Customer expectations are rising, and support teams can no longer rely on surveys alone to understand how customers feel. Traditional platforms like Medallia helped establish customer experience (CX) programs at scale, but many teams now need something faster, more flexible, and more focused on real-time insights to tackle churn. 

In 2025, the best Voice of Customer (VoC) tools go beyond dashboards; they use AI to interpret unstructured feedback from tickets, chats, and reviews, then translate it into actions that drive retention.

This guide looks at the best Medallia alternatives built for support and CX teams. We’ll compare how they approach customer retention analytics, their ability to surface actionable trends, and the role of AI in automating feedback analysis. 

Also, we’ll highlight why SentiSum stands out as one of the strongest contenders.

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Why Look for a Medallia Alternative?

Here are key factors that make customer experience teams look for other tools.

High Cost and complexity

Medallia is designed for large enterprises with sophisticated customer experience programs, making it a strong choice for those with deep budgets and dedicated research operations. 

The challenge is that its pricing model and deployment requirements often overwhelm mid-market or digital-first brands that must move quickly.

For instance, many implementations require professional services or months of setup before value is realized, creating friction for teams that want to act on feedback today, not next quarter.

Systematic Bias That Misses Satisfied Customers

Medallia's survey-first approach captures feedback primarily from dissatisfied customers while missing positive experiences. 

As one hotel professional explained in this Reddit thread, "All of the great customer service I've been doing for people, they don't ever leave reviews. It's always the randos I don't know."

This creates unrepresentative data. Teams can't build accurate retention strategies when the platform systematically underrepresents satisfied customers.

Scoring System That Penalizes Excellent Service

Users report how Medallia's methodology punishes teams even for positive interactions. One user noted: "People will put all 5/10's because they think 5 is 'average' and it absolutely kills our scores." 

This disconnect between customer satisfaction and scoring creates misleading performance metrics that don't support business decision-making.

Slow Adoption in Fast-Moving Teams

Another drawback of Medallia is its long adoption cycle. Implementations often involve complex integrations and specialized training, which can delay time-to-value.

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This lag is a severe limitation for industries like retail, subscription SaaS, or digital services, where customer needs evolve weekly.

Support teams look for solutions that are ready out of the box. They want immediate visibility into ticket trends, anomalies, or review sentiment without waiting months for deployment.

Limited Customization

Users also note Medallia’s lack of flexible customization for survey design and reporting, which restricts tailoring the experience to specific business needs.

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Key Features a Modern CXM Tool Must Have

When evaluating alternatives to Medallia, here are the capabilities that matter most in 2025:

1. AI-Driven Analytics

Traditional VoC platforms rely on manual tagging, static dashboards, or preset survey questions. These methods are too slow and rigid for the volume of feedback customers now generate. 

A CXM solution should use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning models to automatically classify sentiment, detect emerging themes, and assess urgency without human intervention.

2. Omnichannel VoC

Customer experiences are fragmented across touchpoints. Someone might leave a review on Google, open a ticket in Zendesk, respond to an NPS survey, and complain on Twitter all within the same week. 

So, the platform must consolidate feedback from every channel into a unified view, so teams don’t miss critical signals buried in siloed systems. Omnichannel capabilities also prevent blind spots by allowing CX leaders, operations teams, and product managers to see how different touchpoints connect. 

On this podcast, learn from Graham Johnston, Head of Omnichannel at Three, how a major telecommunications company successfully implements innovative omnichannel strategies to drive growth and improve CX:

3. Sentiment and Churn Detection

A CXM tool should translate signals into retention strategies to impact business outcomes. Advanced sentiment analysis classifies responses as positive, negative, or neutral, and digs deeper to identify the intensity of emotion and pinpoint what drives dissatisfaction.

The platforms should combine sentiment analytics with churn prediction models. By detecting when a customer is at risk of leaving, through repeated complaints, unresolved issues, or declining satisfaction scores, teams can intervene early with tailored actions.

4. Real-Time Dashboards & Alerts

CX, support, and product leaders need live dashboards that reflect customer sentiment and operational performance. Real-time dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of trending issues, customer satisfaction, and resolution times, helping teams prioritize resources where they’re needed most.

When an anomaly occurs, a sudden surge in refund requests or negative social mentions, the system should immediately notify the right stakeholders. Alerts enable rapid response, preventing minor problems from snowballing into PR crises or revenue losses.

