2018 North American Social Suites Customer Value ...Journal of Marketing Research: August 2006, Vol....

2018 North American Social SuitesCustomer Value Leadership Award

2018

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

© Frost & Sullivan 2018 2 “We Accelerate Growth”

Contents

Background and Company Performance ........................................................................ 3

Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 3

Customer Impact and Business Impact of Sprinklr .................................................... 4

Conclusion........................................................................................................... 7

Significance of Customer Value Leadership .................................................................... 8

Understanding Customer Value Leadership .................................................................... 8

Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 9

Customer Impact ................................................................................................. 9

Business Impact ................................................................................................... 9

Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices ................................................................................................................. 10

The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 11

Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 11

About Frost & Sullivan .............................................................................................. 11



Background and Company Performance

Industry Challenges

As a means of gauging brand equity and consumer engagement, social channels are

ramping up and growing in importance, while traditional engagement channels are slowing

and winding down. These social media and engagement platforms have transformed the

media and communications landscape drastically in the last 10 years, but brands and

marketers are struggling to navigate the new environment. Social channels can seem an

afterthought for many decision makers until it becomes a critical touch point in a crisis, or

with an unfortunate headline-grabbing gaffe, or when poor reviews drive down traffic and

public perception.

Consumer access to and the ability to share information and product/service/brand reviews

is unparalleled in the current digital landscape. Posted online reviews are increasingly crucial

in buyer’s decision making, as purchasing and sales move online. Recent studies show that

the impact of negative reviews may be more significant than the impact of positive reviews

and that the more content in the review the more significant weight readers grant it.1 An

emerging body of research suggests that while positive reviews are more common than

negative ones, the balance between them carries significance; for as the overall number of

reviews increases, the authority of the negative reviews diminishes. In a study of hotel

properties, findings indicated that in addition to examining and correcting the cause of

negative reviews, hoteliers should seek to increase the number of reviews overall.2

An initial wave of social monitoring, digital advertising, and marketing solutions providers

created a fragmented space—giving way to a period of significant consolidation through

mergers, acquisitions, and exits. Prospective customers are looking for more streamlined

methods to manage omnichannel advertising and marketing campaigns and to merge daily

customer experience with strategic brand building. Consequently, service providers are

going niche or growing horizontally.

Frost & Sullivan affirms that brands and organizations developing a social customer care

program will require essential elements: developing best practices, achieving buy-in from

stakeholders across an organization, and recognizing that social and mobile first applications

are where the consumers conduct discourse.

1Beaton, Caroline. "Why You Can’t Really Trust Negative Online Reviews." The New York Times, June 13, 2018.;

and Judith A. Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin (2006), The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews. Journal of Marketing Research: August 2006, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 345-354. 2 Santiago Melián-González, Jacques Bulchand-Gidumal, and Beatriz González López-Valcárcel (2013), Online

Customer Reviews of Hotels: As Participation Increases, Better Evaluation Is Obtained, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly Vol 54, Issue 3, pp. 274 – 283.



Simultaneous with omnichannel pressures, solutions providers will experience demand for

more vertical-specific knowledge and delivery models. Moreover, as devices proliferate,

service providers must rapidly respond to new product and support categories as they enter

the end-to-end interaction chain. 3

The fragmentation across social platforms and customer touch points pose a complex

problem as brands and marketers seek to shape and coordinate a unified customer

experience. Beyond customer relationship management systems or social monitoring

dashboards, an effective strategy requires faster action and tighter integration to achieve

unified and proactive engagement. In the moment of customer engagement, brands need

rapid methods to respond at scale and a seamless escalation from self-service to assisted

service. Moreover, the silos of data and departments hinder an organization from realizing

more profound and longitudinal insights. Compared to the near-term demands of customer

service, the longer-term analysis to inform strategic planning and proactive policies require

an extensive toolset.

While brands and platforms have more data gathering potential than ever before, gathering

and making use of the data in an ethical manner that is effective for client goals remains

questionable. In a market that can devolve to spam messaging and questionable customer

behavior tracking, brands and advertisers need an established and transparent partner.

