The concept of going digital has been gaining ground in the CX space for years. This is by no means new. However, in the midst of the current crisis, this motivation has since accelerated, pushing organisations to embrace digital solutions and the digital customer experience. As a result, the CX space remains a thriving one, with more and more solutions sprouting up and many being bought out by larger, more all-encompassing CX players. In fact, so much has happened in the last year, that we’d like to shed some light on these movements.
In this article, we will outline the biggest CX acquisitions in 2020.
What drives acquisitions in the CX space?
According to Faith Adams, Senior Analyst at Forrester,
CX is finally getting its due – truly becoming a critical priority for many companies. And because of this, the vendor space to support it, both technology and services, continues to rapidly evolve. With this, there continues to be convergence – often happening by way of acquisition. This convergence is not just about specific features and functionality of CX tools, it is about the convergence across the business – employee experience, customer insights, market research, data and analytics, and more.
There’s a lot happening in the CX space and we’re certain there will be much more happening in the coming months and years. Two key areas that seem to be driving these movements include crowding and ‘thin slicing’:
Crowding within the CX space
If you want to measure and manage your customer experience, you have a lot of options these days in terms of solutions. In fact, many of the tools used for capturing and analysing customer feedback are commoditising. This will present a lot of competition within the market for the best solution and with it, a lot of opportunities for the bigger players in terms of acquisition.
Targeting ‘Slices of CX’
We’re also seeing a lot of large CX players like Medallia and Qualtrics offering ‘full stack’ solutions, meanwhile there are still plenty of the more focused startups that are setting their sites on just a ‘slice of CX’ rather than the whole space. In other words, they’re providing specific solutions such as visual website feedback or mobile analytics. And generally speaking, these smaller, new competitors have more flexibility, a sharper focus and lower costs than their full stack counterparts.
It will be interesting to see how these two trends play out in the coming year. Now let’s take a look at the biggest CX acquisitions that took place this past year.
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A List of the Biggest CX Acquisitions
Here’s what’s happened in the market so far this year, starting with one of the biggest buyers: Medallia.
Medallia acquires several tech companies
Medallia – ‘one of the undisputed leaders in CX’ – seems to have gone on a bit of a buying spree this past year. They’ve dipped their toes into not only voice data and video feedback content but also data analytics and smaller CX management platforms. Here are their latest transactions in the CX space…
January 2020 – To kick off 2020, Medallia immediately came out with a press release announcing its acquisition of San Antonio-based data analytics company Promoter.io Inc.
Learn more about the Promoter.io acquisition here.
February 2020 – Then just a month later Medallia acquires LivingLens, a video feedback platform which captures video signals and transforms them into speech, emotion and sentiment. This acquisition will enable Medallia to leverage video feedback alongside social, voice, app and web within Medallia’s solution.
Learn more about the LivingLens acquisition here.
April 2020 – Medallia acquires Voci Technologies, a real time speech to text platform which delivers powerful insights that drive contact center optimisation and improved customer experiences.
Voci transcribes 100% of live and recorded calls into text that can be analyzed quickly to determine customer satisfaction, adding a powerful set of signals to the Medallia Experience Cloud
Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia
Learn more about the Voci Technologies acquisition here.
May 2020 – Then later on down the road, Medallia acquired Strikedeck. Strikedeck is a B2B customer success and experience management platform. This combination of solutions will allow users to leverage customer information on renewals, product adoption and usage, subscriptions, billing and more. It is also designed to derive intelligent B2B customer journeys through deep artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and predictive analytics.
Learn more about the Strikedeck acquisition here.
September 2020 – Just recently, Medallia announced its acquisition of Sense360, a behavioural consumer intelligence and benchmarking leader. This will create the comprehensive real-time insights needed to make strategic decisions on how to grow a business.
Learn more about the Sense360 acquisition here.
Accenture acquires SAP partner Maihiro
February 2020 – Accenture acquires SAP partner Maihiro, a provider of customer experience and customer relationship management consulting, optimisation and ongoing enhancement services. The acquisition will help Accenture create solutions for clients that drive innovation and transformation in marketing, sales and customer service.
Learn more about the Maihiro acquisition here.
Verdane acquires Confirmit
February 2020 – Verdane, a specialist growth equity investor acquired Confirmit – global solutions provider for Customer Experience, Employee Experience and Market Research. So what does Verdane plan on doing with Confirmit? According to their press release, ‘Verdane is the major investor in data visualisation reporting firm Dapresy and will merge the two companies’.
Dapresy has comprehensive CX and market research reporting software, and Confirmit provides the technology that underpins some of the world’s most sophisticated insights programs. Together, we will provide customers with state-of-the-art collection and reporting for marketing research and customer experience management.
Tobi Andersson, CEO of Dapresy
Learn more about the Confirmit acquisition here.
ProProfs Acquires Qualaroo
February 2020 – ProProfs a leading provider of SaaS products (mainly customer support and survey tools) announced its acquisition of survey software provider Qualaroo. ProProfs hopes to use the ‘Qualaroo Nudge’ technology – in particular – to ask the right questions at the right time without being intrusive.
Learn more about the Qualaroo acquisition here.
InMoment and MaritCX join forces
February 2020 – Market leaders and innovators in the CX sector, InMoment and MaritzCX entered into an agreement to combine the two companies. This new merger will ensure customers have an experience program that can continuously monitor, understand, analyse, and improve the total customer experience with true agility.
Learn more about the MaritCX InMoment merger here.
And that’s it for the major acquisitions so far in 2020. We’ll keep this post updated as we see more of these business transactions unfold in the coming months.
The Future of the CX Space
Managing the Customer Experience is becoming quite complex. We’re seeing that more and more customers are craving personalised and frictionless experiences; a trend that demands software companies to deliver if they want to survive.
As a result, we expect to see a lot of innovation coming from businesses in the CX space, both large and small.
Have we left out any big acquisitions in our list? Let us know below in the feedback form.
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