Sprinklr - Q3 2024
December 6, 2023
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Greetings, and welcome to Sprinklr's third quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Eric Scro, SVP Finance. Thank you, Eric. You may begin.
Eric Scro (SVP Finance)
Thank you, Alicia, and welcome everyone to Sprinklr's third quarter fiscal year 2024 results financial call. Joining us today are Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr's founder and CEO, and Manish Sarin, Chief Financial Officer. We issued our earnings release a short time ago, filed the related Form 8-K with the SEC, and we've made them available on the investor relations section of our website, along with the supplementary investor presentation. Please note that on today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. While the company believes these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. You are directed to our press release and supplementary investor presentation for a reconciliation of such measures to GAAP.
In addition, during today's call, we'll be making some forward-looking statements about the business and about the financial results of Sprinklr that involve many assumptions, risks and uncertainties, including our guidance for the fourth fiscal quarter and full fiscal year 2024, and our initial framework for fiscal year 2025, and our actual results might differ materially. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on our beliefs and assumptions as of today, and we disclaim any obligation to update them. For more details on the risks associated with these forward-looking statements, please refer to our filings with the SEC, also posted on our website. With that, let me turn it over to Ragy.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Thank you, Eric, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We're pleased that Q3 was another strong quarter that exceeded guidance across all key metrics. Q3 total revenue grew 18% year over year to $186.3 million, and subscription revenue grew 22% year over year to $170.5 million. With our continued focus on operational efficiency, we generated $27.4 million in non-GAAP operating income, which resulted in a record 15% non-GAAP operating margin for the quarter. We are going through what I believe is the most exciting time in recent history for the modern front office. Many AI experts agree that AI is gonna boost human productivity significantly over the next few years.
For many industries, customer-facing functions are the most labor-intensive, and we believe that 20%-40% productivity improvements are a real possibility in the next five years. We also believe that the data to train the AI models and the unification of siloed teams, technology, and processes are required to unlock the power of predictive and generative AI. I'd like to share more details on these three key areas, given the benefits customers are experiencing in terms of their operating costs, risk management, and improved customer experiences. Let's start with everyone's favorite topic, AI. We continue to believe that we are at the forefront of a very long-term, durable growth opportunity, given our deep investments in AI more than five years ago.
Today, I'm sure no one is debating the fact that we have an early mover AI advantage, given our decision to design Sprinklr on a single architectural code base, where AI has been infused across all product suites, Sprinklr Service, Sprinklr Social, Sprinklr Marketing, Sprinklr Insights, our self-service offerings, and our entire platform. During the third quarter, customers executed over 170 AI deployments in Sprinklr Service alone. This include auto speech recognition, advanced intent detection, and speech-to-text models, along with agent assist features like smart responses and other generative AI enablement. I met with more than 70 customers around the world this quarter, and while everyone is universally excited about the possibilities of AI, the customers I spoke with wanted more than AI in theory. They wanted practical, actionable, real-world AI that works safely and reliably and produces measurable business results now.
This is what Sprinklr is doing for them. For example, one of our leading telecom customers using Sprinklr's conversational AI bots and AI routing achieved over 90% improvement in their response time and more than 60% reduction in average case handling time after enabling our chatbot. One of our luxury goods customers has seen a 25% improvement in their CSAT score, along with a 50% reduction in their average handling time using Sprinklr's conversational analytics product. As you know, we've taken a very open approach to AI ... This is why you've seen us announce integrations with Google Cloud's Vertex AI and OpenAI, in addition to our proprietary Sprinklr AI+. We offer customers the greatest choice in how to utilize generative AI with accuracy, privacy, and security in just a few clicks.
We maintain that Sprinklr is the fastest and the most effective ways for many enterprise customers and prospects to get actionable and practical AI across a broad global brand front office today. The breadth of the Sprinklr platform enables us to bring practical, actionable, AI-powered insights to a brand's front office. This can only be achieved with AI that is pre-trained with abundant, real-world data, and is secure for use in enterprises, given their compliance and risk profile. We've been working for over five years across a dozen industries to pre-train AI for brand insights, product insights, location insights, crisis insights, and competitive insights. Given the enormous amount of data that Sprinklr has access to, outside of the traditional CRM and CDP data and our industry-leading AI, we can generate and provide actionable insights out of the box right after implementation. Let's talk about unification.
Since our inception in 2009, we've been talking about unifying the front office. If you aren't able to make AI and insights actionable in customer-facing functions, you really aren't moving the needle. How do you take a negative customer review or a comment and automatically convert it into a customer service ticket if your product feedback isn't unified with customer service? How do you take a competitive or a content insight and translate that to a marketing campaign that works if your insight product isn't unified or integrated with your marketing stack? This makes unifying the front office one of the most critically important and strategic things any brand can do today to improve customer experiences. And those who don't unify have numerous point solutions, which creates inconsistencies in interpretation and reporting.