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Top Medallia Alternatives to Consider

Here is our list of the top Medallia alternatives you should opt for:

Let’s take a closer look. 

1. SentiSum

SentiSum is an AI-native Voice of Customer (VoC) platform built for modern CX and support teams that require speed, clarity, and actionability over static dashboards. 

Unlike Medallia's survey-heavy approach, SentiSum transforms unstructured, real-time feedback from chat, email, reviews, and tickets into clear root cause insights that prevent churn by acting on feedback faster. It also seamlessly integrates with all major platforms, including Zendesk, Intercom, Dixa, Gorgias, and more. 

For subscription-based businesses aiming to reduce churn in 2025, the platform stands out as a top Medallia alternative because it delivers confidence through clarity, moving teams from passive dashboards to real-time retention insights that fix customer experience to promote brand growth.

SentiSum Key Features

Real-Time Churn Detection and Prevention: Kyo, SentiSum's AI assistant, highlights anomalies, detects churn risks, and suggests next-best actions in real time. This AI-Native approach enables CX and Support leaders to see what's broken before it costs them, acting with certainty rather than guesswork from quarterly surveys.

For Strategic Decision Makers, this translates to measurable retention impact and business outcomes. Support, Product, and Leadership teams get a unified view of the customer across the entire lifecycle, enabling proactive intervention before renewals are at risk.

AI-Native Platform vs Traditional Survey-Based Tools: SentiSum uses AI-driven ticket tagging, sentiment analysis, and churn risk detection that evolves with customer language. This AI-Native differentiation means every nuance is captured, even when customer terminology shifts or new issues arise, unlike Medallia's rigid survey categories.

Customer Insights and VoC leaders benefit from building trend narratives with digestible insights that facilitate cross-functional collaboration. Product and insights teams uncover blind spots and identify emerging problems sooner, while executives develop greater trust in intelligence that reflects the authentic customer voice.

Fast Onboarding vs Complex Implementation: While Medallia requires months of setup and professional services, SentiSum delivers actionable insights from day one. Teams can go live quickly without manual tagging or complex integrations, making it ideal for fast-moving digital businesses that need immediate visibility into retention risks.

Cross-Functional Retention Intelligence: With integrations across over 100 platforms, including support systems, dashboards, and messaging apps, SentiSum delivers retention intelligence directly to tools teams already use. 

This frictionless approach increases adoption across departments and enables Product, Operations, and Leadership to align on what matters now for customer retention.

Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Immediate Action: SentiSum provides real-time ticket tagging and sentiment analysis as support tickets, chats, and reviews flow in. 

Teams can act on critical issues as they happen, prevent customer churn before it escalates, and prioritize resources based on real-time insights without manual effort or survey delays.

SenstiSum Reviews

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SentiSum Pricing

SentiSum pricing starts at $3,000/month, with customizable enterprise plans for organizations with specific retention analytics requirements.

2. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is an Experience Management platform that helps organizations collect, analyze, and act on data across customer, employee, product, and brand experiences. It offers customer retention analytics by integrating experience data with operational data, enabling businesses to identify at-risk customers and predict churn. 

It has a Qualtrics Predict iQ that uses AI to forecast which customers may leave, supporting proactive retention strategies. Its AI-driven Voice of the Customer capabilities analyze feedback from surveys, social media, and support interactions, uncovering pain points and sentiment.

Qualtrics Pros

• Powerful and flexible survey design with diverse question types
• Comprehensive data analysis and customizable dashboards
• Strong customer support and extensive help resources
  
  

Qualtrics Cons

• High cost, often prohibitive for smaller businesses
• Steep learning curve and complexity in usage
• Dashboard customization and reporting can be limited or unintuitive

Qualtrics Pricing

3. Chattermill

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Chattermill is an AI-powered feedback analytics platform designed to centralize voice-of-customer (VoC) data and transform it into actionable insights for CX, support, and product teams. 

Its strength lies in unifying feedback from diverse sources such as surveys, reviews, and support channels and applying AI to detect sentiment, uncover key themes, and identify customer drivers.

The platform provides real-time insight tools, including customizable dashboards, automated alerts, and an “Insight Assistant” that helps teams act quickly and align on priorities.

