North Highland, the Atlanta-based employee-owned global management consultancy focused on issues relating to change and transformation, has acquired Decooda, another Atlanta-headquartered firm and the provider of a cloud customer feedback management (CFM) solution.

Financial details of the transaction are not known at this time, but the acquisition enables North Highland to leverage insights from data, supporting the firm’s strategy to embed data and technology into initiatives of change and transformation for clients.

“We are invested in helping our clients navigate complex transformations,” says Alex Bombeck, CEO of North Highland. “Decooda tells us the ‘why’ behind what motivates customers or employees alike, enabling us to help companies design exceptional experiences for their constituents that generate profitable returns. It accelerates our clients’ ability to find the needle in the haystack of data and quickly translate insights to actions.”

Decooda is a rapidly evolving cognitive intelligence company that specializes in turning its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered understanding of customer emotions into insights for practical application. Using cognitive psychology and deep learning in its platform to analyze customer interactions, Decooda can uncover intent patterns that specify which aspects of a product or experience matter most to customers or employees. And by detecting sentiment, emotions, and cognitive states, businesses can turn insight about a product or brand into tangible outcomes.

The Decooda platform also has built-in industry-specific models, such as telecom, retail, and hospitality, shortening the window to data aggregation and enabling insights to be obtained more quickly. 

For David Johnson, the founder of Decooda, the purchase of his company provides North Highland with a winning formula. “We are excited to join North Highland to enable richer data-driven and evidence-based decisions that bring people to the center of any transformation,” says Johnson. “Embedding Decooda into North Highland’s services will enrich customer and employee experiences and allow for greater differentiation for our clients.”

Johnson’s sentiments are echoed by Dwight Specht, vice president and head of product at North Highland. “Companies traditionally lean in on hard financial statistics, often missing critical leading indicators from unstructured data to determine if those metrics are available,” says Specht. “That’s where Decooda’s technology is unparalleled: it allows us to find insights earlier and faster than retrospective financial data, allowing companies to adapt more quickly to changing conditions.”