Trying to infuse these point solutions independently with siloed AI models that aren't coming off the same training data makes it even worse. The result is just AI point solution chaos. To create better experiences for the customer and to improve everything from marketing and sales and service and compliance and growth opportunities, brands of the future must unify their digital edge, where their customers meet a customer-facing employee, and have their different customer-facing teams, markets, and geographies work together. As many of you know, we've been on a multi-year journey to transition each one of our product suites into a large, mainstream replacement market. Over the past few quarters, you have heard us talk about how we are taking our service product suite and successfully transitioning it from a social/digital solution to a complete CCaaS solution by adding voice as a channel. That's telephone lines.
The second is our Insights product suite, where we have started transitioning that from a social digital listening product to a full-blown customer feedback management, or a voice of the customer suite, as some call it, by adding surveys. The power of unifying unstructured, unsolicited feedback with structured and solicited feedback is endless. It makes the feedback real time, actionable, and one that can be validated. This quarter, we started definition partnership for our customer feedback management suite with a select few brands and have been demonstrating our early success to industry analysts. We're pleased to announce that Sprinklr was recently named by IDC's research director, Lou Reinemann, in the major players category in the 2023 IDC MarketScape assessment for worldwide voice of the customer applications.
IDC noted, and I quote, "Sprinklr has grown its capabilities to have a fully featured VOC platform for listening, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback. Sprinklr aims to bridge functional silos, sales, marketing, support, et cetera, to seamlessly manage whole customer journey experiences." We're very pleased with the momentum and the progress we've made in our service suite. Our vision is to help customers transform the contact center from a reactive voice-first cost center to a more efficient, AI-powered, proactive, omni-channel revenue center by unifying it with marketing and sales. We are excited to share the launch of Conversational AI+ in the Sprinklr Service suite. We can now empower our enterprise customers to deploy and scale generative AI-powered bots... for human-like text and voice conversations in effortless, three easy steps.
This is a leading and innovative way for customers to train a bot in their brand's voice, automate and deflect call volume, and provide a natural conversational experience to their customers. We also announced a partnership with infinit.cx in Germany, to help customers in the DACH region facilitate a seamless migration to cloud-based unified customer service in the contact center. Together with infinit.cx, we will help the most innovative companies in the region harness AI to its full extent, and be able to act on insights and unify the front-end functions. During the third quarter, we continued to add new customers and expand with existing customers. This includes world-class brands like Alaska Airlines, AstraZeneca, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Shine. Here are some examples: In Q3, one of the world's top five cosmetics companies expanded its long, longstanding partnership with Sprinklr to now include conversational commerce.
With over 65 brands working on over 20 channels, the company has integrated Sprinklr's conversational AI and conversational commerce to enhance customer interactions, support care agents, and transform conversations into sales and long-term value. Sprinklr is helping the company to achieve its goal of generating more than 50% of its revenue through digital sales by 2025. In Q3, a top three North American home improvements retailer selected Sprinklr's AI-first CCaaS solution to provide customers with a unified, seamless customer experience across channels. The retailer will consolidate all digital channels onto the Sprinklr platform to provide a more consistent customer experience while simplifying the lives of its customer service agents. Sprinklr's AI-powered agent assist capabilities will enable the company to reduce the number of open applications and screens at the agent level, and provide the proactive support needed to resolve customer needs faster.
Integrations with the company's knowledge base and order management systems ensure that agents have all the data and information at their fingertips compared to their previous set of solutions. Another example of unification and transformation powered by AI, comes from a top three global food and beverage company, a Sprinklr customer for over 10 years. Last year, the company began to globally transition their social teams to Sprinklr's service suite, to empower a closer, more meaningful brand experience for all its customers. To understand and build brand love further, in Q1 this year, they made the decision to move all their social insights, just the listening part, more than 1.5 billion brand mentions over to Sprinklr. This includes social listening, benchmarking, and product insights. This past quarter, they doubled their competitive insight scope, and now monitor over 2,000 digital accounts.
As a partner in our AI+ beta program this year, the company has also harnessed the power of Sprinklr's generative AI reply assistance. By unifying these solutions onto a single, powerful platform, the company now has access to deep, actionable insights and GenAI capabilities that enable it to provide personalized experiences to each of their many brands that they sell around the world. Before wrapping up, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate our incredible product and engineering teams, as always, who make this possible. Their speed of innovation and dedication to serving customers continues to differentiate Sprinklr in the marketplace. In closing, we had two primary goals this year. The first was to build and establish a foundation to scale in the exciting CCaaS market. And second, was to meaningfully improve the operational efficiency and margins of our business.
There's no question that we've been very successful in achieving both of these goals, and we're on track to deliver a solid year with 18% revenue growth, record profitability, and strong free cash flow generation. We believe that the product suites we've built, the customers we serve, and the size of the market opportunity ahead of us, put us in a great position to become a multi-billion dollar revenue company in the years ahead. Since our IPO in June 2021, we've continued to expand our product portfolio and market focus from social to digital and transitioning to Unified-CXM. The investments we've been making over the last 18 months are enabling us to mainstream our product suites into large, obvious replacement markets, starting with establishing ourselves as a disruptor in CCaaS.
