The News:

QuestionPro, a survey and research, data, and insights services provider, has acquired PathosAI, bringing in AI expertise that will help uncover consumer intent and sentiment through measuring emotions and correlating them to why decisions are made. The PathosAI technology will be integrated into the QuestionPro research and insights platform, building on existing AI and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. See the full press release here.

QuestionPro Acquires PathosAI

Analyst Take:

QuestionPro has had quite an acquisition run over the past 12 months.

• February 2023: Acquired healthcare innovation and go-to-market commercialization consultancy Pundit Consultanz, and its founder and CEO Arti Bedi Pullins became President and Chief Healthcare Officer at QuestionPro.
• February 2023: Acquired assets of multilingual, real-time engagement platform doopoll, expanding its UK presence and broadening its platform.
• October 2022: Acquired journey mapping provider SuiteCX and named industry veteran and SuiteCX CEO Valerie Peck as a Managing Director.
• September 2022: Acquired Digsite, a provider of digital qualitative research.

This latest acquisition will deepen QuestionPro’s AI capabilities and is well-suited to support its research, CX, and EX solutions. PathosAI can measure emotional engagement across channels, in real time and in real life. Importantly, it can also predict customer decisions by tying behavior drivers to outcomes. The company’s proprietary models have the capabilities to find eight distinct emotions and their intensity; 18 possible drivers and their importance to the speaker; and hundreds of behavior enablers and disablers. They can also identify and infer specific contextual information from customer-generated data.

“It’s no longer good enough to just listen to customers – increasingly they demand that brands actually empathize with them,” says Sumair Sayani, PathosAI’s founder. “Our integrated service, which will enable brands to unearth customer emotions, predict what drives those emotions, and create a customer pathway to maximize delight represents a quantum leap in the power of market research and CX to drive better business outcomes.”

I reached out to Ken Peterson, President of CX at QuestionPro (and CX Innovator) to learn more about how this acquisition will specifically benefit CX professionals.

“In the customer experience space, we often rely on metrics that we can measure on a scale so we can diagnose problems. However, customer experience is really about emotion, says Peterson. “With the integration of PathosAI into our customer experience platform, we’ll uncover more about the emotional elements behind customers’ decisions, connecting the reasoning with the emotion to better understand customer needs and address them.”

QuestionPro has been aggressive about building its platform, broadening its capabilities, deepening its expertise in verticals desperate for good CX (I am looking at you, healthcare), and continuously evolving its AI capabilities. These moves are good strategies that will pay dividends to its customer base.