It’s hard to believe that just one year ago, three leading brands with decades of leading expertise in social media marketing, e-commerce, and customer experience (Socialbakers, Astute, and iperceptions) came together to form Emplifi. Today, as a unified customer experience platform, Emplifi serves the social media marketing, social commerce, and customer care needs of some of the world’s biggest brands, helping them close their customer experience gap and build unforgettable experiences for their customers.
In that time, I’m so proud of the many milestones we’ve achieved as a company, not the least of which is our recent growth equity investment led by Sixth Street Growth, with participation from the LionTree merchant bank, putting Emplifi at a valuation of more than $1 billion. In just one year, we have made great strides to fulfill our vision to make Emplifi the platform of choice for brands with a modern, social-first approach to customers. So, let me share a few of the milestones I’ve been most excited about during the last year.
Serving customers where they are
The modern consumer is using social media across marketing, commerce, and care. Whether for product discovery, researching purchases, sharing their experiences, or receiving service and support, people use social media and messaging for almost everything. That’s why our vision is to empower brands to provide great experiences at each step of the customer journey where and how it’s happening - on social.
Commerce is a key part of the customer journey, and it’s no revelation that the modern consumer expects great experiences buying from brands on social. So, last September, we launched Emplifi’s Social Commerce Cloud to help our clients better convert their customers directly on social. By leveraging Social Commerce brands can give their customers instantaneous, seamless shopping experiences natively within popular social shops like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
And that’s just the beginning!
Continuing the momentum around commerce, we also acquired Go Instore, the leading video-powered retail platform, in late September. Go Instore’s technology was helping some of the biggest and best-loved retailers deliver live shopping experiences, by recreating the physical store experience for customers from the comfort of their own homes. Today, Emplifi’s customers also have access to that powerful technology and brands like Currys, Marks & Spencer, and HP using Emplifi’s live commerce solutions to accelerate their commerce and customer support efforts via live video experiences.
Social media customer service is also a key element of Emplifi’s end-to-end offering, and earlier this year we introduced Emplifi Social Care. We wanted to give our customers the tools to serve customers via social media with the same proficiency and ease as they would via their traditional service center, closing the gap between customer support on social media and via the service center.
Emplifi Summit '21
Last fall, we hit another milestone. We hosted our first Emplifi Summit, bringing together innovators and thinkers to celebrate empathic customer experiences under the theme “The Infinite Experience.”
We had outstanding speakers like Omar Johnson, former CMO at Beats by Dre, and Peter Biven, Head of Digital & eCommerce at Ford, alongside thought leaders from Facebook (Meta), Forbes, Lidl, Forrester, and IDC. I am passionate about building and nurturing relationships with customers, prospective customers, and our entire ecosystem, and the Emplifi Summit is our way of giving back to our community.
Great feedback from our audience and our Emplifi teams made this an event to remember and something we felt very proud about. Stay tuned for Emplifi Summit '22!
Nurturing our employee community
Late last year, our employees defined the Emplifi Corporate Values. This was a very important milestone, as I fundamentally believe that the culture of a company is the backbone of the business. It impacts the experiences we have as employees and the experiences our customers have when engaging with us.
What I valued the most in this experience was learning which values meant the most to our teams and why. We’re now in the process of trying to implement and institutionalize behaviors around our values from recruitment to performance reviews and even CSR initiatives. We recently launched the Emplifi Culture Club, made up of ambassadors from all across the organization.
I’m excited to see which new initiatives they will implement during the course of the next year.
The next phase
While Emplifi may be celebrating its first anniversary as a brand, we’re powered by solutions and expertise that our customer-focused clients have trusted for nearly 30 years.
So, what’s on the horizon for Emplifi in the coming year? Well, we believe that brands will need to leverage not only social media, but also social behaviors such as chat and live video in their customer interactions. Consumers want to engage with brands where, when and how they want, so excellent online experiences will become even more crucial to meeting customer expectations. So that’s where you’ll see us innovating. And we promise, we’ll be as busy innovating for our customers over the next twelve months as we have been over the past.
Finally, nothing is more important than our Emplifi employee community. They are the ones nailing these amazing milestones and reaching for the next! And, we are hiring! We currently have job openings across all functions from Product to Marketing to Research & Development and more. Come and join the ride! We promise you that based on our first year, the next year at Emplifi will be anything but dull.
Happy anniversary to all of our employees, customers, and partners. Thank you for your support!