Two feedback companies grew up in Belgium. One of them, CheckMarket, spent two decades earning the trust of Benelux organisations with multilingual surveys, local support and EU hosting, then was acquired by Medallia in 2021 and now operates as Medallia Agile Research, a self-service research module inside Medallia Experience Cloud. The other one is us. Hello Customer is still an independent company in Ghent, built for continuous customer feedback rather than research projects. Let us say the important part immediately: CheckMarket has not shut down, its customers have not been given an end date, and nothing in this comparison will pretend otherwise. This is a story about vendor identity and roadmap direction, and about which of those directions matches yours.
The short answer, for readers who want it up front. If you run market research projects, need deep questionnaire logic, buy panel respondents, or your organisation is already invested in Medallia, Agile Research is a serious and defensible choice. If you want continuous feedback at your customer touchpoints, automatic analysis of every open answer in Dutch, French or dozens of other languages, and workflows that turn a detractor score into a follow-up call, that is what we built Hello Customer for. The rest of this article explains where that line sits and why it moved.
What CheckMarket is today
The facts first, because this comparison only works if we are precise about them.
CheckMarket was founded in 2002 in Turnhout and built a good survey platform: solid questionnaire logic, surveys in Dutch, French and English handled natively, Belgian support people who answered the phone, and EU hosting that made procurement conversations short. For twenty years it was the default answer for a lot of Benelux survey work, and it earned that position.
On 24 February 2021, Medallia acquired CheckMarket. The platform was folded into Medallia's portfolio, and in February 2024 Medallia announced it as Agile Research, a self-service research product inside Medallia Experience Cloud. Medallia describes it as "a fully self-service advanced market research tool" for one-off surveys, competitive analysis and brand and product research. Today, checkmarket.com no longer exists as its own address; it redirects to the Medallia Agile Research product page, where the platform advertises surveys in more than 80 languages, maxdiff and conjoint analysis, and access to third-party panels with millions of respondents.
One more fact matters for the vendor identity question. Medallia itself was taken private by Thoma Bravo, a US private equity firm, in October 2021, and has had new owners since 4 August 2026, a lender group led by Blackstone, Apollo and FS KKR that took over under a recapitalisation. So the survey tool your team knew as a Turnhout company is now a module inside a San Francisco enterprise suite whose ownership has changed twice in five years. None of that makes the product worse at running surveys. It does change whose priorities set the roadmap. Agile Research develops in the direction Medallia Experience Cloud needs it to: fast, self-service research for enterprise customers who are already on the wider platform. That is a coherent strategy, and for teams heading toward Medallia anyway, staying put is a perfectly reasonable decision. For teams who bought a standalone Belgian survey company, it is worth asking whether the product they renew each year is still the product they chose.
We wrote a broader piece on this for teams weighing several options: the best CheckMarket alternatives covers ten platforms. This article does the deeper two-way comparison.
TL;DR: Hello Customer vs Medallia Agile Research
| Hello Customer | Medallia Agile Research (CheckMarket) | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Continuous feedback at customer touchpoints | Self-service market research projects |
| Open answers | ISAAC classifies by topic with sentiment per topic, ranks impact | Survey reporting and dashboards |
| Vendor | Independent, Ghent, Belgium | Module of Medallia Experience Cloud, US owned |
| Pricing | Volume-based | Quote-based, tied to Medallia packaging |
Both platforms host in the EU and both take GDPR seriously. The differences live in what each product is for and who decides where it goes next.
Who each platform is for
Agile Research fits insight teams, research managers and agencies who run studies: a brand tracker, a concept test, a pricing study with conjoint analysis, a one-off survey to a purchased panel. The logic depth CheckMarket was known for survives in the product, and inside a Medallia account it connects research findings to the wider experience programme.