As we've diversified the business and focused on scaling our CCaaS business, we'd like to acknowledge that we have made slower progress on some of our other go-to-market initiatives, focused on our core product suites.... We expect this will have a near-term impact on growth, which Manish will review in more detail in his remarks as he shares an initial framework for FY 2025. We maintain our conviction for the long-term vision of what we are building. And like so many companies that have successfully built billion-dollar businesses, we're navigating through the normal course of resource allocation and investment cycles required to balance short-term success metrics with long-term growth objectives. We're committed to innovating and developing a new category of software that we call Unified Customer Experience Management, and executing for growth and profitability to deliver for our customers and our shareholders.
Thank you to our customers, partners, and our employees for the hard work and results, and thank you to our investors for believing in our long-term vision. Let me now hand over the call to Manish.
Manish Sarin (CFO)
Thank you, Ragy, and good afternoon, everyone. As you heard from Ragy, we're pleased with this quarter's results, which exceeded the high end of our guidance range on the top and bottom line. For the third quarter, total revenue was $186.3 million, up 18% year over year. This was driven by subscription revenues of $170.5 million, which grew 22% year over year. Subscription revenue benefited by $1 million from new business being booked earlier than expected in the quarter. Professional services revenue for the quarter came in at $15.9 million. In terms of new logos, we are pleased with the number of new customers that joined the Sprinklr platform in Q3.
This is particularly true with our Sprinklr Service product suite, as many of the deals in this product suite over the last few quarters have been with new customers. As of the end of the third quarter, we had 123 customers contributing $1 million or more in subscription revenue over the preceding twelve months, an increase of three customers sequentially and a 15% increase year-over-year. Our subscription revenue-based net dollar expansion rate in the third quarter was 118%. While NDE was healthy in the quarter, I would note that we began to see incremental pressure on renewals in Q3, as certain customers that are impacted by the difficult macro environment adjusted their spending levels with us.
As a reminder, the NDE statistic is not something we monitor as part of growing our business, but rather a by-product. Turning to gross margins for the third quarter. On a Non-GAAP basis, our subscription gross margins came in at 83%, as we continue to drive efficiencies in our cloud operations, with total Non-GAAP gross margins of 75%. Non-GAAP gross margins for professional services were slightly negative, coming in at -2%. As we have discussed in the past, we continue to invest in CCaaS delivery capabilities and build out our expertise in that area. Turning to profitability for the quarter, Non-GAAP operating income was a record $27.4 million, resulting in Non-GAAP net income of $0.12 per basic share.
This 15% non-GAAP operating margin for the quarter was a result of revenue overperformance, strong subscription gross margins, coupled with broad-based expense discipline, and is the fifth consecutive quarter of non-GAAP profitability. Lastly, on the topic of profitability, for the third consecutive quarter, we posted positive GAAP net income totaling $17 million or $0.06 per basic share. In terms of free cash flow, we generated $15.9 million during the third quarter, compared to a cash burn of $1.7 million in the same period last year. With this result in Q3, our free cash flow generation during the first nine months of this year now stands at $38.9 million. Our balance sheet has become stronger each quarter, now standing at $656.4 million in cash and marketable securities, with no debt outstanding.
Calculated billings for the third quarter were $161.2 million, an increase of 16% year over year. As of the end of Q3, total remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which represents revenue from committed customer contracts that has not yet been recognized, was $774.5 million, up 34% compared to the same period last year, and CRPO was $491.4 million, up 19% year over year. Moving now to our Q4 and full year FY 2024 non-GAAP guidance. Our Q4 guidance assumes the go-to-market dynamics Ragy mentioned and the renewal headwinds I discussed earlier will have an impact on revenue growth in the quarter. As a reminder, Q4 is our biggest book of business for both new business and renewals.
Given the macro environment, we are experiencing a higher level of downsells as large customers rightsize their software spend. As such, we are mindful that this cycle of renewals may be one of the more challenging quarters to get through and is factored into the guidance numbers. Given these dynamics, for Q4, we expect total revenues to be in the range of $187.5 million-$189.5 million, representing 14% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. Within this, we expect subscription revenue to be in the range of $172.5 million-$174.5 million, representing 17% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. We expect professional services revenue of approximately $15 million in Q4. We also expect non-GAAP gross profit for professional services to be approximately negative $2 million in Q4.
From a profitability perspective, we expect Non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $20.3 million-$22.3 million, and Non-GAAP net income per share of $0.08-$0.09 per share, assuming 275 million basic shares outstanding. The slight decrease in Non-GAAP operating income sequentially is driven by our ongoing investments in Sprinklr Service, product development, and delivery. For the full year FY 2024, we are raising both our subscription and total revenue outlook for the year. We now expect subscription revenue to be in the range of $664 million-$666 million, representing 21% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. This is an increase of $6 million at the midpoint, which is higher than the full magnitude of the Q3 beat.
We expect total revenue to be in the range of $725.5 million-$727.5 million for the full year FY 2024, representing 18% growth year-over-year at the midpoint. For the full year FY 2024, we are raising our non-GAAP operating income estimate to now be in the range of $80 million-$82 million, equating to a non-GAAP net income per share of $0.36-$0.37, assuming 273 million basic weighted shares outstanding. This implies an approximately 11% non-GAAP operating margin at the midpoint on a full year basis. Note the increase of $15 million at the midpoint is greater than the full beat for Q3 and the accompanying operating income raise for Q4.
