#221 Digital Marketing And Marketing Automation With Ragy Thomas, CEO, Sprinklr

Marketing’s future is digital, personal, and social. Ragy Thomas founded Sprinklr, a startup unicorn and social media management (SMM) system that spans from Facebook to Pinterest, and from marketing to customer care. Tune in for his insights on how to wrangle social into an effective marketing channel without creeping out your customers.

Ragy is a technology visionary, entrepreneur, and investor who has played an instrumental role in the evolution of two business-critical channels for the enterprise: social media and email. As founder and CEO of Sprinklr – the world’s most complete enterprise social technology serving more than 1,000 enterprise brands globally – he is empowering companies to re-imagine their customer-facing operations to manage consumer experiences across every touch point.

Prior to founding Sprinklr, Ragy was the president of Epsilon’s (NYSE:ADS) Interactive Services from 2006 to 2008, and the CTO of Bigfoot Interactive, an email marketing leader that Epsilon acquired in 2005.

Read the complete transcript here:
——————
Check out all the CXOTALK episodes:
——————
Follow us on Twitter:
——————
Excerpt from the transcript:

Michael Krigsman: And so, what does an architecture of that type look like?
Ragy Thomas: Now, you’re going to make me talk about Sprinklr. I was just going to talk about … But, I’ll tell you what you need to know.
Michael Krigsman: But, don’t give us a pitch about Sprinklr.
Ragy Thomas: Dude, if you ask me; if you pay me, I don’t pitch. Just stop pitching. I did that a few years ago. People said, “Pitch me!” I said, on what?
Michael Krigsman: Okay. Tell us what this customer experience architecture needs to look like.
Ragy Thomas: So, the way to do that, in my mind; and we’ve done it a few hundred times for customers, so I know it works; is you isolate every element of customer experience management into channel-agnostic, enterprise-level capabilities.
Let me give you an example. You create really pure content management capability, such as social assets, version them. That sits. All of this entire framework has to sit on an enterprise-federated governance capability. So, every team can be brought into this architecture. Every team can retain its independence, and architecturally, the system supports collaboration escalation coworking notification alerting. So, we’ve invented concepts like “message cues,” “escalation cues,” “suggestion cues,” and, the architecture … You know, once you define these spaces in groups of these spaces dynamically, so I can look at every team in South America or marketing teams around the world, and then basically, you have these cues and visibility that control what you see. Does that make sense?
Michael Krigsman: Yeah. We have an interesting comment from Arsalan Khan on Twitter.
Ragy Thomas: Yeah.
Michael Krigsman: … who makes the comment that “It seems that customer experience is, in a sense, an excuse to transform the company,” because, in order to accomplish the goals you’re describing, it seems like you have to go deeper. It’s deep inside the culture of the organization, so simply layering technology is not going to solve these problems. So, I think that’s his point.
Ragy Thomas: Michael, he is absolutely right. One hundred percent. This is such a huge problem. Huge problem! That’s why we have to be at war with these systemic issues. This is a huge problem. This is a paralyzing problem. This is what, and you know the stats that talk about 50% of the Fortune 500 companies have gone away, and 40% of companies that are left will go away in the next twenty-five . This is from 2000 – 2025. Ninety percent of the world’s biggest companies are going to turn over. This is a huge problem. This is a huge problem that the industry is not coming together to solve, you know?
We are organizing … Sprinklr is organizing a digital transformation summit with the explicit charter, only one agenda: let’s go co-create this industry. We can’t wait for this! So, this is not a Sprinklr agenda, the Sprinklr customer summit, this is a digital transformation summit that we are bringing together with brands and analysts, and experts, and technologists together.
Michael Krigsman: You know, it’s very interesting. When I speak with execs from these large brands who are talking about digital transformation, this cultural piece comes up in every conversation.
Ragy Thomas: Yup.
Michael Krigsman: And so, how do you get this ball rolling that requires both that cultural, organizational change dimension, as well as the technology to enable the communication across silos and boundaries that you were describing earlier?