Sprinklr held its second industry analyst meeting, Sprinklr Source24, in New York City this week. My initial interest in the company centered on its contact center as a service (CCaaS) offering, Sprinklr Service, announced in January 2022. In June 2023, after Sprinklr’s first analyst meeting, I wrote Sprinklr’s Journey from Social Media Management to CCaaS Market Disruptor about existing and planned capabilities for Sprinklr Service. Since that article posted, Sprinklr has indeed been a market disruptor, making splashes with notable CCaaS wins in both 2023 and 2024.
How and why has my interest in Sprinklr shifted from CCaaS? In a conversation with Ragy Thomas, Founder and Co-CEO, Sprinklr, I hypothesized that enterprises are no longer making CCaaS decisions, they are making CX decisions. Especially as AI becomes an increasingly essential element in delivering quality customer experience (CX), CCaaS, digital and social engagement, workforce engagement management and analytics have become inexorably linked. Many vendors are marketing platforms that deliver most if not all of these capabilities on a single platform, e.g., AWS, Genesys, NICE, RingCentral, Zoom, etc.
One of the stated rationales for a single platform includes the ability to orchestrate a customer journey more effectively from one application. Another reason is to have a single customer data source to drive both interactions with customers and to create and refine AI models. In most cases, the term “platform” implies the ability to read and write to additional relevant CX data sources, e.g., CRM systems, internal corporate databases, etc.
The term customer journey generally refers to the sum of all interactions a customer has with a brand, product, or service. It includes both direct and indirect interactions, such as contacting customer service or hearing about a brand at an event. During this week’s event, Thomas suggested that there is another, more effective, way to think about customer journeys.
The Sprinklr Unified Customer Experience Management (Unified-CXM) platform delivers all of the functions listed above – with varying degrees of completeness – as well as marketing campaign and content management.
Thomas posits that today most CX solutions are based on managing the breadth of channels customers use to communicate with brands, e.g., voice, chat, social, WhatsApp, etc., and the various functions within the business, e.g., sales, service, and marketing. If all are served on the same platform, using the same data platform, customer service would improve. If one were to graphically depict interactions, each could be classified as on a certain channel (x axis) and addressing to a specific company function (y axis).
Thomas believes there is a third dimension, which he calls the Z axis, which needs to be brought into the conversation: Customer-facing teams. While orchestration typically refers to the journey that the customer takes – e.g., from a social engagement to self-service to live agent and back to self-service – Thomas believes that the teams serving customers are equally in need of orchestration. His model includes channels, functions, and teams.
What happens today when a social channel designed to deliver marketing content receives a customer service query? Or when an outbound sales call results in identification of a customer service issue? Typically, the employee is not equipped to manage the pivot that the interaction has taken. Seldom is that salesperson able to easily handle the service issue or even seamlessly transfer the customer to the appropriate team – with the receiving team receiving the appropriate context. Instead, the customer is typically re-directed to the team that oversees those interactions and that employee has no context of where the customer has attempted to get their issue resolved.
Thomas thinks it is not only journeys that require orchestration, but customer-facing teams as well. He also believes that a single front-office application for all customer-facing functions, a la Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM, delivers such a solution.
What does a Z-axis way of thinking imply about the future direction of Sprinklr? As I see it, one slide from Thomas with these exact words tells the story. “When done correctly, Unified-CXM on Social can be the foundation of [totally] Unified-CXM.”
Sprinklr has found that its best customers are ones that started as social media management customers, grew to be digital engagement and marketing content customers, and added AI and insights along the way. Thomas’s long-term goal for each customer’s path to eventually include a CCaaS deployment.
While the graphic here, from the company’s September 2024 investor deck, is an apt depiction of how Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM product has developed over time, it is also the path many of its top revenue customers have taken with Sprinklr. They started with the social suite and added additional products over time.
In the past, Sprinklr focused its sales and go-to-market efforts on gaining new customers for its various product suites, e.g., social, marketing, service, and insights. At last week’s meeting, Karthik Iyer, senior vice president, sales strategy, planning, Industries, and insights, Sprinklr, outlined a new company focus – on renewals. The first objective is to make sure that customers are getting the outcomes they expect. From there, the goal is to identify additional CX-related business problems and show them how expanding the Sprinklr platform footprint in their organization will help address those issues.
Both of the topics discussed above, the Z-axis of customer-facing teams and a focus on existing customers for future growth, came together in the story of a customer who presented to the analysts.
The head of enterprise social media at a well-known North American bank described how the company initially chose Sprinklr Social to unify disparate social efforts across the bank, culminating in replacing seven systems with one, Sprinklr. After success with social management, social selling teams were brought on to the Sprinklr platform – to handle the social queries that can become sales opportunities. Most recently, the Sprinklr platform was extended to thousands of employees of the bank to help them become social brand advocates, by making social content easily available on the internal website.
I fully expect that when Thomas’s concept of the CX market as a three-dimensional graphic is articulated in the future, marketing will have found new words to communicate the concept. For now, the company is focused on growing the number of teams in each customer business using its platform.
