Customer experience is arriving for the unicorns

Customer Experience Unicorns

Just a quick one today, but wanted to note this.

Saw recently on TechCrunch that Sprinklr, an eight-year old unicorn company with a valuation of around $1.8 billion, is moving from a pure social signals platform to a customer experience platform. They’re putting a large suite of marketing activities under one tab, which is called The Experience Cloud — and yes, that’s the same thing Adobe calls their product.

Sprinklr has been buying companies since 2014 in an effort to ultimately make this “pivot.” Towards the end of that TechCrunch article above, the CEO of Sprinklr admits that customer experience management has been around for a long time — I would know, I’ve been there with it — and now it’s finally starting to take off.

I’d agree.

If you’ve listened to a few episodes of my podcast, there’s one theme that resonates more than anything. A lot of times, CCOs or SVPs of Customer Experience are hired because the company wants to be more customer-driven. Unfortunately, change is hard and sometimes it takes a long time, even with a good CCO, to shift the standard ways of thinking. One of the most important things you can do early on is tie customer work to CFO-level work; in other words, prove how customer experience is going to make stakeholders more money. That’s what a lot of companies care the most about.

We’re starting to see more and more customer experience acquisitions in the unicorn world, which I welcome. The note of caution, though, is that acquisitions mean one company’s culture and CX has to be rolled into another company’s. In that process, CX can become disjointed. Make sure to protect against that.

In the meantime, what’s your take? Do you think customer experience is beginning to represent big money to companies?

 

4 comments to " Customer experience is arriving for the unicorns "

  • Rohan Goel

    Hi Jeanne,

    Extremely relevant post, i keep having the same conversations with all my prospects
    While the answer is not as granular, the ecosystem is willing to invest

    How do you think Customer Experience work can be tied to CFO level work?

    • Jeanne Bliss

      Rohan, I know…this is a bit scary now.

      The CFO we get actively involved in defining success around the growth or loss of the customer asset. It is VERY powerful.
      Jeanne

  • Thomas Willingham

    Good post. Last week, Steven Sinofsky had an interesting series of tweets focused on customer experience.
    https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/852941155054399489

    I think the 9th tweet (out of 12) is especially insightful in dealing with Customer Experience:
    “9/ Rather than staying “busy” listening, right then is the time to re-build a vision, expand to new product areas AND solve new problems.”

    It is important not only to listen, but to take action on what you have learned.
    Thomas

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