Moreover, coordinating actions across channels require breaking down silos and analyzing

data from myriad campaigns with a broad perspective remains a challenge. Effective tools

for truly omnichannel advertising campaigns will minimize wasted/duplicated effort and

media spend while enabling users to monitor and control campaigns quickly and easily

across channels and bidding systems.

Customer Impact and Business Impact of Sprinklr

Previously recognized by Frost & Sullivan, as a Growth Excellence Leader in social media

monitoring in 2016, Sprinkler has developed a full spectrum social customer experience

management platform. Based in New York City, and founded in 2009, Sprinklr’s more than

1,400 employees work to serve over 1,500 global brands, including Allstate, McDonald’s,

Lenovo, Microsoft, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Santander, SAP, Shell, Verizon, and

Visa. Valued at $1.8 billion, Sprinklr helps companies create one-to-one, human connections

– at scale – across 26 different social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

A Vision to Solve the Customer Experience Dilemma

Impressing Frost & Sullivan, Sprinklr recognized that social media management is the

foundation for successful customer experience management. The company’s unified social

media management platform enables brands to connect public data from 350M sources in

Social Listening to the ability to take action in Social Engagement, Social Advertising, and

3 Customer Engagement in North America, 2017: Digital Transformation of Customer Experiences, (Frost &

Sullivan, June 2017).



Social Customer Care. From a mountain of data, Sprinklr takes a holistic, 360-degree

perspective for how to manage customer experience relations and help brands build one to

one relationships with consumers.

Sprinklr expands the scope of consideration and leverages insights across several consumer

touch points. The individual and aggregate multiplicity of social channels are crucial for

optimizing engagement and dialogue about brand and products—these are the places users

and consumers are sharing and giving unsolicited feedback. Consumers are more in control

of conversations than ever before, able to broadcast and magnify opinions and the voice of

the brand and it is incumbent upon brands to engage and provide services in these spaces.

Sprinklr helps brands tackle the challenge of reaching, engaging and listening to customers

across channels, at scale. With a single platform and codebase, Sprinklr is able to use

listening data to power insights across an organization. Marketing, customer care and

advertising teams share one integrated view of the customer in Sprinklr. Additionally

Sprinklr’s unified codebase and single global instance deployment enables enterprises to

keep building out their Social CXM functionality on Sprinklr. Because each Sprinklr product

leverages the same core functions and customer profile, they deliver integrated end-to-end

functionality while also out-performing single-purpose point solutions.

A Variety of Tools for Navigating Each Touch Point

Sprinklr demonstrates a unique approach in helping help brands navigate this complex

problem through consolidated vision, with the core platform, social cloud, and experience

cloud extensions for marketing, advertising, research, commerce, and care. With the only

platform in the space that brings together the spectrum of capabilities in a single

environment with consistent user experience, Sprinklr enables coordinated action and

transportable insights from one cloud to another. Using deep integrations to the leading

social platforms and legacy customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Sprinklr

users can create lookalike audiences, export data across clouds, and use powerful

segmentation tools.

The Sprinklr Core Platform for content management offers a single location for content

management and automating audience management at scale. The core platform also

generates a centralized view for measuring content and business performance, as well as

real-time policy governance.

Building on the Core Platform, the Sprinklr Social Cloud unifies publishing and engagement

across 26 major social channels, distributes workflows among customer service agents

employee advocates, consolidates robust social listening analysis of conversations online,

and presents a compelling social and business data visualization feature—demonstrating the

return on investment and how social channels affect the entire business.



Released in 2017, five extensions of the Experience Cloud complement one another and

integrate with legacy systems organizations already use, such as email and CRM systems.

The Marketing Cloud, Advertising Cloud, Research Cloud, Care Cloud, and Commerce Cloud

coordinate actions and share insights across the board for a “holistic” way to manage

customer experiences with a brand.

