Sprinklr is Scaling the Most Important Business Priority—Customer Experience

In recent years, the way corporations interact with their customers has fundamentally shifted. As consumers increasingly engage companies in real-time, the pressure to manage consumer interactions and expectations across multiple platforms is mounting. Put bluntly: conversations with brands have become not only a possibility but an expectation. 

The ability to understand and engage in these types of conversations can make or break a company — a fact that Yoni Chisholm, marketing VP for Sprinklr, knows well. Customer experience, she says, is now the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy. 

“Marketing is no longer what brands have to say about themselves,” Chisholm said in an interview last year. “It’s what customers are saying about brands.”

Sprinklr, founded in 2009 and currently headquartered in Midtown South just steps away from the Empire State Building, has quickly established itself as a vanguard within the field of customer experience management (CXM). As companies seek seamless, efficient ways to manage consumer interactions across multiple platforms, Sprinklr has attracted some of the world’s largest brands — including Microsoft, Cisco, Verizon, and McDonald’s — with its tech. 

One of the major keys to Sprinklr’s success? “Sprinklr doesn’t assign sentiment to a single word or phrase” Chisholm explained in a 2020 blog post. 

“Sprinklr’s artificial intelligence capabilities can understand and differentiate which words are positive and negative based on their context. For example, for a healthcare company, the word ‘sick’ might be negative. But for a brand like Red Bull, ‘sick’ is a positive word.” 

Interactions matter

What also sets the company apart from other CXM platforms is its all-in-one user experience: brands can manage their marketing, advertising, research, customer care, and engagement capabilities using a single login, in a unified platform. In other words: instead of toggling from one platform for social media monitoring to another for marketing campaign analytics, Sprinklr keeps it all in one place. This enables businesses to not only seamlessly monitor outbound communications, but also maintain a unified voice across all channels — the key to engagement, brand affinity, and customer loyalty. 

The company combines its unified platform with sophisticated AI tools that not only inform companies on customer preferences, but the reasons why they act the way they do, allowing clients to make more data-driven advertising and marketing decisions going forward. Approximately 500 million conversations and 18 million consumer cases are captured on the platform each day, while Sprinklr’s AI tool makes around 150 billion predictions each month. 

“When you and I speak one on one, it’s easy for us to listen,” Sprinklr CEO and founder Ragy Thomas said in a 2021 Collision Conference interview. “But if I’m a brand, especially a large, global brand, I’m listening to hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of conversations. So how do I understand and listen to what everybody is saying?” 

“The answer is obviously you use artificial intelligence and digital listening. You can’t listen to more than one person if you don’t have the technology.”

Thomas chalks much of the company’s success up to its targeting of the “modern customer”: a digital-savvy, online consumer who is highly active and engaged on social media. Sprinklr not only mines customer data from social media and blog posts, but also from more unconventional — and highly innovative — sources like Quora, with whom Sprinklr signed a deal in 2020. The Quora-Sprinklr partnership gives brands access to more than a decade of customer insights — and a leg up on the competition: Sprinklr is the only software platform to offer access to Quora data. 

The importance of managing experiences

The company has also inked two key partnerships: one, with Adobe’s Exchange partner program, which allows Sprinklr clients to integrate with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager and Marketo Engage. A second, with Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), bolsters Sprinklr clients’ ability to engage with customers across various social media channels. 

Partnerships with companies as large as Adobe and Oracle are key to Sprinklr’s exponential growth. If it can integrate with platforms hundreds of Fortune 500 companies use in one shape or another, it only serves to make Sprinklr more accessible and thus a vital part of any brand’s technology stack. 

Sprinklr’s approach is demonstrably effective for its users: Puma, a Sprinklr client since 2018, has increased social media conversions while eliminating the need to manually optimize ads for separate social media campaigns. Cosmetics giant L’Oreal, meanwhile, has entrusted Sprinklr with helping the brand reach its goal of becoming a “100% responsive company.”

The multi-channel, unified platform approach is working for Sprinklr, too: since its founding, Sprinklr has seen exponential growth. In 2016, the company raised $150 million in its first fundraising round, then captured a whopping $200 million in 2020, on a $2.7 billion valuation. 

Sprinklr’s bright future

Sprinklr, which currently has approximately 2,000 employees across 22 offices in 15 countries, is now preparing an IPO, after reporting a 19.3% revenue hike for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2021. Its initial offering, backed by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, will see 19 million shares offered at $18 to $20 each. Sprinklr will trade under the ticker CXM.

Sprinklr’s growth — and market dominance — positions it as a leader in the CXM field, which is itself seeing enormous expansion: in 2019, the CXM market size was estimated to be more than $8 billion; this number is likely to increase to more than $21 billion by 2027. 

“The connected consumer now has more information about your product and services than [your company],” Thomas said in an interview on CNBC’s Mad Money. “There’s a lot of big companies that want to play in our space. I believe that this is the next big enterprise software opportunity.”