In deriving the net income per share for modeling purposes, we estimate $24 million in interest income for the full year, with $6 million of that to be earned here in Q4. Furthermore, a $6 million total tax provision for the full year FY 2024 needs to be added to the non-GAAP operating income ranges provided. We estimate a tax provision of $2.5 million here in Q4. And given the performance throughout the first 9 months of the year, we will be GAAP net income positive for the full year FY 2024, consistent with our comments in the past few earnings calls. And lastly, I would like to provide some thoughts on billings. We estimate billings to grow 13% here in Q4, equating to total billings of approximately $262 million for the quarter.
This translates to total billings of about $773 million for the full year FY 2024, which is up a little over 17% on a full year basis compared to FY 2023. Before moving into Q&A, I would like to provide some high-level commentary on fiscal year 2025. As I just outlined, we are on track to deliver a very successful FY 2024, with 18% revenue growth and 11% operating margins that will have expanded by more than 1,000 basis points year-over-year. And we accomplished all this while broadening our product portfolio. Our primary strategic focus in FY 2024 has been to rapidly scale our Sprinklr Service product suite. We are very pleased with the results, having made significant demonstrable progress with Sprinklr Service, gaining market share and customer momentum in the CCaaS market.
As Ragy mentioned, our focus on succeeding in our CCaaS business slowed progress with some of our other go-to-market initiatives in our core product suites, much more than we had anticipated. Now that Sprinklr Service is at scale, we have developed a consistent and repeatable selling motion to that buying persona and built an enviable collection of reference customers. We're in a position to refocus our go-to-market efforts to better align our resources across all product suites. We expect it will take several quarters for the full impact of these changes to work its way through the P&L. To put some numbers around these dynamics, if you adjust for the $1 million linearity benefit I mentioned for Q3, Q4 subscription revenue is expected to grow approximately 2.5% sequentially.
At this time, based on what I just outlined, coupled with an unforgiving macro environment, we expect a sequential quarterly increase of 2.5% for each quarter of FY 2025. This equates to approximately a 10% total revenue growth for the full year, which we believe is the appropriate starting point for FY 2025. From a profitability perspective, we have been pleased with the significant progress in our profitability performance this year. We expect FY 2025 non-GAAP operating margins to continue to expand from our guidance for 11% operating margins for FY 2024.
... I want to be clear that the dynamics I've just discussed here will be short term in nature and do not change our expectations for Sprinklr's growth potential across each of our four product suites. We have the strongest product portfolio in our history, with an innovation flywheel that is consistently expanding our competitive differentiation. Lastly, I would like to thank all our employees for their dedication and passion for what we are building at Sprinklr. I'm also grateful for the confidence that our customers have placed in us during these uncertain times. We remain focused on building a track record of successful execution and operating discipline across the business. And with that, let's open it up for questions. Operator?
Operator (participant)
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove the question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Arjun Bhatia (Partner, Co-Head of Technology Equity Research)
Perfect. Thank you, guys. Maybe to start just on the go-to-market adjustments that you're making and the macro pressures that you called out. Are there any products where you're seeing the greatest incremental pressure or any part of the customer base that sticks out here in Q4, where the downsell is greater than other areas, just as we try to hone in on where the headwinds are increasing the most?
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, Arjun, I'll... Let me take a first pass at it. It's kind of the obvious culprit is what most people would guess it is. You know, one of our product suites is a marketing and advertising product suite, and as you know, you know, in difficult times, marketing is one of the first budgets and teams to be impacted with layoffs, cutting back on spend. What's going on with some of the networks isn't helping. And so that's an obvious place where we're seeing some additional pressure.
Arjun Bhatia (Partner, Co-Head of Technology Equity Research)
Okay. Got it. Then, just as we look to the other side of this, when you think about the go-to-market revamp, what are some of the steps that you need to take to, I guess, refocus on the broader suite? Is there incremental hiring that needs to happen, or is it more a matter of, you know, internal resource allocation, enablement, et cetera?
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
It's more of an internal resource allocation. In hindsight, I think the most obvious explanation for this is the fact that we, and I don't know whether we would have, knowing everything we know, done it differently. We kind of over-rotated a little bit more on the CCaaS side, and so we took our field, and we incented them strongly to go sell CCaaS. Essentially, there's a lot of people who jumped in and really are happy, and we're thrilled with the results. And there are some that didn't quite, you know, jumped, but didn't quite make it on the other side. And the fix is quite obvious to all of us.
You've got to take the field, folks in sales and support and service that came from the social suite background, or the marketing suite background, or the research insight suite background, and we got to let them go back and focus on it. So what we are doing now, as we think and plan for the next year, is we are adjusting quotas, and we are just, you know, bifurcating or trifurcating the field to have to just fix the over-rotation we did. And we're pretty hopeful that in one or two quarters, we'll begin to see some data that would allow us to just update you further.
Arjun Bhatia (Partner, Co-Head of Technology Equity Research)
Okay, understood. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Pinjalim Bora with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.
