Qualtrics to Buy Clarabridge

Experience Management giant Qualtrics has announced a definitive agreement to acquire conversational analytics firm Clarabridge, in a stock transaction valued at $1.125bn.

Founded in 2006, Clarabridge is privately held and had about $100m in annual revenue. The company uses natural language analysis spanning 23 languages and more than 150 industry models to sort massive volumes of indirect customer feedback from unstructured sources including social media, emails, support calls, chats and product reviews, helping clients to understand 'critical human nuances' such as effort, emotion and intent. This includes how easy customers found it to do what they wanted, the intensity of their feelings about the experience, and how that experience is likely to affect their willingness to do business with the company again.

Qualtrics is owned by business software company SAP and based in Provo, Utah. Since its acquisition for $8bn in November 2018 it has gained further in value, briefly reaching a high of $15.3bn shortly after a partial IPO earlier this year.

Announcing the Clarabridge deal on Qualtrics' web site, CEO Zig Serafin (pictured) said: 'We know that people are increasingly sharing their feedback in many different ways, and very often, it's not directed at the company at all. It happens in informal ways like social posts, support calls, product reviews, and video recordings - this kind of unstructured data is seeing unprecedented growth. We've known the Clarabridge team and technology for many years, and we've admired the powerful platform they've built. We're culturally aligned in our values, with a relentless focus on customer success, innovation, and winning as a team.

'This is an absolute game-changer for Experience Management, the category we created and continue to lead. We have an unparalleled opportunity to help companies build deep, trusted relationships with their customers and employees and deliver incredible experiences that everyone will love'.

Clarabridge CEO Mark Bishof says his company's ability to 'help companies discover what their customers are saying about them across unstructured sources and provide meaningful, actionable insights' is 'a perfect complement to the Qualtrics platform'. He adds. 'What we deliver is far more powerful as part of Qualtrics, and we have an incredible opportunity to accelerate our growth and innovation as part of the world's #1 experience management company'.

The deal will be based on a Qualtrics share price of $37.33 - slightly below the $39.81 it closed at on Wednesday - and has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies, but is subject to the usual regulatory approvals and is expected to close during Qualtrics' fourth quarter of its fiscal year ending December 31st 2021.

Web sites: www.qualtrics.com and www.clarabridge.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.