Sprinklr: A New CEO But the Same Vision for a Unified CX PlatformSprinklr: A New CEO But the Same Vision for a Unified CX Platform

On November 5, 2024, customer experience platform company Sprinklr appointed Rory Read president and CEO and announced that visionary founder Ragy Thomas would continue as chairman of the board. During the Sprinklr financial analyst call on December 4, 2024, Read discussed some of the reasons he joined Sprinklr and outlined some of the reasons the change in leadership was considered necessary.

On January 30, 2025, during Sprinklr's quarterly meeting for industry analysts, Read was introduced and answered our questions—some similar to those of the financial analysts, some different. Below, I highlight issues and provide a picture of Read's plans for Sprinklr for 2025 and beyond.

Sprinklr Leadership Shift Reflected Need to Retrench

In June 2024, in conjunction with the reporting of the first quarter of fiscal calendar 2025, Sprinklr announced that Trac Pham, then interim COO, had been named co-CEO. The company also revised downward revenue forecasts for 2027. In the next earnings call, September 5, 2024, Pham said during his remarks, "We acknowledge the near-term challenges we are facing, including lower net bookings we've been experiencing over the past few quarters. This is due to execution challenges exacerbated by macroeconomic factors." 

Two months later, Read was brought in. In his conversations with the financial and industry analysts, Read was transparent, discussing the issues he and the leadership team are working to address. They provide a blueprint for Sprinklr's fiscal year 2026, which began February 1, into fiscal 2027.

Source: Sprinklr

Simplifying and Focusing Offerings

Sprinklr’s platform has four pillars: Service, Social, Marketing, and Insights (i.e., analytics). In the analysts’ call, Read divided those four pillars of the Sprinklr into two categories: core and service. Core refers to the Social, Marketing, and Insights pillars, while the Service pillar includes CCaaS and digital engagement, i.e., interaction management for tens of social and messaging channels.

Caption: Sprinklr

Alt tag: Sprinklr Platform: Built to Unify CXM

Since its announcement in 2022, Sprinklr’s CCaaS offering has been a key focus of the company. However, there is an admission that "core" solution innovation has lagged as development resources have been shifted to building out the CCaaS solution.

Why the shift of resources to CCaaS? In my June 2023 post, Sprinklr's Journey from Social Media Management to CCaaS Market Disruptor, I shared a Sprinklr CCaaS graphic showing the contact center components Sprinklr envisions in its final product. In it, Sprinklr stated that it was building a complete CCaaS platform that would replace 10 different point solutions, including workforce management, quality management, conversational AI, etc.

Read repeatedly uses the phrase “Grow the core, and harden and expand the Services base” to refer to product capability and market penetration. He is shifting product development resources back to the core portfolio and working on productizing Service pillar components included in customer contracts.

Tailoring and Streamlining Go-to-Market Structure

"It will take some time to develop and execute our go-forward strategy," Read told the financial analysts in September. Four months later, the company shows signs of progress. Read hired a Chief Administrative Officer, Joy Corso, In the role, Corso leads both the Marketing and Culture & Talent organizations. She is focused on strengthening market position, customer and employee engagement, talent development, and culture change.

Read is committed to delivering what was promised to Deutsche Telecom in a 40,000 agent seat deal in 2023 and in other deals before his tenure. However, he is also clear that he will no longer approve contracts that promise capability that is either too customized or too far out to predict availability accurately. Read says this is being accomplished with disciplined account management and deal reviews.

In addition to increased sales management rigor, Read is working to rebalance sales resources. Just as product resources have over-rotated in the past two years in favor of building Service features, the same can be said about hiring people and dedicating scarce sales resources to CCaaS. Read has already re-balanced sales headcount and product resources between Service and the core pillars.

Have CCaaS Decisions Become CX Platform Decisions?

Most of Sprinklr's 150 $1 million annual revenue accounts are customers with either two or three of the CX platform pillars described above—but, as of today, typically not CCaaS. Just as CCaaS leaders are focused on selling digital and AI workloads to their customers, Spinklr will increasingly focus on selling CCaaS to its customers over time.Read explains that while the CCaaS suite needs to be “hardened,” by calendar 2026, he expects to "put the hammer down," which I take to mean Sprinklr will heavily market CCaaS as a differentiating component of the platform.

As AI becomes increasingly essential in delivering quality customer experience, CCaaS has become inexorably linked with data, digital and social engagement, workforce engagement management, and analytics applications.

In the past few years, CCaaS leaders like Five9, Genesys, and NICE have broadened their solution set and now describe themselves as CX platforms. Sprinklr comes to the CX platform discussion with social and digital engagement strengths. All of these companies offer AI and analytics to support their other offerings.

So it’s timely that the topic of the CX/Contact Center keynote panel at Enterprise Connect this year is Have CCaaS Decisions Become CX Platform Decisions? One key question for enterprises considering a move from premises to a cloud contact center or from one CCaaS solution to another is how important the voice component of a CX platform decision is. Is the relevance of voice in CX decisions declining? Join us at Enterprise Connect in Orlando on March 19 to hear the positions of AWS, Cisco, Five9, NICE, Salesforce, and customer panelist Johnson Controls International on the issue.