Caplena with Medallia: Get the Most Out of Your Open-Ended Feedback

Already using Medallia for customer experience management? You've made an excellent choice for survey distribution, closed-loop feedback workflows, and enterprise-wide experience orchestration.  

Where many teams still struggle is with the open text itself.
The scores are clear, the workflows are in place, but the comments are not being mined as deeply as they could be. Actionability is limited and key insights are often missed.  

That is where Caplena comes in. Not as a replacement for Medallia, but as a specialist AI feedback intelligence layer that sits alongside it and goes much deeper into text analytics.

Let’s see how:  

Understanding Medallia’s strengths

Medallia excels at what it was built for: experience management at enterprise scale. 

• Enterprise-scale feedback collection 

• Complex survey design and distribution across channels such as web, mobile, SMS, WhatsApp 

• Closed-loop workflows with routing to the right teams and case management 

• Integrated experience orchestration with Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow and other systems 

• Broad signal capture from surveys, social media, contact center transcripts, digital behaviour, reviews and many other touchpoints 

Caplena does not replace this. It focuses on the part of the picture that tends to be hardest to handle inside a big platform: the detailed analysis of open-ended text. 

The analysis gap in Medallia

Medallia’s text analytics helps you move from raw comments to themes and sentiment. For high level dashboards this is often enough. 

The pain points usually appear when: 

• a single topic collection is reused across many surveys and programmes, which makes it hard to add the extra nuance research teams need 

• you want to add new themes and keep your topic structure consistent over time 

• you need to assess the quality of your analysis, and keep an audit trail of how topics evolved

• you need more advanced cross-tabulation and significance testing than standard dashboards provide 

• you want to compare several programmes, waves or even external sources in a consistent way 

• you want one unified workflow to analyse Medallia data alongside local ad hoc projects or surveys run outside of Medallia.  

• you want a 360 degree view on feedback that also includes online reviews and other research programmes

At that point, teams normally start exporting data into spreadsheets or BI tools and building their own workarounds. Caplena is a place where that kind of work belongs natively, without bloating your workflow or tech stack.  

How Caplena complements your Medallia setup 

Caplena is a specialised feedback intelligence platform that integrates Medallia’s open comments and other data sources (ad hoc projects, reviews) and gives your insights team the flexibility, control and depth they are missing. 

Our platform is designed to combine analytical power and ease of use. With Caplena, you can perform ad hoc analysis from individual surveys in under an hour.

Create a Codebook in minutes 

In Medallia you often work within a single, centrally managed topic collection. In Caplena, the codebook is yours.  

You can easily set up MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) topic structures per programme, market, or client, while still keeping coverage high, with typically less than 1-2% of comments left untagged. 

In practice, this means you can still report at a simple level for all stakeholders, while maintaining a richer structure for specific teams, markets or products.  

AI quality scoring 

Caplena is built for teams who need to trust and defend their results. 

You can: 

• review and fine-tune AI coding in a structured workflow 

• see confidence scores and quality indicators at topic level 

• retrain models based on your corrections and keep a clear history of those changes 

For regulated industries, market research projects or internal work that must stand up to scrutiny, this moves you from “we hope the AI is right” to “we know how well the AI performs and where humans stepped in”. 

Insight Agent  

Insight Agent sits on top of your Caplena projects and gives you a conversational way to explore the data.  

Because it works against your coded dataset, not a generic model, it can answer precise questions such as: 

• what is behind low NPS for enterprise clients in one country 

• how sentiment around a specific topic has shifted since a product change 

• how a particular theme looks across different segments 

What’s unique about Insight Agent is the quality of the analysis. It understands numbers, and stays consistent even when you re-ask it the same question (unlike LLMs like ChatGPT), going beyond convincing-looking text. Answers include a quantitative and qualitative analysis that are grounded in your data and codebook, surfacing statistically significant findings. 

That makes it a useful companion in steering committees, workshops to answer any question from a department or team on the spot.  

And because Insight Agent is very easy to use, it can be shared with unlimited users across your company for self-served insights, and can be accessed from stakeholders’ everyday tools like Slack or Copilot. 