Driving Innovation with Artificial Intelligence

Sprinklr has been a leader in innovation, launching its Intuition artificial intelligence (AI)

layer in 2017. Most prominent for social listening and customer care functions, Intuition

automates workflows for the massive amount of inbound messages, categorizing the

message content and routing it according to priority and category. With machine learning

training, Intuition can recognize taxonomy of customer comments and sentiments to know

what customer are saying broadly about a brand or a particular location. A smart alert

feature detects anomalies in user content and messages online, recognizing a crisis or peak

in mentions based on historical trends. Intuition’s dynamic AI distinguishes between false

alarms and gives warning of growing emergency or viral spread, beyond simple threshold

alerts.

Rock-solid Tech Stack Built for Growth

In the challenging and rapidly changing social channel landscape, Sprinklr stands out with

its dynamic stack built to leverage integrations and monitor billions of messages and comb

through petabytes of data daily. With tight application program interface (API) integrations

with the leading social channels and several legacy systems, Sprinklr’s technology stack

harmonizes several silos of data and systems of record. These dynamic APIs also enable

Sprinklr’s ability to support channels when they update and expand, as well as continue to

extract value from legacy systems which produce structured and unstructured data. Over

the last several years, the company integrated its technology acquisitions and recoded the

platform to exist in one unified code base. Bringing all the data under one umbrella and

making a single platform to access content and audience management capabilities makes

Sprinklr’s offering highly useful across a horizontal organization that seeks to be more

customer-centric.

The rock-solid framework will enable Sprinklr to continue innovation in AI and deliver

enhancements to each cloud area and extend capabilities with new and changing channels

moving forward into the future. In the most acute example, new European data protection

laws (GDPR) require significant alterations in business processes for many companies.

Sprinklr provided an early capability release to customers, making the company fully

compliant— Sprinklr’s privacy capabilities follow guidelines for profile deletion, and

coordination for case management and workflow process to track and audit the process for

maintaining and deleting information. Moreover, Sprinklr will build out deeper industry-

specific verticalization in the platform, and train machine learning algorithms to understand

industry jargon and nuances.



Finally, international expansion is on the horizon from a presence in 13 countries around the

globe—and Sprinklr already identifies and filters 65 languages and provision sentiment

analysis for 22 languages.

Beefing-up the Executive Team to Continue Corporate Growth

Maintaining the company’s core values while the company has grown, Sprinklr has also

fortified itself with skilled and experienced executives as it scales up to the next level. In

early 2018, the company brought aboard high-performing executives, experienced in public

and private companies as well as startups and large enterprises, to shepherded Sprinklr

through new levels of complexity and growth: a new Chief Operating Officer, Chief

Experience and Marketing Officer, and a Chief Culture & Talent Officer. In recent years

Sprinklr has made 13 acquisitions, bringing new customers and expanding its capabilities.

The company demonstrates significant operational and engineering efficiency to integrate it

all together smoothly. Consequently, Sprinklr’s high-speed growth validates the vision and

evolution undertaken to reorganize customer experience journeys.

Conclusion

With customers more empowered than ever to share opinions online via social channels,

brands need a more comprehensive approach to customer interactions. Sprinklr presents a

new vision for helping brands and marketers navigate through each touch point.

Consolidating customer experience through 26 social channels, as well as advertising,

marketing, commerce, and customer care, Sprinklr’s Experience Cloud enables better one-

on-one interactions and informs macro decisions with big data analysis. Bridging data silos

across resource management systems, Sprinklr’s platform leverages insights across the

spectrum so that brands can optimize and consolidate the digital experience management

strategy in the social ecosystem.

For its strong overall performance, powerful platform, and innovative vision, Sprinklr

earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2018 North America Customer Value Leadership Award in social

suites.



Significance of Customer Value Leadership

Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon customers purchasing from a

company and then making the decision to return time and again. Delighting customers is,

therefore, the cornerstone of any successful growth strategy. To achieve these dual goals

(growth and customer delight), an organization must be best-in-class in three key areas:

understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition.

Understanding Customer Value Leadership

Customer Value Leadership is defined and measured by two macro-level categories:

Customer Impact and Business Impact. These two sides work together to make customers

feel valued and confident in their products’ quality and long shelf life. This dual

satisfaction translates into repeat purchases and a high lifetime of customer value.



