US-based Sprinklr offers a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform. It collects data from over 30 digital channels — including social media and messaging platforms — and publicly available news, blog, and review sites to derive insights and subsequent actions to improve CX for marketers. It claims to have worked with over 1, 400 blue chip clients including Cisco, Procter & Gamble, Salesforce, HDFC Bank among others.
In May, the tech firm rolled out SprinklrAI+, an advanced AI-powered platform that empowers organisations to understand and enhance customer experiences through intelligent insights and automation. In an exclusive interaction with Storyboard18, Arun Pattabhiraman, chief marketing officer, Sprinklr talks about generative AI scope in marketing, enhancing customer experiences and key trends in customer management space.
Edited excerpts:
What’s required to build a brand with strong recall and deep consumer engagement?
To achieve a successful brand, understanding consumer behaviours and preferences is pivotal. In the modern marketing landscape, challenges arise from the use of different platforms for managing customer experiences. Brands traditionally rely on CRM (customer relationship management) systems for transactional and historical data. However, the surge of digital channels led to the adoption of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to compile behavioural data from interactions like website visits, clicks, emails, and social media engagement.
Despite this, the majority of consumer interactions, about 99 percent, occur on external platforms that brands have limited control over. A significant portion of consumer opinion forms through influencer reviews and discussions outside the brand’s direct engagement. Failing to listen to these conversations means missing out on crucial insights. By integrating insights from external digital channels with CRM and CDP data, brands gain a comprehensive view of consumer interactions, allowing for a more strategic customer experience approach.
This integrated data facilitates a unified understanding of consumers across diverse channels. A skincare brand, for instance, operates across various geographies with distinct customer-facing teams using separate platforms. This fragmentation leads to inconsistent experiences for consumers interacting with the same brand in different regions. Forward-thinking brands recognize the need to consolidate publicly available consumer insights on a single platform to enable all customer-facing teams to enhance experiences cohesively.
Notably, nine out of the top ten valuable brands globally, including many of Sprinklr’s clients, choose our platform to address this challenge. The core realisation is that unifying channels, teams, and departments on a single platform is crucial for delivering a seamless and consistent customer experience.
Are there specific brand categories struggling to consolidate their customer engagement platforms that could benefit from assistance?
The need for consolidation spans across all brand categories. Historically, brands have been hindered by technology limitations rather than failing consumers. As consumer interactions transitioned from phone calls to various digital channels, brands adopted multiple point solutions for each channel, resulting in fragmented data. This prevents a seamless customer experience as information is disconnected across platforms. This technical challenge is prevalent across industries, and most companies face this issue.
Despite advancements, many brands still encounter frustrations. Even today, an interrupted call necessitates repeating information to a new agent, reflecting a technology gap rather than brand inefficiency. Forward-looking companies recognise that the solution lies in leveraging technology to unify customer-facing functions. It’s about using technology to bring all channels, departments, and business units into one cohesive platform. This approach is being embraced by progressive brands, many of which we work with. Their journey toward unified customer experience management involves gradually consolidating data and functions, starting with smaller segments before extending to the entire organization. However, while these transformations are underway, the majority of companies are still in the early stages of this journey.
Do you truly believe that AI technology holds the potential to address numerous challenges for marketers? How can they effectively harness its capabilities?
Generative AI is undeniably a game-changer for marketing, particularly in content creation and design. Content marketers and designers benefit greatly as it streamlines research and content generation, reducing time to market. Designers can create high-quality videos and images without the hefty investment in skills and resources, thanks to generative AI. Conversational marketing is another arena transformed by this technology. Traditional chatbots often frustrate users with mechanical interactions. However, generative AI enables human-like conversations, enhancing conversions and overall user experience. This innovation also reflects in customer satisfaction scores. Additionally, generative AI streamlines consumer and competitive research for product marketers. It swiftly compiles valuable insights, from audience to competition, facilitating more efficient and creative campaign conceptualisation. In essence, generative AI revolutionises various facets of marketing, making it a game changer across departments. Yet, marketers, in particular, stand to gain immediate and substantial benefits from its diverse applications.
What inquiries do Indian marketers typically raise, and what immediate challenges are encountered when harnessing AI technology?
