In 2002, three people in Utah put $40,000 into a company that surveyed customers of fast-food restaurants. It was called Mindshare Technologies, and its product was about as unglamorous as software gets: a way to ask the person who just bought a burger whether the fries were hot and the line was too long. Twenty-three years later, that same company - by then renamed InMoment - was acquired by Press Ganey Forsta as part of a customer experience firm serving more than 43,000 organizations. The through-line is a single stubborn idea: your customers are already telling you everything, in their own words, and almost nobody is set up to listen.
InMoment sells customer experience software - "CX" in the trade. Strip away the category jargon and the job is concrete. Feedback about a company shows up in a dozen disconnected places: survey responses, one-star reviews, call-center transcripts, chat logs, social posts, comment cards. Each lives in its own tool, in its own format, read by its own team, if it gets read at all. InMoment's XI Platform - short for Experience Improvement - collects those signals, connects them, and runs AI and text analytics over the messy open-ended parts so a company can see the whole picture instead of a dozen fragments.
Section 01Who actually uses it
The customer list reads like a cross-section of the consumer economy: retailers, banks, hospitals, car dealers, insurers, restaurants, hotels, airlines and utilities. More than 3,000 brands ran programs on the platform before the 2025 acquisition. What ties them together is scale of contact - these are organizations that touch millions of customers and generate an unmanageable volume of feedback as a byproduct. A regional bank might get thousands of survey responses and hundreds of Google reviews a week. Left alone, that is noise. The pitch InMoment makes is that it is signal, if you have the plumbing to read it.
Section 02The problem it solves
Everyone in business says "listen to your customers." Very few companies have the infrastructure to do it across every channel at once. That gap - between the platitude and the plumbing - is the whole business. A support call and a Yelp review might describe the same broken checkout process, but if one lives in a call-center system and the other in a reputation tool, no single person ever connects them. InMoment's argument is that the most valuable sentence in a company is often sitting in a transcript nobody has read.
The harder half of the problem is unstructured text. A survey score of 3-out-of-10 tells you a customer is unhappy. The comment underneath - "your app logged me out three times and support hung up" - tells you why, and what to fix. Turning that free-form language into something a business can act on is a natural-language processing problem, and it is where InMoment placed one of its biggest bets.
Section 03Buy, don't build
InMoment did not out-innovate the CX market so much as out-acquire it. Each purchase bolted on a channel or a capability the platform was missing. It is a roll-up strategy executed patiently over a decade, and the shape of the company today is basically the sum of those deals.
Bar length is illustrative, ordered by year - not deal value, which was undisclosed.
The Empathica deal in 2013 is the one that named the company. It roughly doubled the business, and the rebrand from Mindshare to InMoment reframed the entire pitch. One name is about market share. The other is about the single moment a customer decides how they feel about a brand. The 2021 purchase of Lexalytics, a veteran text-analytics firm, gave the platform its language smarts. ReviewTrackers in 2022 added review and reputation management. Each was a piece of the "hear customers everywhere" promise.
The rename was not cosmetic. "Mindshare" is marketing-speak for how much of a customer's attention you own. "InMoment" points at something narrower and more useful - the specific interaction where a customer forms a judgment. The product philosophy followed the name: capture the moment, read it, act before it curdles into a lost account.
Section 04What's inside the platform
The XI Platform is sold as a set of connected capabilities rather than a single app. Customer feedback management handles surveys and voice-of-customer programs. Conversational intelligence reads call and chat transcripts. Reputation management watches reviews and local listings. Digital and social listening tracks public conversation. Underneath it all sits an advanced analytics and AI layer - text mining, sentiment, prediction - plus an employee-experience module on the theory that unhappy staff and unhappy customers are usually the same problem viewed from two sides. For clients who would rather not run programs themselves, there is a managed research and consulting arm.
Section 05How it makes money, and where it sits
The business model is straightforward B2B SaaS: brands subscribe to the platform, with pricing that scales by seats, data volume, channels and program scope, layered with consulting and professional services for the larger accounts. That puts InMoment in a crowded, competitive market. The rivals are names CX buyers know well - Qualtrics, Medallia, Sprinklr, Verint, Reputation.com. InMoment's differentiation was rarely about being the loudest. It leaned on owning the unstructured side - the actual words customers use, not just the number they circle - and on stitching survey, review and conversation data into one view rather than selling any single channel in isolation.
The analysts noticed. InMoment was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Voice of the Customer - its third time in the Leaders quadrant - and a Leader in the Forrester Wave for Text Mining and Analytics, Q2 2024, with the second-highest overall score and top marks in eleven subcategories.
Section 06When your competitor buys you
In May 2025, InMoment was acquired by Press Ganey Forsta, a firm best known for measuring patient experience in healthcare. Both companies had recently sat in the Leaders quadrant of the same Gartner report. The combined entity has more than 3,000 employees and over 43,000 clients, pairing InMoment's conversational intelligence, reputation management and cross-industry reach - retail, hospitality, automotive, financial services - with Press Ganey Forsta's depth in healthcare and experience measurement. When two category leaders merge, that is less a defeat than the market consolidating around the players who got the fundamentals right.
Section 07The expertise, and the long game
Founders rarely get to watch a napkin idea run the full loop. John Sperry started the company surveying restaurant customers, served as its founding CEO, then stepped back to become chief scientist and board chairman when Andrew Joiner took over in 2017. He lived to see the thing become a pillar of a 43,000-client CX company. Its expertise is genuinely earned: two decades of doing one unfashionable job - reading what customers say and turning it into what companies should do next - long enough that the boring data everyone else ignores became the moat.
The company describes its values in three words - Human, Bold, Invested - and while corporate value statements usually evaporate on contact, the strategy at least rhymes with them. Being "invested" in a client's success is a reasonable description of a business that only wins when its customers actually act on the feedback it surfaces. There is a quiet Utah lesson in here too: not every durable software company comes out of the Bay Area. Some come out of Salt Lake City, spend twenty years on a category nobody brags about at parties, and end up a three-time Gartner Leader.