Sprinklr’s Experience Cloud grows larger with purchase of Get Satisfaction

Sprinklr, whose name connotes its history of managing the rain of social postings, has taken another step toward its transformation into a more encompassing Experience Cloud.

The New York City-based company announced today it has acquired Get Satisfaction, a platform that combines a knowledge base with an online community for customer self-service. Deal terms were not made public.

This is Sprinklr’s fifth purchase in 14 months, and the second that acquires a community platform. In February, the company picked up Pluck, which offered forums, review capabilities, and image galleries.

In September, the company bought advocacy marketer Branderati, having previously snapped up social and brand analytics platform Dachis Group last winter and Facebook ad optimization platform TBG Digital last summer.

A week ago, Sprinklr announced $46 million in new funding, its new Experience Cloud initiative, and its status as a startup “unicorn” — a company valued at more than $1 billion.

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Get Satisfaction and Pluck in particular help to build the customer-facing chops of the Experience Cloud initiative, which Sprinklr has described as a “collaborative technology infrastructure that connects all of a brand’s social touch points.”

“The conversations [in Get Satisfaction communities] are not about the weather,” CEO Rahul Sachdev told me. They’re about “solutions to problems, specific questions.”

The community is designed around an intelligent search engine that peruses user-supplied answers as well as a brand-supplied database. Pluck’s communities, he noted, are more focused toward providing sales/marketing info and support.

The Experience Cloud concept provides tools for environments that companies control, like communities, in addition to tools for environments they mostly don’t control, like social networks. For Sprinklr, these brand-controlled properties are “first-party experiences,” the social networks are “third-party,” and the Cloud connects them.

Sachdev assumes the unique title of Vice President of the First-Party Experiences business unit. The San Francisco-based Get Satisfaction will maintain its standalone product and its customer base for the time being, as it begins the integration with Sprinklr and eventually assumes the parent’s brand.

Sprinklr showed me a demo of an additional community type that brands can build with the Experience Cloud. Although the interface was fairly basic — a blog-like design with a few photos and some social sharing tools — it pointed toward the creation of topic- or product-specific communities for like-minded individuals.

Many other platforms similarly offer interest-based community building tools, but the Experience Cloud holds a new angle.

It’s the unified customer profile, where social identity is matched not only to your various selves in disparate social networks, but to your identity in the brand’s customer service, product-selling, and interest-based communities.

“The unified view of the customer,” a cliché among customer-facing vendors, is nevertheless a goal that still eludes marketers. But, where platforms like Adobe have built out their identity-unifying efforts from their marketing campaigns, Spinklr is doing so from the point-of-view of one, big social interaction.