Pinjalim Bora (Executive Director)
Hey, guys. This is Noah on for Penjalim Bora. Thanks for taking our questions. On the first part, Ragy, you mentioned that you mentioned you met with over 70 customers globally this quarter. Just curious to hear, you know, some of the feedback from those conversations. Just any incremental takeaways from there? And then I had a quick follow-up. Thanks.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, Pinjalim, I'm glad you asked that question. Look, I think I've not seen this kind of excitement since the early days of social that I'm seeing now on the CCaaS side. I think we have a very differentiated product. And we've landed, I mean, we're ahead of schedule in terms of our own expectations, which is why we over-rotated. And we're seeing like such an exciting reception to that. And the idea there is pretty simple, right? We're going into a market with vendors who've been there for a long time, and a market that's very fragmented.
If your knowledge base, your agent console, your supervisor console, your routing and your bot, and your quality, and your workforce management, all just is unified and everything is based on AI, these results are fairly spectacular, and it's cost advantageous as well, right? So we're bringing the average handling time down, and these demos are received really well. And the number one question we get, "That's not real, is it?" And we're like, "We are. We'll set it up for you." Now, I want you to note, though, that excitement is meted in months, not weeks, right? A social product, anytime people are happy, let's go. In the CCaaS world, these are very time-consuming transformations, so there are long, protracted RFPs. And so we're very pleased with where we are.
The number one excitement we're seeing in the field among customers is our CCaaS product, and so we know we've done the right thing. Now, if you play this movie in, you know, three-year increments, I think most of us would agree we did the right thing. So excitement on AI, excitement on practical AI, excitement seeing the results. Because we are walking into customers... I'll give you a large, large customer, that I spoke to, who was on a track to kind of build their own LLM. And after really understanding how we're approaching AI, they were like, "Oh, my God, yeah, we just got to work with you, and then you'll ensure that we can always use the best LLM and the best model that yields us the best results." So that's the most exciting thing that's going on.
No surprise that AI and what it can do for you, and we're manifesting just easy, measurable results on the CCaaS side.
Pinjalim Bora (Executive Director)
Got it. No, thanks so much for that answer. And then maybe just focusing a little bit more on the model, as we sort of contemplate the preliminary 2025 guidance, you know, how does that, if anything, does that change at all, the long-term model that you had outlined during your Investor Day? How should we really think about that going forward?
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Well, I, I'll start by saying no, and Manish, can you elaborate?
Manish Sarin (CFO)
Yeah, it does not change our FY 2027 long-term plan. And again, just to be clear, this is not our guide for 2025. I will do that in our March earnings call. Just given some of the renewal pressures we are seeing here in Q3, and as I said, Q4, we expect it to be, you know, quite intense. Given the visibility that we have, we just wanted to be clear that we laid out what we are seeing right now. It might change substantially when we talk in March, and we talk about the full year guide. But as we sit today, we don't feel any different about FY 2027 than we did six months ago.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Matt Saltzman (Equity Research Analyst)
Hi, this is Matt Saltzman for Elizabeth. So I'd love to just touch on some of the renewal headwinds that you all are seeing. You previously highlighted the expectations for net dollar expansion to be under pressure from some of those moderating renewals and upsells. So I'm just curious, the downsell pressure incrementally more than you expected? And just any sense for why now, when you know, we've been hearing from a lot of your software peers over the last year, you know, talk about this dynamic. So just curious around the timing of it now, and also just versus your initial expectation. Thank you.
Manish Sarin (CFO)
Yeah, that's a good question. So let me start, and then Ragy might chime in. So first, I wanna be clear, we're not seeing logo churn. We're just seeing reduction in the number of seats, as an example. And why now? Well, you've seen a lot of corporations pull back on headcount. There have been layoffs across the economy. Q4 tends to be our biggest business, both in terms of renewals and new business, and I suspect what is happening is when those contracts are up for renewal, which for us happens to be in Q4, we're seeing a downdraft in terms of the number of seats being renewed. So I think that's point number one. And then, as Ragy was saying, there are quite a bit of macro challenges, particularly as we look at the marketing and advertising suite.
We sell volumes here, so it's not really seat-based. And again, companies are looking to advertise less just given the macro, and that's pulling back the ARR that we ascribe to that product suite. Hope that helps.
Matt Saltzman (Equity Research Analyst)
Got it. Got it. Yeah, no, it's very helpful. And just maybe as a quick follow-up, when you think about the pressure on, on some of those seat-based renewals, is there any opportunity to potentially move some of those, seats into separate SKUs that maybe the customer will utilize more to maintain, overall, you know, ACV? I'm just curious, if there's any discussion internally about pursuing, avenues like that to just maintain overall, retention levels. Thank you.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, that's an exciting thought. You know, our approach here as we kind of bring a fairly disruptive new product to a new buyer is to not confuse them with the new model, pricing model. So we've started by... There are some products that are just flat AI-based, conversational bots, et cetera, but we've tried to keep the pricing model parity with the market sees. But I agree with you, Matt. I think there is some upside for us as we get to scale in our CCaaS side, there is opportunity for us to revisit pricing, and that's not something we're willing to comment on right now. Yeah, and let me make sure. Was your question that at renewal time, are we trying to offer them additional SKUs to maintain ARR? Was that the question?
