Disruptive ambitions: Sprinklr's quest to reshape the front-office

After making strides in the CCaaS market, Sprinklr is looking to disrupt the broader front office. Their recent analyst conference in New York provided a comprehensive update and prompted me to take a step back to look at its trajectory in the evolving realm of customer experience solutions.

Founder and now Co-CEO, Ragy Thomas, cut his teeth on email marketing as CTO of Bigfoot Interactive. This experience was instrumental in shaping Sprinklr's technical approach, which centers on three key principles:

1. Abstract communication channels

2. Build for scale

3. Embrace a platform approach

Following Nicolas Boileau's adage to "put your work twenty times upon the anvil," Sprinklr has continued to refine its platform. The company's 12 acquisitions, including the notable ones of Get Satisfaction and Lithium Technologies, weren't just bolted on; they were integrated into the core platform. Thomas revealed that this unwavering commitment to perfection has led to the entire platform being rebuilt four times in its 15 years of existence.

Sprinklr is on a mission to unify the front office, which it calls "the messy middle." The company has expanded its support for channels to include virtually all of them — social, digital, and voice — across marketing, sales, and service. It offers four suites targeting its different entry points in a business:

1. Marketing & Advertising

2. Social Engagement & Selling

3. Support & Service

4. Insights & Feedback

A key feature of Sprinklr's unified platform is its capacity to integrate functions across business units and teams — which the company refers to as the "Z-axis."

Sprinklr officially entered the contact center space in early 2022, when it added support for the voice channel. It then deliberately positioned its service solution as Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). This bold move, rather than the expected Digital Customer Service positioning, signaled its ambitions in the market.

Since then, the company has enjoyed a rapid growth:

• Jan 2023: Sprinklr Service accounted for over 40% of new bookings, up from 30% in the previous quarter.

• September 2023: Inked a landmark 40,000-seat CCaaS deal with Deutsche Telekom (DT).

• March 2024: Selected by British Telecom as their strategic customer service technology partner.

I estimate that service accounts for approximately 20% of its business, positioning Sprinklr among the top 12 contact center providers. The company boasts broad coverage of the CX stack and is now focusing its roadmap on deepening feature sets across its offerings.

Sprinklr's platform is underpinned by two other core tenets: its data platform and AI capabilities.

The company's data platform serves as a competitive advantage. A case in point: a large retail customer was able to leverage Sprinklr's platform to correlate a surge in contact center inquiries with a payment option malfunction within just four hours on Black Friday—a critical insight during retail's busiest period.

In May, Sprinklr unveiled Digital Twin, a significant AI overhaul. The term, borrowed from the manufacturing industry, underscores the company's focus on AI that augments human capabilities. Currently in alpha, Digital Twin enables the creation of autonomous AI applications, tailored to various personas, brands, teams, or even individuals, all anchored in their corresponding data set.

Two customers presented their stories at the event:

A major beauty conglomerate started its journey with Sprinklr by unifying social media management across its 40 brands. It then embarked on a strategic transition of its entire customer service operations to the Sprinklr platform. While still in the process of migrating voice (from Amazon) and email (from Salesforce), the 700 agents are already on the new system. The company cited two primary drivers for this consolidation: the elimination of disparate point solutions and the leveraging of Sprinklr's data platform. I found the latter reason particularly compelling. Given that this company does a lot of business through retailers, it doesn't engage directly with many of its customers. Using Sprinklr, it can gather and consolidate customer profiles as they interact with the brand across various social and other channels, enabling the creation of a customer database.

The second customer, a top 10 US bank, first adopted Sprinklr to centralize its social media activities, a critical step given the increased regulatory scrutiny of social media in banking after the SVB bankruptcy. The bank went on to enable social selling using the platform. Today, 25,000 of its 60,000 employees have access to Sprinklr for sales, making social media the bank's third most important digital channel for generating new revenue.

After making significant investments to grow its CCaaS business, the company has been making adjustments to its go-to-market to better balance its support of the various businesses. It is also recruiting an ecosystem to bolster its front-office ambitions.

Ragy delivered a 90-minute presentation with passion bouncing off the wall. The next step for the company is to simplify its story and sharpen its go-to-market.

Last year at Enterprise Connect 2023, the CCaaS industry declared that orchestrating interaction across the broader enterprise was its next frontier. Sprinklr is arguably one of the providers pursuing the most aggressively that path.