Hello Customer fits CX teams, marketing leaders and operations people who need to know, every single day, what customers experience at their touchpoints: after a delivery, after a support call, after a branch visit. Our customers are organisations like Baloise Insurance and Standaard Boekhandel, companies with high volumes of customer contact in more than one language, where the value is in the rhythm of listening and acting rather than in any single study.
The honest way to say it: one platform is built around the question, the other around the answer. Both matter. They are different jobs.
Surveys: both platforms know how to ask
We will not pretend CheckMarket was ever weak at surveys. It was excellent at them, and Agile Research still is. Branching, quotas, advanced question types, statistical tools like maxdiff and conjoint, panel sampling: if your project needs a questionnaire with real methodological depth, that platform delivers it, and it earned two decades of Benelux loyalty doing exactly that.
Our survey philosophy is different by design. Hello Customer surveys are short, sent at a specific touchpoint, and built to be answered in under a minute: a score question such as NPS, CSAT or CES, plus one open question in the customer's own language. We keep them short on purpose, because response rates collapse when surveys grow, and because our analysis engine gets more from one honest open answer than from twenty grid questions. If your need is a 40-question study with rotation logic and screening quotas, we are the wrong tool and Agile Research is the right one. If your need is hearing from thousands of customers every week without exhausting them, short and continuous wins.
What happens to the open answers
This is where the two platforms diverge, and it is the reason most teams switch to us.
A survey tool treats the open answer as an export. You get the verbatims in a table, perhaps a word cloud, perhaps a text analysis add-on, and then a person has to read, code and summarise them. With a few hundred responses that is a long afternoon. With tens of thousands across Dutch and French it simply does not happen, and the richest feedback you own goes unread.
Hello Customer was built around that exact problem. ISAAC, our AI engine, reads every open answer natively in dozens of languages, including Dutch and French, and classifies it by topic with a sentiment per topic. One sentence like "delivery was fast but the driver could not find the entrance" becomes two data points: delivery speed, positive; delivery instructions, negative. ISAAC then runs key driver analysis to rank which topics actually move your score, so you know whether to fix the waiting time or the invoice layout first. And when a director asks what customers are saying, Ask ISAAC answers plain-language questions with the verbatims attached, so the evidence is never more than a click away.
Agile Research reports on surveys, and reports well. It does not do this. If the open answers are where your value lives, this single difference outweighs everything else in the article.
From measurement to action
Feedback that ends in a dashboard is a cost. Feedback that changes something is an investment. The second real gap between the platforms is what happens after the score arrives.
In Hello Customer, a detractor response triggers an alert to a named owner, the person who can actually fix the problem, while the customer still remembers the experience. Close-the-loop workflows track whether the follow-up happened, and management reporting shows which teams close their loops and which let them sit. Some of our customers that close the loop on both customer and management levels report minimum 2.3% annual churn decrease and 11% revenue increase. That number is the entire argument for treating feedback as an operational rhythm rather than a reporting exercise.
A research platform has a different relationship with the respondent. In a panel study, the person answering is a sample unit, and following up individually is neither expected nor usually possible. That is not a flaw in Agile Research; it is the nature of research. But it means that if your feedback comes from your own customers, people with names, order numbers and a reason to churn, a research tool leaves the most valuable step out of the process.
The local question
For many Benelux buyers this is the quiet deciding factor, so let us treat it seriously rather than sentimentally.
Both platforms host in the EU, and on paper both tick the compliance boxes. Hello Customer is GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001 certified, and our security documentation is written to shorten procurement, not to survive it. We will assume Medallia's European hosting claims are equally solid.
The difference is where decisions are made. Hello Customer support answers in Dutch and French, invoicing is Belgian, and the people who set the product roadmap sit in Ghent and talk to Benelux customers every week. CheckMarket used to offer the same, and its people deserve credit for two decades of it. But Turnhout is no longer where the decisions happen. Feature priorities, packaging, pricing and support structures for Agile Research are set within a US enterprise organisation, under its second set of financial owners in five years, with a strategy that quite reasonably centres on Medallia Experience Cloud. When you need an exception, an integration or a fast answer in your own language, the distance between you and the person who can say yes is part of what you are buying. With us that distance is one phone call inside the same time zone.