Key Benchmarking Criteria

For the Customer Value Leadership Award, Frost & Sullivan analysts independently

evaluated two key factors—Customer Impact and Business Impact—according to the

criteria identified below.

Customer Impact

Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value

Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar

offerings in the market.

Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience

Requirement: Customers feel they are buying the most optimal solution that addresses

both their unique needs and their unique constraints.

Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience

Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service and have a

positive experience throughout the life of the product or service.

Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience

Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality.

Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty.

Business Impact

Criterion 1: Financial Performance

Requirement: Overall financial performance is strong in terms of revenues, revenue

growth, operating margin, and other key financial metrics.

Criterion 2: Customer Acquisition

Requirement: Customer-facing processes support the efficient and consistent acquisition

of new customers, even as it enhances retention of current customers.

Criterion 3: Operational Efficiency

Requirement: Staff is able to perform assigned tasks productively, quickly, and to a high

quality standard.

Criterion 4: Growth Potential

Requirements: Customer focus strengthens brand, reinforces customer loyalty, and

enhances growth potential.

Criterion 5: Human Capital

Requirement: Company culture is characterized by a strong commitment to quality and

customers, which in turn enhances employee morale and retention.



Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices

Frost & Sullivan analysts follow a 10-step process to evaluate Award candidates and

assess their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the

Awards are based on close adherence to this process.

STEP OBJECTIVE KEY ACTIVITIES OUTPUT

1 Monitor, target, and screen

Identify Award recipient candidates from around the globe

Conduct in-depth industry research

Identify emerging sectors

Scan multiple geographies

Pipeline of candidates who potentially meet all best-practice criteria

2 Perform 360-degree research

Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline

Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners

Assess candidates’ fit with best-practice criteria

Rank all candidates

Matrix positioning of all candidates’ performance relative to one another

3

Invite thought leadership in best practices

Perform in-depth examination of all candidates

Confirm best-practice criteria Examine eligibility of all

candidates Identify any information gaps

Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates

4

Initiate research director review

Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles

Brainstorm ranking options Invite multiple perspectives

on candidates’ performance Update candidate profiles

Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best-practice positioning paper

5

Assemble panel of industry experts

Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders

Share findings Strengthen cases for

candidate eligibility Prioritize candidates

Refined list of prioritized Award candidates

6

Conduct global industry review

Build consensus on Award candidates’ eligibility

Hold global team meeting to review all candidates

Pressure-test fit with criteria Confirm inclusion of all

eligible candidates

Final list of eligible Award candidates, representing success stories worldwide

7 Perform quality check

Develop official Award consideration materials

Perform final performance benchmarking activities

Write nominations Perform quality review

High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees’ successes

8

Reconnect with panel of industry experts

Finalize the selection of the best-practice Award recipient

Review analysis with panel Build consensus Select recipient

Decision on which company performs best against all best-practice criteria

9 Communicate recognition

Inform Award recipient of Award recognition

Inspire the organization for continued success

Celebrate the recipient’s performance

Announcement of Award and plan for how recipient can use the Award to enhance the brand

10 Take strategic action

Upon licensing, company is able to share Award news with stakeholders and customers

Coordinate media outreach Design a marketing plan Assess Award’s role in future

strategic planning

Widespread awareness of recipient’s Award status among investors, media personnel, and employees



The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards

Research Methodology

Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research

methodology represents the analytical

rigor of our research process. It offers a

360-degree-view of industry challenges,

trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of

Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies.

Too often companies make important

growth decisions based on a narrow

understanding of their environment,

leading to errors of both omission and

commission. Successful growth strategies

are founded on a thorough understanding

of market, technical, economic, financial,

customer, best practices, and

demographic analyses. The integration of

these research disciplines into the 360-

degree research methodology provides an

evaluation platform for benchmarking

industry participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth

and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's

Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined

research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation

of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages more than 50 years of

experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the

investment community from 45 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership,

please visit http://www.frost.com.

360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN

THE CHAOS

http://www.frost.com/

2018 North American Social Suites Customer Value ...Journal of Marketing Research: August 2006, Vol....

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