Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Customer experience (CX) is now a corporate board-level concern as quality and consistent delivery directly impact customers’ buying intentions, attitudes, and potential long-term relationships with a company.
Though it’s simple in concept, the ability to deliver a mutually rewarding CX across any combination of digital and/or physical channels demands a level of coordination and orchestration that traditional transactional customer relationship management (CRM) systems can’t support. Recognizing this new reality, major CRM vendors, and others, have developed what can be better described as customer engagement platforms (CEPs). So the market is evolving from transactional CRM systems to augmented platforms that support intelligent and relevant engagement.
The best of these vendors have created a unified environment that enables companies to eliminate departmental silos and intelligently orchestrate a positive and relevant response throughout each customer’s interaction journey based on behavioral signals, implied intent, enriched customer profiles, and real-time artificial intelligence (AI). The best CEPs offer a dynamically orchestrated CX triggered by deep individual customer insights while simultaneously protecting customers’ privacy in compliance with applicable regulations. Actions from signal capture and interpretation to response happen in real time for users of the most advanced CEPs.
The granular user experience with transactions is a vital factor in delivering a positive overall CX and ensuring rapid onboarding with the aid of a well-designed and intuitive user interface (UI) supported by contextually relevant recommendations that help employees deliver the desired customer and business outcomes.
Companies successfully deploying and using CEPs also integrate them into their operational systems, enabling CEPs to connect customers with fulfillment and supply. Modern CEPs use application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect operational systems and ingest and synthesize customer-related data via customer data platforms (CDPs) to create a real-time view of each customer. This helps the enterprise optimize operations based on customer demand, thereby reducing costs.
Many enterprises, especially large international companies, already use some elements of a CEP and will need to make informed choices based on their business objectives and the capabilities they need to reach them. Moving from siloed front-office departmental applications to a unified CEP represents both a significant advance and serious IT systems transformation.
In this report, we highlight the relative strengths and challenges of eleven CEP vendors, based on the latest primary and secondary research. We also provide information on the size of business they serve best, their industry coverage, and deployment options—each of which may be an important purchase consideration for prospective customers. For more information on the CEP market and its evolution, please read the accompanying GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Customer Engagement Platforms.”
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.