Sprinklr has made quite the splash in the CCaaS market over the past 12 months, signing some of the biggest deals in the space.
Despite the Sprinklr Service platform only launching in January 2022, leading telecoms, healthcare, and finance brands have selected it as their CCaaS platform of choice.
Two years ago, some may have doubted whether a vendor best known for social listening tech could cope with the complexity of enterprise contact centers. Yet, Sprinklr quickly dispelled such concerns.
Contract wins, such as its 40,000+ seat deal with Deutsche Telekom, proved that the vendor could compete at the forefront of the enterprise CCaaS market.
The charismatic Ragy Thomas, Founder & CEO of Sprinklr, led that quick-fire success, setting out his vision for the space – and the market reacted (and continues to react) strongly.
In December, Thomas hailed “another solid quarter across the board with record levels of profitability supported by strength in our Sprinklr Service product suite.”
However, despite its CCaaS momentum, Sprinklr’s management team surprisingly revealed that its growth was set to decelerate – causing its stock to plummet by 33 percent.
What Happened, and How Sprinklr Is Fighting Back?
In December, Sprinklr issued preliminary earnings guidance, predicting its revenues will increase by ten percent in 2024. That fell far short of Wall Street’s consensus estimates of 15 percent growth.
Sharing the forecast, Manish Sarin, Chief Financial Officer at Sprinklr, affirmed that the vendor needed to “refocus … go-to-market efforts to better align [its] resources across all product suites.”
In doing so, he hinted that Sprinklr’s attempt to give its CCaaS platform scale achieved such startling success that it had skewed the business’s focus from its overarching Unified CXM platform.
Three months later, Thomas seemingly confirmed this during an earnings call:
We over-rotated to CCaaS and [suffered from] a difficult macro-economic condition that drove elevated churn.
Yet, after some soul-searching at Sprinklr, the CEO declared: “We now have the clarity on how to best position this company for our next phase of growth.
“[We have] made several substantive changes across the organization. This includes investment in our leadership team and enhancements to our operational rigor.”
The Sprinklr C-Suite Shake-Up
As part of Sprinklr’s investment in its leadership team, the vendor appointed former board member Trac Pham as Interim Chief Operating Officer in January.
In the role, Pham focuses on improving organizational structure, increasing cross-function collaboration, and “bringing operational rigor” to the business.
Shortly after the announcement, Scott Harvey became the vendor’s first-ever Chief Customer Officer, driving increased customer-centricity across sales, delivery, and service teams to “accelerate go-to-market efficiencies”.
Now, Sprinklr has announced Amitabh Misra as its new Chief Technology Officer. He has joined the business from Adobe, where he led the global R&D organization responsible for developing the Adobe Experience Platform.
“He has invaluable industry experience, extensive experience in scaling businesses, and a deep understanding of AI,” said Thomas. “We are excited to have him onboard soon.”
Each addition to the C-suite aims to drive a “more structured cross-functional and disciplined approach” for the year ahead. As Thomas confirms:
We feel very good that we have a clear plan and we’ve brought in the right people with the right experience, and we are heads down focused on executing.
Despite the Refocus, Sprinklr’s CCaaS Success Mounts
Despite its confessed “over-rotation” to CCaaS, Sprinklr remains committed to the market – announcing another megadeal with BT earlier this month.
“We expect CCaaS to be a growth driver,” confirmed Thomas. “But, we also expect that renewed focus to start yielding better results in core as the quarters progress.”
Indeed, CCaaS played an outsized role last year in bringing new customers to the business, helping Sprinklr grow its overall install base by 21 percent.
Thomas sees great potential for pushing that much higher if its “core” business can pick up some of the slack. He said:
While we are pleased with this growth, it’s important to note that we’re only at a four percent penetration of our target market of 43,000 named companies.
The core business may entice many of these. Yet, so will CCaaS, and Sprinklr will continue to push innovation in the space forward.
Last quarter, it released new features and enhancements to Sprinklr Service, expanding its channel offerings for Microsoft Teams and Slack.
In addition, it enhanced the conversational analytics module inside the CCaaS platform to more quickly run root cause analysis across a contact center’s top call drivers.
What’s Driving Sprinklr’s Continued CCaaS Success?
Thomas refused to pour cold water over Sprinklr’s competitors when asked to detail the differentiators contributing to the vendor’s mounting CCaaS success. But, he noted:
Our win rate is pretty high, and that comes from the fact that we have built a unified platform from the ground up.
The CEO then suggested that Sprinklr typically displaces between six to 20 point solutions when it enters the contact center – from knowledge to workforce management.
That mishmash is a of competitor solutions – not woven together – is something that Sprinklr promises to solve.
As Thomas stated: “Ours is just clean, pure, everything works with everything else. And then we integrate with all the external systems, and everything is based on AI.”
For more from Thomas and the Sprinklr team on its vision for the future of CCaaS platforms, read our article: The Evolution of CCaaS: From Monolithic Stacks to Cloud-Native Platforms