Pricing: volume-based vs quote and module
Hello Customer prices on feedback volume. You pay for what you actually process, the model scales with your programme rather than your headcount, and onboarding takes days, so the cost of starting is mostly the decision itself.
Agile Research pricing is quote-based and increasingly tied to how Medallia packages its platform. That is normal for enterprise software, and for a team buying into Experience Cloud it can be efficient bundling. For a standalone buyer it means the renewal conversation is also a packaging conversation, and it is fair to ask what the price path looks like for a customer who wants only the survey module and nothing else. Ask that question before renewal, not after.
When Agile Research is the right choice
An honest comparison names the cases where the other platform wins, so here they are.
Choose Agile Research when you run genuine market research: panel studies, concept and pricing tests, brand trackers, anything that needs conjoint or maxdiff. That is its home turf, and it is not ours. We are not a market research suite, and panel studies and research-agency workflows are not our territory.
Choose it too when your questionnaires are the product: complex logic, quotas, rotations and screening built by people who think in research design. And choose it, without hesitation, when your organisation is already on Medallia Experience Cloud or heading there, because then the roadmap gravity that worries standalone customers works in your favour.
If you recognise yourself in those paragraphs, staying with Agile Research is the sensible call, and we would rather tell you that than win a bad-fit deal.
Verdict
CheckMarket earned its reputation, and the platform lives on inside Medallia with its research strengths intact. What changed is identity and direction: a Belgian survey company became a research module in an American enterprise suite, and its future is now written in Medallia's strategy documents rather than in Turnhout.
So the choice in 2026 is clearer than it used to be. For research projects and Medallia-aligned organisations, Agile Research remains a strong product. For continuous customer feedback in Dutch and French, for open answers that analyse themselves by topic and sentiment, for loops that actually get closed, and for a vendor whose decisions are still made in Belgium, Hello Customer is the platform built for that job. You can also benchmark your scores against your sector with our CX benchmarking, something a project-based research tool has no reason to offer.
If you want to see the difference on your own feedback rather than take our word for it, book a demo. We will run it in Dutch if you like.
Frequently asked questions
Is CheckMarket shutting down?
No. CheckMarket has not shut down and no shutdown has been announced. The company was acquired by Medallia in 2021 and the platform was renamed: it now operates as Medallia Agile Research inside Medallia Experience Cloud, and checkmarket.com redirects to that product's page. Existing customers continue to be supported. The questions worth asking are about roadmap direction and packaging, not about survival.
What is Medallia Agile Research?
Medallia Agile Research is the self-service market research product inside Medallia Experience Cloud, built on the CheckMarket platform. Medallia launched it under that name in February 2024. It offers DIY surveys in more than 80 languages, advanced analysis such as maxdiff and conjoint, and access to third-party respondent panels.
Can I still buy CheckMarket as a standalone Belgian product?
The platform is sold and supported by Medallia, so the vendor relationship is with Medallia rather than with a standalone Belgian company. EU hosting remains available, but roadmap, packaging and commercial decisions sit with Medallia in the US. If a Belgian vendor relationship matters to your organisation, that is now a real difference between the two platforms rather than a nuance.
How is Hello Customer different from a survey tool?
Surveys are our starting point, never the product. Hello Customer captures short feedback at customer touchpoints, then ISAAC classifies every open answer by topic with a sentiment per topic, ranks which topics drive your scores, and routes detractors to named owners through close-the-loop workflows. A survey tool tells you what people scored. We tell you why, and make sure someone follows up.
Does Hello Customer support Dutch and French?
Yes, on both sides of the platform. Surveys go out in your customer's language, ISAAC analyses open answers natively in dozens of languages including Dutch and French, and our support team works in Dutch and French as well. Onboarding typically takes days, so a first touchpoint can be live within the week.