Keith Dawson's Analyst Perspectives

Sprinklr’s analyst day in September was an opportunity for the company to dive deeply into its progress in pivoting its product offerings to align with a broader perception of the market for contact centers and adjacent customer-related applications.

Sprinklr has described its market as “unified CXM,” or customer experience management. This is nominally aligned with how ISG Research defines the new space emerging from the collision of contact center tools with other systems necessary to manage CX at the enterprise level. For Sprinklr, taking this approach involves a bit of messaging finesse combined with a commitment to building out a very broad set of features in the software. There are indications that the company is having success along both tracks.

Of course, messaging along these lines involves persuading a critical mass of buyers that there is no danger or uncertainty involved in taking a non-traditional approach to outfitting contact centers. In other words, it means convincing contact center managers and IT teams that they won't be exposed to a downside by deploying interaction routing that doesn't depend on a standard cloud provider laying down all of the operating software—no penalty in accessing applications, nor future-proofing or in the reliability of the underlying network. ISG Research asserts that by 2028, one-half of the contact centers that replace core platforms will focus that purchase around data tools like CRM or CXM rather than the voice routing engine.

This notion has been gaining credence for several years now and was reiterated by several Sprinklr customers who described their experiences using Sprinklr systems to handle high-criticality customer-facing operations.

On the product development track, Sprinklr provided analysts with a look at the latest iterations of both contact center and extended CX developments. Some are further down the development road than others. Workforce management, for example, still needs several important features that are currently road-mapped or in development.

Sprinklr divides its product set into four related suites, one each for Service, Social, Insights and Marketing. Service now includes a variety of advanced functions like conversational AI, multichannel communications, ticketing and knowledge base management. Some core features of the cloud component include workforce management (still a work in progress) and quality management. It has intriguing analytics and agent-assist features, along with an environment for creating self-service and hybrid bot/human workflows.

Sprinklr is one of at least a dozen companies making a serious run at the contact center market from an adjacent segment. The two most relevant adjacent segments are CRM, which provides expertise in tracking customers and managing the data, and marketing technology, which contributes a revenue-centric and analytics-driven approach to customer relations.

Sprinklr emerged from the marketing technology segment with tools originally built around managing the marketing components of social media. Coming at contact centers from an outsider position presents both challenges and opportunities. Since most of the core technology needed to run a center is mature and (to some degree) commoditized, competition now rests on being able to differentiate based on elements like analytics, automation, data management and AI applications. These areas allow vendors with more enterprise software expertise (like Sprinklr has in marketing) to achieve quick gains.

At the same time, it does put pressure on outside vendors to either create new cloud service tools or build just enough of a portfolio to allow the solutions to ride on top of existing cloud contact center or communication platforms in a bring-your-own-telephony configuration.

Sprinklr performed well Exemplary in ISG Research’s recent CXM Buyers Guide, earning a rating as an Exemplary provider. What emerges from our analysis and from spending time with Sprinklr product teams and executives is a picture of a company eager to have the industry adopt its market redefinition as quickly as possible in order to solidify in buyers’ minds this new idea: Building out and running a contact center is inextricably linked to controlling customer behavior through an enterprise-wide CX program. But this requires getting buy-in from a much wider group of potential stakeholders across the enterprise, which can be challenging, while also earning the confidence of the very risk-averse contact center and IT teams who lead contact center buying decisions.

The customers Sprinklr featured at its analyst conference expressed confidence in the tools and the integrations Sprinklr provided for building enterprise CX. Even as market definitions remain in flux, buyers should look at Sprinklr’s CXM offerings as one potentially valuable approach to melding contact center and CX operations.

Regards,

Keith Dawson