Matt Saltzman (Equity Research Analyst)
Yeah, it's partly it, I think, but your answer, you know, also, also addresses it.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, and I think to be clear, that is one of the plays we are running, so we are constantly, as you'd recall from our prior earnings calls, upsells for us has always been a very strong suit. So we are constantly figuring out ways to either maintain as what we're doing now or increase the ARR on an account. So offering them additional product suites is one of the plays, where there's a number of other plays we are running. And again, this is part of the reason I was saying, just given where we are and the limited visibility in how this plays out for the remainder of this year, what is captured in the guide is the situation we see.
Matt Saltzman (Equity Research Analyst)
Understood. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt VanVliet with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.
Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)
Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I guess when you look at the success of the contact center product on Sprinklr Service here, you know, any help in terms of the mix of existing customers that are buying that versus this as a tool to land at new logos? And how do you think about that going forward?
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Matt, surprisingly, I think it's 50/50. We're surprised to see brand new companies involved and include us in a contact center RFP. We're usually a late addition, it's usually coming from an analyst who's seen the product, saying, "You guys have got to take a look," or our reps calling in, or, you know, someone who's tried us, the few that have tried us that have been impressed. And so the answer is: there is a surprising number of sort of net new RFPs we are beginning to get in, and then there is always the customers that have been using us for social and digital care and are also, you know, expanding into voice with us.
But I'll tell you a new category that potentially has some upside, and we're beginning to look at them, are the large BPO players. And these are things that, you know, there's an established market that's 20 years old. So we're seeing more traction early, but more traction from the partner sourced. So the leads for us, and so that's something that we're excited about.
Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)
Okay, very helpful. And then when you look at the partner community, it seems like they've been pretty instrumental in helping some of the growth here on the contact center side. But, you know, were you also sort of refocusing them in that direction and maybe they also took their eye off the ball on the social and marketing side? Or anything that you think your internal sort of sales focus influenced performance by the partner community as well?
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. Actually, let me just take a step back, right? You know, it's obvious that we're gonna go through an air pocket here, and that's a nature of the beast as we transition from a set of buyers that were largely marketing based or like social customer service or digital customer service-based. Now we're talking to the guy who runs the contact center, who, like, kinda didn't know that Sprinklr existed till about 3-6 months ago. That curiosity and that growth is what we think was worth the effort. Having said that, the partner ecosystem is the same way. You know, they are transitioning off very long-term established partnership and trying us out.
So I think a lot of this air pocket situation for, let's say, up to a year or so, can be explained by making that transition and landing it right, where, you know, we're still developing our playbook and our blueprint, to enable partners, right? So the people who are trying are loving it. We have to document their successes, we have to create the blueprints, we have to train the partners. So there's a. Let's say, any way you look at it, you're looking at a 6-9-month lag in that, you know, going from one to the other. And that's the way we look at it, though, we're seeing very good early traction, and that early traction to convert to steady, predictable growth on the booking side, I think that's probably the two quarters or three that we need.
Matt VanVliet (Director of Equity Research)
Okay, thanks for taking the question.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Absolutely.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brett Knoblauch with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed with your question.
Brett Knoblauch (Director)
Perfect. Thanks, guys. Congrats on, on the strong quarter. I guess, you know, last quarter, you flagged some very large deals, with some of your largest customers and said that, you know, those kind of contract values were up 10, 15% or double digit. But it seems like, you know, this quarter, large customers are more of a headwind. So I guess, is there, you know, a bifurcation of, I guess, in terms of the type of customer, maybe the industry of that customer that is expanding versus downsizing?
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
... Yeah, these are two different bases, right? So, you know, some of the downside pressure we're talking about sort of the marketing side and advertising side. And the other thing to put in perspective, you know, we did land some large implementations and contracts sort of brand-wise, size-wise, on CCaaS, we will continue to do so. The thing, though, is there's a - they go market by market, right? So these are companies in many cases that have executed a master agreement, but then you go market by market, and you'll start seeing those bookings and revenues only as markets come on board. And these markets are on different contract timing cycles, right? So you might have a set of markets in LatAm, whose renewal with their current solution is coming up in six months or nine months.
It's actually good for us because these early implementations, you know, the 99, the five nines uptimes, and a whole bunch of things that we are just working through the system. We've done it before, that it's good to have that breathing room. So I just want to make sure that you understand the time lapse as you take those snapshots and try to put it together. And, you know, that should, once the base is established through, you know, the rest of this year and next year, we should see that pipeline convert steadily, but you're gonna see a little bit of a starting lag.
Brett Knoblauch (Director)
Understood. Makes sense. And then maybe just on retention or your kind of like net revenue retention, how we should think about that going forward. I guess to get to maybe the 10% growth that you guys were talking about next year, it seems like that's gonna fall pretty sharply. Is that something that we should expect to maybe end 25 below 110?
Manish Sarin (CFO)
Yeah, this is Manish. So I have never given a number for net dollar expansion or retention. As I state on every earnings call, it's a by-product of what's happening in the business. We have signaled, even in the past, we do expect the 118% to keep coming down. I don't know where it's gonna end up, but I think you can use the total revenue guide. You can use the billings number for next year to sort of know that it is gonna come down from the 118%. Probably, maybe not very different from where you are expecting, but it's not something that I formally put out a number on.
