Acoustic Reviews

Just to give you a taste of how things are at Acoustic, here's just a few bullet points: This company went through 3 CEO's in less than a year. They laid off 30% of the company in one day without any notice right before Christmas, 2020. Layoffs continue to be a constant thing to this day. They are hiring low cost over-seas workers to replace US workers and are asking the US workers to train them before getting let go. They wasted millions on consultants who only wasted time and caused more work. They are bleeding cash. Currently they do not give raises and they cancelled the 401k match. Moral is very low (at least among the US workers that haven't been laid off). The overseas workers are seriously lacking in the skillsets and experience compared with the people they are replacing, and what's more, the leaders who are bringing them on (who also lack any hands-on technical skills) don't realize it. At a high level, the number 1 issue is arrogance among upper management and the leadership team. They make decisions in a vacuum without any input from lower level managers who are intimately familiar with the pieces of the technology they were hired to implement or manage. Finally, they take no accountability for this on-going disaster. They blame the carve-out, IBM, Covid, older infrastructure, and consultants just to name a few. My guess is that this company will get sold off again and that the product's future will be full of instability and downtime.

Were to start.... The problems really started while Acoustic was still part of IBM... Watson Customer Engagement was a huge failure... great ideas, horrible execution. They spent all R&D for the past 4 years on Watson AI (not a bad thing) only to sunset all products with AI this year because 'they just didn't work'. Now the platform's relevance is threatened. Once Acoustic, the executive leadership was full of IBMers that didn't understand the value of prospecting and building pipeline for sales. New sales growth shrank to it's lowest levels in over a decade. The continued changes in sales leadership did not help, and now they have a new GTM strategy: all inside sales. High velocity, high volume. They are trying to be like MailChimp or Constant Contact.... but the platform is build on strong marketing automation. It's far too sophisticated for that. And sadly, that too will fail. Add the multiple layoffs of talented people, the decrease in medical premiums paid by the company, and the removal of the 401K match, and you've got a failing company. Now they are resorting to cheap marketing shots at the competition. It's embarrassing. And the first round of analyst reports are coming out for 2021... I've never seen a company go from being a leader in a marketing wave to fall all the way to a 'Contender' status. Not even 'Strong Performer', but 'Contender'? WOW! That says it all. Prospective customers and employees: you have been warned.