Chattermill Pros 

• Highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, enabling quick access to sentiment insights and trends without deep analytics expertise
• Powerful AI-driven analytics that unify and categorize feedback from multiple channels
• Enables fast detection of customer pain points and root causes

Chattermill Cons

• Limited flexibility for custom report creation and advanced personalization
• High pricing and sales call requirements may be prohibitive for smaller organizations
• The system is built on a rigid list of topics and categories, so it may not be a good fit for teams that need their categories to grow and change

Chattermill Pricing 

Request for a customized quote from the Sales team. 

4. InMoment

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InMoment unifies customer, employee, and market feedback across digital and offline touchpoints. It is a Medallia alternative because of its ability to turn unstructured feedback into actionable insights through advanced AI-driven text analytics, sentiment detection, and predictive workflows.

The platform excels at omnichannel coverage, gathering feedback from web, mobile, email, SMS, social media, and even in-store interactions to provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey. 

InMoment Pros

• Multi-channel feedback and real-time alerts
• Strong analytics and journey mapping
• Reliable support and helpful staff
  

InMoment Cons

• Reporting and dashboard complexity
• Expensive, especially for smaller teams
• Some integrations and workflows lack flexibility

InMoment Pricing

• Contact the InMoment team for personalized pricing information.

5. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a unified, AI-first customer experience management (CXM) platform that combines social media management, marketing, customer service, and analytics in a single enterprise-grade suite. 

Its AI-powered integration streamlines listening, campaign execution, service delivery, and performance analytics into one cohesive system. Its generative AI innovations, through Sprinklr AI+, now leverage OpenAI’s GPT models and Google Vertex AI to enable conversational AI, workflow recommendations, and advanced insights. 

Sprinklr Pros

• Unified platform managing customer experience across 35+ channels
• Advanced AI for sentiment analysis and trend prediction
• Strong collaboration tools with easy tagging and approvals
  

Sprinklr Cons

• Steep learning curve due to complex user interface
• Expensive pricing, not suited for smaller businesses
• Customer support often reported as slow or unhelpful

Sprinklr Pricing 

• Pricing is customized based on specific business needs.

6. GetFeedback

GetFeedback is a customer feedback and survey platform tailored for Salesforce users, making capturing and acting on customer sentiment within the CRM workflow easy.

Its native Salesforce integration ensures feedback links directly to cases, accounts, or opportunities, enabling immediate follow-ups. 

Teams can design and launch surveys quickly, with omnichannel distribution options such as email, SMS, web, and in-app delivery. This flexibility improves response rates and keeps feedback relevant. 

GetFeedback Pros

• Easy and fun survey creation with a good mobile experience
• Strong Salesforce integration for seamless data syncing
• Intuitive design leading to higher response rates

GetFeedback Cons

• Limited customization options for surveys
• Reporting and data visualization are basic and sometimes difficult
• Can be expensive for smaller businesses or extensive use scenarios

GetFeedback Pricing

• Reach out to the support team for custom pricing.

7. AskNicely

AskNicely is an NPS and customer experience platform that empowers frontline teams with real-time feedback and coaching. It is well-suited for service-driven organizations that prioritize customer engagement and team responsiveness. 

The platform automates workflows by instantly routing feedback, triggering follow-up actions, and enforcing SLAs across distributed teams. It also provides rich engagement tools, including conversational surveys enhanced with AI-driven sentiment analysis and dashboards, leaderboards, and coaching features.

AskNicely Pros

• Very easy to use with an intuitive interface
• Strong automation for NPS program management
• Engaging TV dashboard boosts company-wide customer focus

AskNicely Cons

• Reporting capabilities are limited and can be difficult
• Integration options are somewhat restricted
• Customization for surveys and dashboards is limited

AskNicely Pricing

It offers three pricing plans. Reach out to the team for more information. 

8. Thematic

Thematic is another Medallia alternative that turns unstructured customer feedback into actionable insights. Its strength lies in advanced natural language processing (NLP), which automatically discovers themes, subthemes, and emerging patterns from surveys, reviews, and support tickets. 

This solution refines its analysis as more data flows in, ensuring insights remain relevant. It is helpful for product, CX, and support teams seeking to understand customer pain points at scale without manual tagging. 

