block activates every employee with Medallia. It has 70,000 tax pros. Caribou Coffee chose Medallia Experience Cloud in 2019 for its employee experience. It operated over 300 company-owned stores then. The City of San Diego chose Medallia in 2020 for a pilot on the needs of its employees and residents.

A US patent office bought it

The US Patent and Trademark Office signed a September 2024 award. The award was for employee experience survey platform software. It obligated $624,425 and ran to 29 September 2026. The Department of Commerce awarded the definitive contract to Medallia, Inc.

Terms to settle before you sign, from AI to ownership

Some of Medallia’s terms and changes matter only after you sign. The cards below cover the AI terms, how long records last and what the software reads. Ownership matters too. Thoma Bravo completed its purchase of Medallia in October 2021. On 3 August 2026 Medallia completed a recapitalisation. It secured $150 million of new capital and cut its outstanding debt. Ownership moved to an investor group led by funds managed by Blackstone, with Apollo and FS KKR Capital Corp. Get your terms and support arrangements confirmed in writing by the new owner.

Generative AI costs extra

Medallia sells it as a separate Gen AI subscription tier with a signed addendum. Its pricing includes AI-powered analytics that support alerts and follow-up at no extra cost. Themes with GenAI and Intelligent Summaries are generative features. Ask which of them your tier includes.

The newest AI tools are not everywhere yet

Medallia’s product description limits generative AI to English-language records. A July 2026 announcement adds German and French to English and Spanish. Some generative features may be missing from some data centres. In July 2026, Insights Assistant was limited to test environments and a few early accounts. Full availability is due in a future release.

Medallia’s AI adapts using customer data

Its AI models adapt from new feedback, customer data and usage patterns. Medallia’s product description licenses it to use customer data to provide and improve its products. The condition is that improvements are not derived from the use of personal data. It may also publish aggregated or de-identified insights such as benchmarks. Its privacy policy says AI features run on customer data only as customer agreements permit. Customers control how those features are used in their own environments.

Old records may go

Medallia’s product description makes records over three years old subject to deletion. That holds unless your agreement or order form provides otherwise. Its Data Protection page puts it differently. The reporting system keeps customer data until clients delete it or end the relationship. The retention screen sets how many months completed records are kept, with a baseline of 36 months. The feature is inactive until you ask Medallia Support to switch it on. Video feedback is stored no longer than two years. Speech audio is stored for 30 days. Ask which rule applies to your records.

Masked comments stay readable to the analytics

Users without the View Sensitive Data permission see masked values. The original comment stays in the database. That lets Text Analytics and Action Intelligence process it. Action Intelligence finds suggestions and ideas in individual feedback. Your team writes the masking rules. Each rule covers a dictionary of words or a pattern of words. Masking protects what people see, so check what the analytics still read.

Signals go beyond survey answers

Medallia counts Slack and email usage as an indirect signal of how staff feel. It counts help-desk tickets, performance reviews and paid time off patterns the same way. Medallia links staff responses to help-desk tickets, performance reviews and recognition. That reaches past what staff chose to tell you. Medallia and Visier announced a collaboration in 2020. It will let organisations predict employee behaviour and act to avoid turnover. Ask which signals your order switches on and who sees the results.

The bill follows survey records, and exports have a time window

The bill follows how many survey responses you collect, not how many people you employ. Medallia prices by Experience Data Record, or EDR. An EDR is a survey response with all its linked transactional, operational and follow-up data. A new EDR created in a rolling 12 month period counts as one. The tiers are annual and cover customer and employee data.

Medallia tells buyers to contact sales for pricing. UK public sector prices sit on the government’s G-Cloud 15 framework. They run from £21,262 a year for 20,000 EDR to £107,064 for 252,000 EDR. Above 252,000 EDR you ask for a quotation. The prices are in pounds and exclude VAT. They are open only to public sector organisations entitled to buy under G-Cloud 15. Discounts run from 7% under £250,000 a year to 20% over £5,000,001, excluding VAT. A free trial is not available under that listing.

