A conversation is an exchange of information between the company and a respondent, with the purposes of collecting feedback from the respondent, or assisting them by providing new information.

Conversation results are collected and reported as Medallia Experience Cloud responses, and aggregated in reports in Medallia Web reporting and Medallia Mobile.

Dialogs

A dialog is one prompt or response in a conversation. A dialog can be a simple statement like "Thank you!", or it can be a request for information like "How would you rate your experience?"

A conversation may have one or more dialogs. It might have just one or two simple dialog statements. But, to engage the respondent and to gather information, a conversation is usually a series of dialogs and expected responses, similar to a traditional survey which asks a set of predefined questions to gather feedback.

Unlike a traditional survey, a conversation usually has just a few questions, and it is not uncommon for the respondent to abandon the survey after a couple of questions. Before creating a conversation, consult Designing conversations for tips and best practices to ensure quality results.

Dialogs that gather information can be open-ended text, or require specific answers, "yes" or "no". They can also insert known information about the respondent or event that triggered the conversation. For example, a dialog might say, "Hello Skyler. How was your visit to Orion's in Buenos Aires?"

Using dialog-conditions and based on collected or known information, dialogs in a conversation can be skipped, and they can trigger new conversations. For example, if the respondent's response is "Tell me more", the dialog might trigger a new conversation specific to providing information instead of gathering it. See Designing conversations and Dialog types for more information. 

Creating and managing

Create and manage conversations and dialogs from the Conversations tab.

For information about the available activities, see Managing conversations. Some of the activities include:

• Creating conversations

Starting conversations

A conversation can be initiated via a feed, it can be triggered manually from the Conversation Builder, and it can be triggered on request from the respondent.

• A feeded conversation begins when the company submits the respondent's name, contact information, preferred channel, and possibly the conversation to have. Feeded conversations are the best mechanism for survey collection because they tied to a business unit. For more information about triggered conversations, see Get started.

• A manually triggered conversation is started by an administrator who first identifies existing respondents with whom to have the conversation.

  Important: Do not manually trigger conversations in production instances. Use this feature for testing purposes only.

• A triggered-on-request (feedless) conversation begins when the respondent sends a message to one of the company's channels, such as sending a text message to a phone number or starting a Facebook message from the company's Facebook page. Use this method to drive respondents to the company, such as directing them to a web site or phone number, or to initiate a Feedless Web-based conversation.

  Note: A triggered conversation is an implicit opt-in by the respondent. For initiated conversations, it is assumed the company acquired the respondent's permission to have the conversation.

Conversation expiration

Once a conversation has been initiated, the respondent may engage the conversation indefinitely unless there is an expiration restriction, in which case the conversation is no longer available some time after the respondent originally initiated the conversation. Respondents may also retake the survey (conversation) unless specifically restricted to just once. See Conversation settings for information about the expiration and retake options.

Special conversations

Special conversations happen for common interactions not tied to a specific information-gathering task, such as to inform the respondent the earlier conversation has expired and is no longer available, or to welcome a respondent to Medallia Conversations and inform them how to opt-out of future conversations. See Specialized conversations for details.