Qualtrics has reinforced its CX strategy with back-to-back acquisitions of Customer Experience Management companies Usermind and Clarabridge on the 20th and 29th of July, respectively.
COVID-19 has changed and elevated customer experience expectations across various industries. Today, more than ever, understanding the consumer behavior and preferences that are critical to business survival has encouraged organisations to urgently adopt customer experience strategies and technologies.
A recent report by ResearchAndMarkets.com revealed that the global Customer Experience Management market size is expected to reach USD 27.12 billion by 2028, registering a CAGR of 17.5{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} from 2021 to 2028. The report highlighted the increasing demand for speech analytics due to the growing customer preference for voice commerce and hyper-personalised experience and the need for digital transformation in industry verticals to improve customer engagement and enhance customer experience, among others.
Explaining the significant role of experience management, Alan Webber, IDC’s Program Vice President for Digital Strategy and Customer Experience, said:
“The role of experience management is growing in importance within organisations, and the ability to listen across multiple channels is going to be critical to their future success. Increasingly, customers and employees provide feedback in many different places, and organisations will benefit from a single platform to capture it, uncover meaningful insights, and use them to drive action across their business.”
Reinforcing CX with Customer Experience Management Companies
The recent strategic move by Qualtrics, the creator of the Experience Management (XM) category, to acquire customer experience management companies Clarabridge and Usermind reflects the SAP company’s strengthening presence in the XM space.
Expanding Omnichannel Capabilities with Clarabridge
Before July closed, Qualtrics announced that it has entered into a $1.125 billion definitive agreement to acquire Clarabridge, the leader in omnichannel conversational analytics. The 15-year old, Virginia-headquartered company is known for the Clarabridge Experience Management (CEM) platform that leverages industry-recognized AI-powered text and speech analytics. The platform provides actionable insights from every customer interaction point including social media, emails, support calls, chats, and product reviews.
“With our acquisition of Clarabridge, we’re accelerating our growth and leadership as the world’s #1 experience management company and taking the category we created to an entirely new level,” said Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin. “Together, we’ll give companies even greater power to build deep, trusted relationships with their customers and employees and deliver incredible experiences that everyone will love. We’re excited to welcome the Clarabridge team to Qualtrics.”
Clarabridge’s platform, which has the power to discover and understand critical human nuances such as effort, emotion, and intent, adds to Qualtrics’ solutions stack focused on enhancing customer and employee experiences. Its highly sophisticated natural language understanding that spans 23 languages and over 150 industry models helps organisations better understand the customer experience journey.
“Clarabridge’s ability to help companies discover what their customers are saying about them across unstructured sources and provide meaningful, actionable insights is a perfect complement to the Qualtrics platform,” said Clarabridge CEO Mark Bishof. “What we deliver is far more powerful as part of Qualtrics, and we have an incredible opportunity to accelerate our growth and innovation as part of the world’s #1 experience management company.”
The proposed transaction is subject to receipt of required regulatory approvals and satisfaction or waiver of other customary closing conditions and is expected to close during Qualtrics’ fourth quarter of the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021.
Delivering Experience Orchestration with Usermind
Just about two weeks before the Clarabridge announcement, Qualtrics announced its strategic acquisition of Usermind, the leader in Experience Orchestration (XO). Usermind’s next-generation experience orchestration (XO) platform captures and analyses contextual data at every touchpoint of the customer journey— from website visits and support calls to purchase history and communications preferences– enabling organisations to deliver seamless, personalised customer experiences across any channel and reduce points of friction in real-time.
Usermind was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Journey Orchestration Platforms, Q2 2020 report, receiving the highest score in the Current Offering category.
Brad Anderson, President of Products and Services at Qualtrics, said:
“Usermind will strengthen the Qualtrics XM Directory, the largest human sentiment database with over 4B customer and employee profiles, by bringing in contextual data from any source to create richer customer profiles that include every interaction a customer or employee has with a brand and all of the feedback they’ve provided over time.”
Anderson stressed that with Usermind onboard, organisations can now bring experience and contextual data together with operational data including customer demographics or sales history, analyse it, and automatically take action to shape journeys in real-time and deliver personalised experiences for customers and employees at every touchpoint.
Michel Feaster, Co-Founder and CEO of Usermind, stated:
“We believe combining the best-in-class XM platform with the best-in-class XO platform will unlock new possibilities for CX and Digital teams working together to create and deliver great experiences that power the business. After all X+O= E>!”
