Sprinklr Lays Out Its New co-CEO Strategy, Aims to Reinvigorate Growth

As the new co-CEO, Trac Pham will keep the ship steady while Ragy Thomas runs around on deck dreaming his next big dreams for Sprinklr

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Sprinklr Lays Out Its New co-CEO Strategy, Aims to Reinvigorate Growth
Contact CentreNews Analysis

Published: June 10, 2024

Charlie Mitchell

Last week, Sprinklr announced Trac Pham as its new co-CEO.

Pham has been interim Chief Operating Officer since January, working closely with Ragy Thomas, the Founder and co-CEO of Sprinklr.

Now, he’ll take complete control of Sprinklr’s operational underbelly, allowing Thomas to fully focus on product and vision.

In this sense, they’ll work together as two halves of one brain.

“We have extremely complementary skill sets,” said Thomas during the earnings call. “I love and live and breathe being in the product, talking to customers, innovating, and thinking about the future. And Trac is very good at all the things [that] have not been good.

“He has already made a solid impact in establishing a consistent operating rhythm, fostering strong alignment across our executive team, and leveraging his operational expertise to set us up for our next phase of growth.

In this new structure, we will maintain the effective collaboration that we established over the last five months and leverage our complementary skill sets to realize our shared vision for Sprinklr.

Co-CEOs Are Nothing New

Sprinklr is not the first business to adopt a co-CEO strategy. Indeed, several organizations have embraced the idea of installing people with different backgrounds as co-CEOs, hoping to attract new perspectives and skills.

Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, and Workday are just some examples from the enterprise tech space.

Yet, the strategy has had mixed success, with internal power struggles sometimes cited as an issue.

Consider when Sprinklr’s enterprise communications rival RingCentral ran with a similar concept last year: the incoming CEO, Tarek Robbiati, left after just three months.

Nevertheless, Sprinklr is enthusiastic about the co-CEO strategy, alongside the opportunity it offers to scale and pivot at a time of significant organizational change.

“Ragy and I are aligned on how our co-CEO structure can drive our success,” said Pham.

What I’ve now experienced first-hand is a company pioneering a technical vision while the rest must catch up operationally.

“But my genuine belief in Sprinklr’s mission and conviction motivated me to join the company in a permanent capacity… and – together – we are committed to delivering the best outcomes for our customers, partners, employees, and investors.”

Pham is not the only C-suite arrival hoping to achieve these goals. Indeed, the CX stalwart also recently onboarded Amitabh Misra and Scott Harvey as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Customer Officer, respectively.

As that suggests, Sprinklr is in the midst of a significant transition, targeting increased scalability to reinvigorate growth.

How Sprinklr Hopes to Reinvigorate Growth

Over the past 12 months, Sprinklr has secured landmark CCaaS deals with global healthcare, financial services, and telecoms brands, including Deutsche Telekom and BT.

Yet, as Sprinklr wrestled with those megadeals, it suffered from “elevated churn” in its more conventional social markets. Now, the C-suite shakeup aims to readdress that balance.

Our success in the CCaaS world has put implementation strain on the organization, which we are working through,” acknowledged Thomas.

“The good news is we have been landing planes consistently in each of these, and we’re developing the implementation muscle and building the partnership.

But at this point, one of the things holding us back in CCaaS is our inability to scale any faster than we currently are.

Thankfully, Thomas promises change over the next two quarters “through improved institutional learning, best practices, tools, frameworks, partners, and playbooks.”

However, despite the seemingly urgent efforts to inspire change, Sprinklr continues to grow. Last quarter, it achieved a 13 percent year-over-year (YoY) revenue spike.

Such double-digit growth is rare in the crowded markets in which Sprinklr operates, including the conversational AI and contact center spaces.

That exemplifies how Sprinklr remains a rising force within CX. Now, if its co-CEOs can go further to scale its increasingly complex, multi-faceted business, growth may pick up to 20+ percent, where it was 12 months ago.

With its deal and innovation cycle humming – as evident in its recent Sprinklr Surveys launch and Digital Twin announcement – growth may well lift back up from 2025 onwards.

 

 

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