Brett Knoblauch (Director)
Got it. And then maybe if I could just ask one more on the expense side, particularly with sales and marketing. It looks like kind of cash-based sales marketing expenses are down a good bit from the first quarter. I guess, how should we think about expense growth while you go through this go-to-market transition?
Manish Sarin (CFO)
I think at this point, we will probably provide more color in the March earnings call for next year. I did want to point out that, non-GAAP operating margins ought to expand from here, so there will be more efficiencies across the business. I don't want to specifically call out for sales and marketing, but I think as Rajiv answered in one of the other questions, we're not looking to incrementally invest a lot more. I think it's more around reallocation of existing resources.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah, I mean, this might be premature, but look, we just—I started the call by saying we want you to expect 20%-40%, you know, productivity gains in the front office. And look, we intend, and let me be specific, I intend for us to be client zero. So, there's a lot of things that we're doing now that's gonna take a few quarters, that it just... Like, we're gonna eat our own dog food, to drink our own champagne here. And so look, we're anticipating and working towards improving productivity. So I think I echo Manish's sentiment that we should be able to do both.
Brett Knoblauch (Director)
Perfect. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Question comes from the line of Michael Berg with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
Michael Turrin (Managing Director and Software Equity Research Analyst)
Hi, thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask, going back to CCaaS, when you think of the sales process for your CCaaS offering, it's primarily in the application layer. You do have the voice capabilities now. But maybe more, more holistically, how do you think about that, that piece of the business progressing to doing, you know, more, what I at least how I imagine it, augmentations today to more strategic, holistic rip and replaces, or at least that's becoming more of a norm. Thank you.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Sorry, Michael, can you -- so what was your question? Is it... Can you repeat the question? I'm not sure I got it.
Michael Turrin (Managing Director and Software Equity Research Analyst)
Absolutely. I guess, how do you think about the progression of, in CCaaS, moving from being an augmentation in more the digital application layer within a CCaaS deployment to being a more holistic, strategic replacement of the legacy vendors from end to end, moving forward? Or I guess, what inning are you in, in that transition? Thank you.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Got it. Got it, got it, got it, got it. We—I don't know when and what to expect in reality. So we have two sets of buyers, right? We have a set of buyer that is used as the social customer service and is expanding to digital, maybe as a next step. We have a bunch of those. The exciting development there, Michael, is our conversational AI capability. And that's becoming really, really good. And it's becoming more human-like. I'm not gonna name the customer, but we have one customer where our bots and a case that's closed by a bot has a higher NPS than a case that's closed by a human. So I think that speaks to the progress we've made in technology.
So that's sort of the class A digital customer service and mitigation of redirection and call volume, and it just saves you money. And the other one is where we are actually in a CCaaS replacement RFP. I can tell you, this is anecdotally, because we don't have enough data to be specific here. Our win rate when we are seriously considered is pretty high. And you know, you have this, "No one ever got fired for buying an IBM" syndrome, is the only reason why someone who sees it and believes it and tests it, then, and kinda, you know, maybe says, "You know, I'm gonna give it more time." So we know we have a very differentiated product.
We know that, the opportunities we are in, we're seeing very good win rates, but we have to develop that muscle across the company, and that muscle development takes time. The good news is the parts of the world where that muscle seems to have developed quickly, either through hiring salespeople who have been at other CCaaS companies or leaders embracing CCaaS, they're doing really well. And so it's inconsistent, at this point across the company, and one of our big goals for next year is to make that really consistent around the world.
Michael Turrin (Managing Director and Software Equity Research Analyst)
Helpful. Thank you.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Thank you, Michael.
Operator (participant)
Question comes from the line of Michael Turits with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Michael Vidovic (Associate VP)
Hi, this is Michael Vidovic. I'm from Michael Turits, and thanks for taking my question. On the headwinds you talked about seeing this quarter with the over-rotation, the down-sell pressure. I guess, were you not seeing those same dynamics in Q2 and Q3 in, like, a similar frequency, or is that still relatively new for this quarter? Thanks.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
It's kind of consistent, right? But because as Manish said, we have a much bigger base coming up in Q4. So we're not seeing the macro environment get better or get worse. And so I wouldn't characterize that something changed in Q4.
Manish Sarin (CFO)
Yeah. So, let me clarify that. I think what Rajeev is getting at is, the level of downsells that we are beginning or we saw in Q3 and then we expect here in Q4, is much sharper than what we saw in the first half of the year. But to also add to what he said, when we look at the... you know, how the sales teams were organized, of course, a lot of this was things that we had wanted to do in terms of our focus on CCaaS, which was very successful. But I think that whole sequence of moving the sales teams around, we probably didn't see, at least till now, that we were not getting the level of market momentum in our core products or traction in the core products that we should have had.
I think that's a bit of a, you know, new element.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
But I would, again, to reconcile the two, right? The macro, we don't think is what's changing. It's really our over-rotation that's causing the change that we're—Manish has articulated.
Michael Vidovic (Associate VP)
Great. And then just on that over-rotation you called out, I guess, how significant on, like, a dollar or a resource standpoint, are you reallocating away from CCaaS? I guess I'm just trying to figure out, are you far, you know, far enough along in the CCaaS expansion or growth that you can continue to, like, push into that market and grow the business despite that reallocation?
