Sprinklr released several agentic AI tools and copilots and previewed others designed to automate marketing, customer service and customer feedback — and to bridge marketing and service processes.
Available now are Sprinklr AI Agents, a low-code agent builder platform; Sprinklr Copilot, an agent-assist tool for customer service that offers contextual help during calls and summarizations afterward; and AI Customer Feedback Management, analysis tools for solicited survey feedback and unsolicited customer input on channels such as social media.
Telephony for its contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platform, which the company said is already being used by customers in more than 100 countries and is handling more than 2 million calls a day, is planned for November release.
In January, Sprinklr plans to release workforce management tools that can orchestrate collaboration between human and AI agents. The company is also developing agent customizations for 18 vertical industries, including banking, retail and telecommunications. Sprinklr plans to roll out the first five this week, and the rest are scheduled for release through next January.
Customer service teams have adopted generative and agentic AI faster than other facets of CX because they were ready for the technology, said Abhishek Priyam, vice president of product management at Sprinklr. Not only had service teams adopted rules-based chatbots before the rise of generative AI, but they also had hardened metrics to measure contact center performance and could demonstrate strengths and where improvements were needed.
“A lot of agentic workflows were built very early just by replacing NLP [natural language processing] with generative AI; that acted as a foundation for speeding up customer support adoption,” Priyam said. “That particular business function was already ahead — and people started to double down on [AI].”
Sprinklr launched in 2009 as a social media management platform but has since expanded more deeply into CX by adding marketing workflows, email support, live chat, conversational commerce and CCaaS. When the company released its CCaaS in 2022, it quickly followed with a 40,000-agent contact center deal with Deutsche Telekom. That set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to a new CEO and the retooling of its product line.
Marketing, service remain siloed
Marketing and service have a difficult time collaborating because of challenges in both data access and digitization of operational processes, said Justin Robbins, founder of independent CX technology research firm Metric Sherpa.
This can lead to situations such as, for example, marketing wishing they had a particular insight into their company’s customers to inform a campaign — and it turns out that customer service had that intel all along but didn’t know how to aggregate and share it.
In another example, marketing might roll out a big promotion unbeknownst to the contact center, which gets inundated with calls without warning or preparation to respond. Robbins said this was common when he ran a contact center for a well-known brand in the 2000s.
“We had one [in a story] on the front page of USA Today that we didn’t find out about until we picked up the paper in the break room and the phone started ringing,” Robbins said. “This is the kind of stuff that happens at businesses of all sizes today.”
Sprinklr’s AI agents and copilots have the potential to bridge the collaboration gap between marketing and service for users who have well-defined processes and data accessible for systems to process in advance of their AI implementations, Robbins said. They also need to imagine business strategies for using the proactive customer communications that AI can suggest to improve outcomes, such as better customer satisfaction and increased sales.
In fact, many AI technology vendors have released powerful tools with deep technical capabilities. But customers struggle to keep up.
“It’s absolutely exceptional to see the level of capability that’s being developed across the board,” Robbins said. “But think about it from the standpoint of a car, where most people struggle to just back out of the driveway. Now we’ve put them in a supercharged vehicle that can go zero to 200 in three seconds. It’s just too much.”
Sprinklr previewed and released these AI features during its CXUnifiers user event in Nashville Sept. 29 to Oct. 1.
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.