Sprinklr launches Digital Twins, AI versions of brands to tackle CX issues

Sprinklr has introduced a new slate of artificial intelligence tools aimed at helping companies provide enhanced customer experiences. The centerpiece is autonomous and intelligent AI technology that can mirror a brand’s customer-facing team called Digital Twins. In addition, the company is moving into SurveyMonkey’s territory with the launch of AI-powered surveys.

These announcements are another effort by Sprinklr to develop what CEO Ragy Thomas describes as a “completely unified front office.” However, the launches are a bittersweet moment as the company continues to reel after laying off more than 100 employees last week.

What are ‘Digital Twins’?

At first, it might appear that Sprinklr has a customer service chatbot like many others in the customer experience space. The company thinks otherwise. “I’m sure you’ve tried chatbots, which is what you’re thinking [as] digital twins. [They’re] not,” Thomas claims during an interview with VentureBeat. He explains that the “most frustrating part” with chatbots today is when you spend a long time answering questions only for it to error out and ask that you contact customer support.

He argues that Sprinklr’s Digital Twins is a “breakthrough” because it “sits on top of the Sprinklr platform” and automatically supports all integrations made on the backend, is built specifically for the enterprise, and offers a “super easy” experience requiring no “heavy lifting” by customers.

Powered by Sprinklr AI+, companies can build and deploy Digital Twins as a replica of their front-office team. Digital Twins is empowered to make decisions, plan actions, design workflows, and execute tasks without human supervision. Thomas describes it as an extension of the human agent. “When you speak to my Digital Twin, it handles everything. But when it doesn’t — and it can’t—when [customers connect with a human representative], it will feel like we’re picking up the conversation. And that’s the magic of the Digital Twin,” he claims.

By default, the autonomous agent will attempt to provide a solution to a customer issue. However, if it can’t, it will hand off the inquiry to the best available agent and then assist the representative with generating a response. If successful, the human agent can pass the conversation back to the Digital Twin for follow-up.

Though some organizations may choose to deploy conversational agents for each use case or channel, Sprinklr’s is more universal. It can help employees with their tasks, attend meetings on their behalf, communicate internally and externally, and recommend strategies. It can also be used to represent teams, helping departments craft end-to-end marketing campaigns, for example. Finally, it can be deployed across the entire company to be the internal and external “face” of the brand.

Thomas envisages Digital Twins as the front of a company’s brand one day. “I see a day where every ad will have a QR code. Instead of taking you to a static web page, which is what it does today, it should take you to a living, breathing version of your Digital Twin, which knows that you’re interacting with that campaign at that time but will seamlessly connect to anywhere.”

Sprinklr boasts that Digital Twins does not rely on hardcoded business processes and can operate across different channels. It can be trained with little to no coding knowledge required, centrally managed and learns in a manner similar to humans. It has access to defined data and systems, policy and safety guidelines, and instructions on processes to use for certain tasks.

Thomas describes the product as offering a “very seismically different approach” and is betting big that Sprinklr’s customers will embrace Digital Twins. There’s a growing market for Digital Twins, with the technology being used in fashion, focus groups, clinical trials, and semiconductor manufacturing.

Sprinklr’s Digital Twins is in limited availability today with a few partners. The company says it will release pricing when the tool becomes generally available later this year.

Sprinklr debuts AI-powered surveys

Another feature Sprinklr is introducing is Sprinklr Surveys, a new feature coming to its Insights product. Like traditional questionnaires, these AI-powered ones allow organizations to poll their customers and gain actionable and complete insights into what they should be doing next. This tool is the company’s latest foray into the Customer Feedback Management space, putting it in more direct competition with SurveyMonkey, HubSpot, Medallia, and Qualtrics.

It’s something Thomas isn’t shying away from: “Now you can potentially think of us replacing Qualtrics or Medallia,” he remarks.

Sprinklr Survey shirks the tried-and-true questionnaire format, electing to generate inquiries that are conversational and interactive. Sprinklr customers can also have the AI develop and publish styled questionnaires based on their company’s brand assets and guidelines.

This feature also supports hypothesis testing, allowing teams to validate survey results by comparing the data to “large volumes of unsolicited social and review data.” Doing so will give teams greater confidence and better inform them of what steps they should take next.

“Sprinklr Surveys help enterprises redefine their CFM process by combining solicited survey feedback with unsolicited feedback and internal business data to derive meaningful, actionable insights. Modernized surveys with conversational UI are the future of research and critical for brands that want to accurately capture feedback from customers.”

This tool is not yet available to the general public. If you want access, Sprinklr requests you contact your account or salesperson to have a demo set up.