Having already procured CentraCX and Spearline earlier this year, customer experience assurance experts Cyara are rounding out 2023 in style with the acquisition of conversational AI testing company QBox.
But what will this mean for the future of both brands?
Announced on the 28th of November, 2023, the acquisition appears to be a natural marriage of two complementary vendors in the CX tech space.
With clients that include Johnson & Johnson, Natwest, and Sky, Qbox’s world-leading conversational AI testing solution will support and enhance Cyara’s existing chatbot training technology.
In acquiring QBox’s expertise, Cyara will take a further step toward maximizing the effectiveness of its chatbot and conversational AI investments, as well as allowing the assurance specialists to provide a broader array of chatbot solutions.
This desire for a more extensive toolkit was mentioned by Alok Kulkarni, CEO and Co-Founder of Cyara:
This acquisition marks a milestone in Cyara’s journey to provide a comprehensive solution for optimizing AI-driven chatbot and voicebot performance.
The Nuts and Bolts
Among QBox’s multitude of assets, arguably the most beneficial to Cyara will be its best-in-class natural language processing (NLP) platform – an area in which Cyara has a vested interest.
Configured to provide real-time feedback on the performance of NLP training data, Qbox’s platform is invaluable in discerning a chatbot’s customer service competence. Integrating this into their portfolio will allow Cyara to significantly streamline their testing process.
It is the merger of these two industry leaders and their tech solutions that appear to excite Benoit Alvarez, CEO of Qbox, who commented:
“By joining forces with Cyara, we bring together our unique capabilities to solve more use cases for a broader customer base.”
“Together, we can accelerate the advancement of conversational AI testing solutions and provide organizations with the confidence they need in deploying and managing conversational AI-driven interactions effectively.”
A Trio of Tech Triumphs
As touched upon above, this certainly isn’t Cyara’s first acquisition rodeo; or even their second for that matter, having acquired Spearline in June and picked up CentraCX in September.
But what do these acquisitions tell us about Cyara’s strategy moving forward?
When it comes to Spearline, there are clear similarities with the Qbox procurement – most notably, the fact that Spearline had recently been making strides in the conversational AI testing space.
Consolidation is another topic that has been present in both cases, with Kevin Buckley, former Spearline CEO and now SVP of Cyara, commenting at the time:
Organizations today are attempting to consolidate the number of vendors they have, and we allow that to happen.
“Some enterprises have previously worked with four vendors to accomplish all their CX testing requirements; now they only need to work with one.”
This was a point also echoed in the CentraCX acquisition, where Cyara outlined its credentials for becoming the first vendor to elevate its solutions from a CX Assurance Platform to a CX Transformation Platform by incorporating CentraCX’s VoC program.
With a clearly defined strategy to become a true ‘end-to-end platform,’ don’t be surprised to see Cyara making more moves in the CX tech space in the not-so-distant future.