In the realm of generative AI, I encounter two types of marketers: those who perceive it as a threat and those who are anxious about missing out on the generative AI wave. Both groups must recognise that the optimal approach is to embrace generative AI as a partner rather than a threat. It’s crucial to understand that human intelligence and skills retain immense value. AI may take time to catch up with human intellect, and even when it does, a human layer of intelligence will be indispensable to refine generative AI outputs. While tools like ChatGPT excel at generating initial drafts, their true potential lies in significantly expediting the content creation process. Thus, my advice to my team is to view generative AI as an ally for collaboration. Another concern among those eager to embrace generative AI is the struggle to find suitable resources for comprehending and mastering this evolving technology. There’s a pressing need for top-notch, practical courses to equip marketers with the necessary skills. Current resources are somewhat limited in fully elucidating the various use cases of generative AI. My team is actively researching valuable resources to compile comprehensive learning materials to bring our internal teams up to speed with this technology.
Turning our focus to India, brand-related challenges here are distinctive. India’s consumer behaviour spans multiple platforms, not just mainstream global social media but also local platforms, posing challenges for generative AI adoption. Furthermore, India’s cultural and linguistic diversity requires localised and regionalized content and campaigns. This introduces an additional layer of complexity that generative AI must address to cater effectively to the Indian audience. Lastly, despite India’s digital adoption, a significant portion of the population remains offline, lacking publicly available data that generative AI relies on. While generative AI functions well in English-speaking urban and tier-one markets, it encounters limitations when transitioning to rural areas and various corners of the country. Hence, marketers need to factor in these nuances when crafting campaigns. Currently, generative AI may not fully cover all these diverse use cases.
How does Sprinklr leverage AI to enhance consumer experiences, and could you share specific examples from India?
Certainly, Sprinklr recognized the potential of data assimilation from various external digital channels, leading us to develop our AI platform several years ago. Now, with the integration of generative AI, we’ve introduced Sprinklr AI Plus, merging our capabilities with the power of generative AI. This synergy unlocks unique possibilities across customer-facing functions. For instance, our social media management platform empowers marketers to automatically generate social posts using generative AI. We aid marketers in crafting responses with the right sentiment and tone before posting, facilitating real-time interactions with content curated by generative AI.
In customer service, our voice bots and AI-based sentiment analysis enhance interactions. For example, HDFC Bank, a recent Sprinklr customer, transformed its contact centre using our platform. With over 10 million text-based interactions and 15 million voice calls monthly, HDFC leverages Sprinklr for comprehensive customer experience management across digital and voice channels. They’ve successfully reduced their average first response time by 50 percent, achieving a 70 percent resolution rate through AI-driven automated tools.
These instances showcase the versatility and impact of Sprinklr AI in enhancing customer engagement. Our solutions empower brands to connect, understand, and engage with their audience more effectively than ever before.
How do you ensure data privacy while ensuring data insights for customers?
When utilising consumer data to extract valuable insights for companies, safeguarding consumer data privacy is paramount. We adhere to strict privacy practices, ensuring that we do not collect any personally identifiable information from consumers without obtaining their explicit consent. Moreover, in many instances, we don’t even require personal details. Our focus is on capturing signals and sentiments that are aggregated and pertain to specific demographics, geographies, or regions. Privacy is a top priority for us, and we are committed to handling end consumers’ data in a manner that is privacy-safe and does not compromise their security.
We’re living in an AI-centric world, but what components of a brand do you believe remain irreplaceable by technology?
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t foresee AI replacing jobs. However, I firmly believe that those who fail to embrace AI will eventually be surpassed by those who do. The competitive landscape is shifting towards proficiency in AI utilization, emphasizing the mastery of prompt engineering rather than the mere ability to operate AI tools.
This evolution of roles is not unprecedented. Consider a few years back when marketing teams relied on armies of analysts for basic reporting tasks, now automated through AI models with higher accuracy. This automation actually opens doors for humans to engage in more value-added endeavours. Particularly, generative AI prompts everyone to adopt a leadership or creative director role. Instead of merely creating designs or content, individuals must now provide precise instructions to generate desired outcomes. This transition demands a level of skill that many frontline marketers and customer service agents might not currently possess. The progression of generative AI offers them the opportunity to enhance their skills, enabling a shift towards more strategic thinking and away from tactical tasks handled by machines.
To be clear, I believe generative AI will not replace humans. The unique qualities of human intelligence, including judgment, intuition, and creativity, continue to set us apart from AI. As of now, AI cannot replicate these aspects. Therefore, the key approach towards generative AI is not to fear it, but to embrace it, becoming proficient in its use