Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Emplifi drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Emplifi and 21 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Vendor Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our Benchmark Research on Customer Experience (CX).

Emplifi was created through the merger of social media analytics company Socialbakers with CX vendor Astute Solutions in 2021. It was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor, ranking seventh overall in this Value Index evaluation. Emplifi performed best in Usability, where it placed fourth. It also scored well in Adaptability (eighth place), Manageability (sixth place), Vendor Validation (sixth place) and Capability (seventh place).

Emplifi’s product is CX Cloud, a platform containing three modules: Social Marketing Cloud, Social Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud. The company’s origins in both social media and contact center allow it to develop features for those clouds that reflect the needs of many user personas. Social Marketing Cloud contains analytics and content management, as well as social customer care. Social Commerce Cloud incorporates e-commerce and inventory management into the CX mix. And Service Cloud contains tools for agents and self-service, knowledge management and process automation.

Emplifi performed well in Manageability in the measures of privacy and security and on the clarity of its roadmap and technology architecture. In Capability, it has unique features related to transaction processing and commerce. Emplifi could boost its ranking in that category by improving its ability to provide managers with predictive analysis for planning and for building out better cross-departmental workflows. It can make improvements in Reliability by giving attention to how well it delivers metrics and notifications around scalability and helps organizations optimize for that capability.

This assessment was based on Emplifi’s customer experience management (CXM or CEM) products available in October of 2022. In the subsequent November release cycle, Emplifi implemented a series of hotfixes to the platform, as well as a series of new features for contact center agents and administrators.

Emplifi, like all vendors in this space, should continue working towards a holistic, integrated CX platform that addresses the needs of users across the enterprise. Connecting workflows from marketing, sales and service teams should be a key priority.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of CXM software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.