Each reporting application includes unlimited user access. The EDR price covers employee data coming in, the analytics on it, the steps that follow, security and self-service. Some things cost extra. Add-On Features, such as Partner Packaged Integrations, are bought separately in an order form. Other success plans appear in the order form if you buy them. Implementation and support services are available on request. A one-time import of historical records is allowed up to twice the annual tier for each new environment. It may need extra implementation services.

Medallia commits to at least 99.9% monthly availability of web-based survey-taking. The monthly calculation excludes up to 36 hours a year of planned maintenance and upgrades. If Medallia misses 99.9%, you can claim its “Service Credits” of 3% to 12%. You must ask within 30 days of the shortfall. Its G-Cloud 15 listing gives 24x7x365 availability with a minimum of 99.9% a month. The same listing adds a guarantee of 99.99% uptime monthly in its terms of service. Ask which figure goes into your agreement.

Clients own their data and can export it during the contract and for a limited time after it ends. After termination Medallia makes the data available as a flat file, which is a plain table of rows. That window lasts at least thirty days. Medallia then removes the data within 60 days after that period. Data export and import use CSV. Standard reports export as PDF, XLS, SPSS or CSV files. Medallia automates GDPR and CCPA deletion of employee data on request.

You could also run survey steps with agents built on your own systems. We have mapped what that looks like. The HR Agent Map

Eight questions before you sign

How many survey records will our tier cover, and what counts as data linked to a record? Good answer: A record count per tier, and a written list of what counts.
Will you sign the generative AI addendum before we pay, and which languages does it cover? Good answer: A draft addendum now, and the languages written into the order form.
Which of our staff data do your AI models adapt from, and how do we switch that off? Good answer: A clause naming the data, and a named admin who controls it.
How long will you keep our survey records, and who switches the retention setting on? Good answer: A number of months in the agreement, and a date the setting is on.
What minimum sample size will we set, and who can change it? Good answer: One named admin owns it and every change is logged.
Which signals from other systems would our order switch on, and who sees them? Good answer: A list switched on one signal at a time, each with a named owner.
Has the August 2026 change of ownership altered our terms, support team or product plans? Good answer: A written statement that our terms and support stay as signed.
How do we take our data out, and for how many days after the contract ends? Good answer: A stated file format and a window in days, written into the agreement.

Alternatives to Medallia, including buying nothing

Dayforce, Betterworks and HiBob each work differently from Medallia at one point where it stops. Buying nothing is a fourth route.

Medallia counts survey records, so the tier follows how many responses you collect. It includes unlimited user access. Dayforce counts employees instead. Dayforce Engagement is priced at $33.96 per employee per year. A per-employee price moves with headcount. A per-record price moves with how often you survey and how many people answer.

Medallia sells generative AI as its own tier with a signed addendum. Betterworks includes AI in its solution and pricing, and embeds it throughout the product. Betterworks Engage is employee engagement software. Ask each vendor which AI features sit in the base price.

Medallia’s AI models adapt from new feedback, customer data and usage patterns. Its licence covers improvements only if they are not derived from the use of personal data. Its privacy policy limits AI features on customer data to what customer agreements allow. Neither HiBob nor its AI providers train on customer data. Under its AI Terms, customer data processed by HiBob AI Features is not used to train AI models. The terms also let the customer opt in or out of the AI features. HiBob’s pulse surveys and eNPS tools sit inside its HR platform.

Buying nothing means giving up the link between staff answers and customer scores. Permanent TSB’s analysis found a 30-point gap in customer scores. The gap was between branches with lower and higher employee engagement. It also means avoiding a contract counted in survey records. You would skip a separate AI addendum. You would also skip a clause that lets Medallia delete records over three years old. If your HR system already has a survey, our guide for HR system owners covers that route.

More in this guide

The Employee engagement guide
Compare the 40 researched products how each asks staff, who sees the answers, what it costs and the contract terms.
Mid-market companies which engagement products suit 200 to 2,000 people, what they cost and what to ask.
Enterprise companies which engagement products suit 2,000 people or more, what they cost, how contracts run and what to ask.
Companies whose HR or performance system already runs surveys what the survey part of an HR or performance system covers, what it costs and what else exists.