Before Ragy Thomas built Sprinklr in September 2009, he had already gained the experience of building and scaling three companies. Thomas had helped build a large publicly traded company by 2005. “At that time, I was running the world’s largest email marketing company. Before that I had helped large global companies use email to communicate to customers and prospects,” added Thomas, in a conversation with edge/.
Today, this idea may seem commonplace, but in 2005, businesses simply weren’t using email as a means of communication. To further expand on this, Thomas started Sprinklr in 2009. However, the current version of the product has gone through different stages of evolution and iterations.
The New York-based startup announced in 2020 that it had raised $200 million from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman in a Series G round that values Sprinklr at $2.7 billion. Hellman also bought $300 million in secondary shares of Sprinklr in addition to its primary investment. Sprinklr raised an additional $150 million in convertible-at-IPO debt from investment firm Sixth Street Partners.
The MENA region today is one of Sprinklr’s fastest-growing markets, with significantly high demand both from the public and private sectors. Currently, the Government of Qatar is one of Sprinklr’s customers and has deployed the platform to unify the citizen experience.
Starting with social media engagement
By 2009 the social media world was opening. There were multiple different new channels to communicate with customers – Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Flickr and the list goes on.
The first problem was how do businesses talk to their customers and engage their attention across multiple different channels?
“For smaller businesses, it was just one account, but for businesses like Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Nestle, Nike or Microsoft, this was done across different business units across markets. This meant the large giants had several accounts worldwide. The challenges of calendar planning, content creation, approval, workflow, and publishing reporting, acted as our early problem statements,” said Thomas.
Sprinklr started with publishing and engaging with the customers of these large clients. What the team soon realised was that they were receiving a significant amount of unstructured data across Facebook posts, people talking about brands in their native languages.
“We realised there had to be an intelligent way to communicate, and that begins with the ability to listen to the customers. We started building a listening engine early on that could process unstructured human languages, and extract usable information out of it,” explained Thomas.
This gave the team the ability to gain insights into what the customers were seeing, what products they liked and disliked, the issues they faced, and a competitor’s perspective.
Adding the advertising layer
The next stage in product evolution came when Facebook started changing the way they would allow brands to reach their customers. In a couple of years, brands had gained several followers and subscribers, but soon the access and reach to these followers was cut off by the social media platforms.
To get the reach they needed, brands had to spend advertising dollars. In response, Sprinklr added advertising as an offering. These three offerings – Social publishing and engagement, listening, and advertising became the foundation of the Sprinklr platform of today.
By 2015 Sprinklr had started growing and realised that the platform was also being used for marketing, customer service etc. “We realised that the customers were running research and getting insights to drive the business. So, in response, we started building digital marketing, customer service, and insights on the platform,” added Thomas.
However, today generative AI (gen AI) has made all of this simpler, and faster. Thomas explained for producing multiple versions of content, optimising it for advertising performance all has been made simpler with gen AI.
“We are arguably one of the foremost gen AI platforms for marketing and customer service today. There are options of automated case resolutions, as you can create human like workflows with intelligence. It is about building the right AI conversational engine. With this we are seeing 70 per cent increase in productivity,” said Thomas.
Citing an example of an e-commerce company, he added the company got 47 per cent improvement in productivity for customer service. These are all impacting customer facing functions for large companies. Marketing, and customer facing functions are typically the bulk of any company’s spends, and with Sprinklr, these costs are drastically being reduced.
“We unify the different markets, functions, and channels that companies operate in, across different languages and dialects. This helps gain significant efficiency and reduce costs,” explained Thomas.
The team is now building survey capabilities to augment the unstructured data processing and develop next generation of customer feedback capabilities. The company follows a SaaS-based revenue model.