Thematic Pros

• Easy to use with an intuitive interface and quick setup
• Advanced AI categorization that identifies key themes and sentiment
• Allows deep drill-down by segments, helping prioritize impact areas

Thematic Cons

• May be less user-friendly for untrained or casual users
• Initial data collection setup can have minor hiccups
• Mostly focused on text analytics; limited broader CX features compared to larger suites

Thematic Pricing

Thematic offers two different plans. Contact the team for detailed information.  

9. Wonderflow

Wonderflow is a feedback intelligence platform that collects, analyzes, and interprets customer opinions from multiple sources, including reviews, surveys, and call center transcripts, then transforms them into actionable insights. 

Its AI-powered “Wonderboard” provides a unified view of customer sentiment and performance drivers. This allows decision-makers to align CX strategy across teams. 

Wonderflow Pros

• Quickly analyzes large volumes of customer feedback across multiple languages and platforms
• Accurate AI analysis with granular topic detection tailored for specific industries
• Easy-to-understand reports suitable for sharing with broad audiences

Wonderflow Cons

• Text analysis can have errors in sentiment labeling and annotations
• Limited customization options for reports and dashboards
• Some users find creating detailed reports time-consuming and less user-friendly

Wonderflow Pricing

• Contact the Support team for pricing details.
  

10. Survicate

Survicate is a feedback platform for agile teams that need quick, actionable insights. Known for its ease of setup, Survicate allows organizations to launch targeted surveys across websites, emails, apps, and product interfaces. 

With prebuilt templates and intuitive workflows, teams can capture data on NPS, CSAT, or product feedback without technical overhead. The tool integrates smoothly with CRM and marketing automation tools, ensuring customer data flows seamlessly into existing systems. 

Survicate Pros

• Easy to use with an intuitive survey builder
• Responsive and helpful customer support
• Multiple survey types and distribution channels

Survicate Cons

• Reporting and data aggregation features can be limited
• Notifications can be overly frequent and disruptive
• Customization options for design and questions could improve

Survicate Pricing

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What Makes SentiSum a Top Alternative for Support-Led Teams?

SentiSum is built for teams who need fast, actionable insights without the overhead of traditional enterprise systems. It is an AI-native VoC platform designed to handle the scale, speed, and complexity of unstructured feedback.

• Kyo’s dynamic Assistance: With Kyo, SentiSum’s intelligent AI assistant, you get real-time visibility into customer sentiment, pain points, and churn risks. Plus, it can suggest next-best actions in real time.

• AI-Native, Fast Onboarding: Most VoC platforms require long setup cycles and professional services before you see value. SentiSum changes that. It instantly classifies support tickets, chat logs, and reviews into themes and sentiments—no manual tagging or rules needed. 

That means your team can go live in days, not months, and start using insights to drive product improvements, CX, and retention strategies immediately.

Watch now: Legacy Voice of the Customer (VoC) is Broken. SentiSum fixed it.

• Focus on Unstructured Feedback: Customer feedback comes through unstructured channels like tickets, chats, and reviews, but many platforms still rely heavily on surveys. SentiSum prioritizes unstructured data.
  Its AI processes language as customers use it, surfacing insights about issues, urgency, and emotion. You’ll not only know what customers are saying but also why they’re reaching out and where friction happens.

• ‍Retention-Driven Insights: Support teams are often the first to see signals of customer dissatisfaction, but without the proper tooling, those signals get lost.SentiSum’s churn detection engine highlights at-risk accounts early, letting you act before renewals are at risk. This proactive visibility helps you improve retention and drive measurable renewal growth.

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Case Study:

‍Lakrids by Bülow partnered with SentiSum to turn unstructured feedback from Dixa support tickets into actionable insights.

Previously, product improvements were based on gut feeling, but SentiSum’s automated tagging and real-time analysis created a trusted, organization-wide view of customer needs.

"Working in CS is often based on a lot of feelings. We need to learn to work with data, as it's easy to fall into feelings and hunches when you don't, which leads to difficulty in getting buy in from other areas of the business."

- Lokke Egraf

Head of Consumer Service, Løkke Engraf, used the platform to validate issues, build a VOC feedback loop, and influence product strategies with data instead of hunches. 

Insights drove packaging updates, reduced complaints by 26%, improved customer communications, and equipped teams to handle friction points more effectively. As a result, CSAT scores improved, with 5/5 ratings rising by 9%.

Book a demo today to see how SentiSum drives retention with unstructured feedback.