Sprinklr bolsters customer care value proposition with acquisition of Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction’s origins were as a freemium online community solution. It was rapidly adopted mostly by SMBs. The company started to focus on the enterprise market in 2012 and completed the build out of an enterprise solution by late 2013.

Today Get Satisfaction hosts about 1,000 communities, 300 of which are for enterprise companies. Enterprise communities include the Pampers Diaper product line for Procter & Gamble, and the TV group of Korean electronics company LG. Get Satisfaction’s primary use case is customer care, but it also supports product research and marketing. Get Satisfaction’s enterprise edition was typically sold for $30-50k per year per community, and as high as $100k depending on add-on modules and services.

Get Satisfaction is rated positively on TrustRadius with an average “likelihood to recommend” score of 8.0 out of 10. In Q1 2015, 140 unique people visited TrustRadius to research Get Satisfaction. This compares to 2,047 for Sprinklr, and 552 for competitor Lithium across its community and Social Web product lines. Sprinklr is rated 8.5 out of 10, and is a Top Rated product in our Buyer’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Management Software.

Sprinklr’s stated motivation for the deal is to provide a more cohesive solution for Customer Care spanning private community and third-party social networks. “You cannot be effective without having a full view of the customer. We are connecting the various parts of the customer experience”, Jeremy said.

Rahul shared that he and his board found Sprinklr’s vision appealing. They felt it was inevitable that branded communities would need to be more tightly integrated with third-party social networks. “Brands need to be able to interact with their customers, wherever they are”, said Rahul. He went on to share that while about 50% of the traffic to Get Satisfaction communities comes from search engines, with third-party social networks and company websites being the next strongest contributors. Despite their existing integration with Sprinklr, the experience for users was a little bit disjointed and they now have the opportunity to unify around a common identity and customer experience.

When asked if the deal was in part motivated by Get Satisfaction competitor Lithium’s acquisition of social customer care software provider, SocialDynamx (now Lithium Social Web), both Jeremy and Rahul said that was not a factor. My view is that both transactions call into question whether private community software remains a viable stand-alone category.