"

Caplena's Insight Agent provides you with valid data to a depth people are surprised by – visuals in Insight Agent are a real game changer for us.” 

Niklas Melchior

Customer Insights Expert

Comparative analysis across programmes and sources 

Medallia is ideal for understanding what happens inside a single ecosystem. 
Caplena is designed to look across. 

You can bring together: 

• exports from multiple Medallia programmes and waves 

• survey data from other platforms 

• external sources such as online reviews from Google Maps, Trustpilot and more (including competitor reviews for benchmarking).

You can then look at differences between regions, brands, product lines or time periods in one place, with consistent topics and sentiment definitions.  

With real-time alerts in Caplena, stay in the loop when topics or sentiments change significantly across these combined sources. 

Deeper segmentation and statistics 

In Caplena, topics, sentiment and any nuances can be broken down by any variable you have: segment, market, channel, date, and more. 

You can: 

• run detailed cross-tabs 

• examine drivers of key metrics such as NPS or CSAT 

• test whether differences between groups are statistically significant 

Medallia gives you the big picture, Caplena helps you get an understanding at a granular level and make informed decisions tailored to specific areas and audiences.  

DIY flexibility 

Caplena lets you do a lot yourself, without the help of a data scientist nor waiting on a support ticket.   
For each project, you can:  

• Bring your own data, whether from Medallia or other sources  

• Create Smart Columns to map, cleanse or enrich your data set with the help of LLMs. Append Genders, remove slurs, assign emotions. The limit is your imagination.  

• Ask the AI to detect topics, use your own classification, or do a mix of both. Then add, remove merge topics yourself, or ask a LLM for topic suggestions.  

• Create custom dashboards, add filters or segments, and share tailored views with unlimited users while controlling access levels.  

Such flexibility makes Caplena a perfect fit for savvy teams looking for more freedom to run analyses independently and move fast.

Award-winning Customer Success  

While Caplena is designed for teams looking to do a lot by themselves, our Customer Success team remains a chat message away.

Caplena’s Customer Success team comes from insight and research roles. They help you: 

• design codebooks for your first Medallia dataset 

• set up validation and QA that match your internal standards 

• get started with Smart Columns to make the most of your datasets

• build Insight Agent use cases that are genuinely useful to your stakeholders 

Feature comparison at a glance 

How Caplena fits into a Medallia-centred stack 

If you step back, the division of work is simple. 

Medallia remains your system of record and orchestration. It is where surveys live, where feedback is collected and where closed loop processes and journey metrics are tracked at scale. 

Caplena becomes your text analytics and feedback intelligence studio. It is where: 

• open ended responses are coded with several tags 

• quality of AI outputs is measured and controlled 

• different programmes and sources are compared in one framework 

• detailed segment level analysis is carried out 

• Insight Agent is used to explore questions that standard dashboards do not answer 

The two tools do not fight for the same space. They cover different parts of the lifecycle of feedback. 

Getting started with Medallia & Caplena  

If you are a Medallia customer and want to strengthen your text analysis: 

1. Identify your gaps 
   Where do you need more detailed, multi-dimensional analysis than your current Medallia text analytics provides? 

2. Start with a pilot 
   Export one dataset from Medallia and organise a proof of concept with our friendly team. Compare the process, the ease of use, and the additional insights you can surface. To help you define comparison criteria, you can start from our Evaluation Matrix  and tailor it to your needs.

3. Keep Medallia as the system of record 
   Let Caplena handle specialised analytical work while Medallia continues to run feedback collection and workflows. 

The bottom line 

Medallia is an excellent choice for enterprise experience management. But when you need to go beyond topic discovery and real-time insights to conduct detailed, multi-layered text analysis with quality controls and comparative capabilities, Caplena provides the specialized analytical depth you need. 

You don't have to choose between platforms but rather use both for what they do best. Keep Medallia for comprehensive experience orchestration and workflow management. Add Caplena when you need advanced feedback intelligence that goes deeper. 

Questions about how Caplena can complement your Medallia stack? 
Book a call with us for a quick walkthrough.  

Note: Medallia is a registered trademark of Medallia, Inc. This comparison is based on publicly available information from Medallia's official website, blog, and product documentation as of November 2025.