Manish Sarin (CFO)
I think the short answer is yes. We have had several quarters here of looking at not just win rates, but you know, the go-to-market model for CCaaS, what is working in the market. As Rajeev was mentioning earlier, we've been successful in onboarding partners, in that segment. So, so we now have, I'd say, enough of a science around what it's gonna take for us to succeed in that segment. And I think this would be the appropriate time for us to then refocus on all of our product suites, not just CCaaS.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yeah. And I would just say, though, I would again give ourselves the explanation for all of this is, we'll probably need another quarter or two before the partner enablement, the scaling of that completely new product suite is just brought to the world, right? So now we're implementing these early partners working with us. So it's just... We're in the process of templatizing it and being able to do it with much less heavy lifting.
Michael Vidovic (Associate VP)
Great. Thanks, guys.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. As a reminder, please press star one to ask a question at this time. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Schwartz with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.
Brian Schwartz (Managing Director)
Hey, this is Ari Friedman, sitting in for Brian Schwartz. Thanks for taking my question. I'm just wondering, like in the quarter, if you saw any strength in certain verticals or weakness? Our research suggests that there's been, like, some softness in, like, insurance and autos and, tech and financials. Wondering if you're seeing the same thing or, or something different. Thanks.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
... I mean, I don't think there's anything super noticeable. If you, like, wanna interpret it a certain way, I'd say maybe the media sector, right? Then, yeah, media, publishing, you know, channels who have been customers. We're seeing some sort of softness there. You can interpret that there's some extra softness there. You know, there, there's been, you know, the streaming wars that have been going on has calmed down. You know, so there's social networks are in a very different place than they used to be. And as you know, there is some... These are all, like, one-time things that we, for us, it's just unfortunate timing that they're coming together at the same time. But I'd say that's probably one way to interpret it.
Brian Schwartz (Managing Director)
Yeah. Thank you. That was very helpful.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Yep. Thank you, Ari.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Austin Cole with JMP Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Austin Cole (Equity Research Consultant)
Hello, thanks for taking my question. So on Sprinklr Service, sounds like customers are seeing pretty meaningful productivity improvements. I'm wondering if you could walk through how does Sprinklr Service handle automated call deflecting and routing to agents? Just maybe so investors can better understand kind of the technical pieces here. And how are those functions different from other CCaaS solutions, and how are customers benefiting? Anything there would be... Thanks.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Austin, thank you for that question. I really mean it, because I think when you see it in action, it actually just changes your perspective. I'll tell you the story of... You remember the big bank we talked about, right? One of the, I think, the fifth largest bank that was one of our first CCaaS implementations, 15,000 agents. I met with the CEO, and they did a live demo for me. Put the phone on the table and just dialed out, you know, 1-800 bank. What do you get when you call a big bank? Press one for credit cards, press two.
And after they finished implementing Sprinklr, for the most part, the question on the other side that the system poses, "How can I help you?" And you just say, "I wanna know my credit card balance." And then the follow-up question is, "Can you please put in your security code? We will recognize your phone number." And literally, you can just continue the conversation. And there are, you know, I don't know, 100 some journeys that they've identified, some of 50%-80% of that, as we connect to more internal systems, have been automated, and the credit card balance inquiry is something that is automated. So literally, you now have an experience where it's very unlike a traditional experience where we're routing and calling.
On the back end, if you did ask a question like, "I wanna change my credit limit," that would go to a human, but we already understand from your speech and your text and your voice that what you wanna do, so we know where to send you, and then we use smart AI to find the best agent who can do that. And because you can do it across channels, let's say you request a credit limit increase. At the bank, you know, before you had Sprinklr, if that request was on the phone, they could ask you: "Hey, can you just send me a proof of your salary increase?" Blah, blah, blah, and you send it and get it done.
But if that came on the phone on a Friday or a Sunday night, if that came on email on a Sunday night, the agent that had an email console... Remember, before Sprinklr, these consoles were all different, right? And they were logging into eight screens. The agent will reply back via email saying, "Hey, can you send me a proof of your income?" And that email, you know, you go to work and you reply back five days later, the SLA for the same call driver on email was dramatically different than if it were on the phone. And with Sprinklr, that agent who's responding on email, because it's an omni-channel console, just clicks on call and calls the customer. And those are the kind of magical things.
By the way, in the demo, it was the head of CX who did the demo. He hung up before Sprinklr could blurt out the bank credit card balance and called back, and Sprinklr picked up from where it left off and continued that transaction. Those are the kind of things that are not possible in a traditional point solution, existing legacy contact center infrastructure. I hope that brings it to life.
Austin Cole (Equity Research Consultant)
Very helpful. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to pass the floor over to Ragy Thomas for closing comments.
Ragy Thomas (Founder and CEO)
Thank you, Alicia, and thank you all for joining us today. Again, I'd like to thank our employees, our partners, and most importantly, our customers, for their trust and continued business. We look forward to updating you all again in 90 days or so, as we continue this exciting journey. I'm sure that's gonna span years and decades of creating a new category that we call Unified Customer Experience Management. Thank you very much, and have a wonderful evening.
Operator (participant)
This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time.