Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Customer Journey Management ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

Customer Journey Management (CJM) software is a component of broader experience management platforms that allows organizations to design the pathways that customers take as they interact with businesses. The underlying metaphor behind managing customer experiences is that of the journey: customers follow a path through distinct stages, with different needs and modes of contact at each stage. The default mode for controlling experiences has long been to react to what the customer does and, to a great extent, build an enormous and costly infrastructure around having to wait for customers to decide to engage.

CJM software helps automate that process. It makes the reactive processes smoother and easier, and uses the information gathered about interaction context to provide context for agents, self-service systems and anyone else in the organization who faces the customer. CJM turns the passive act of responding to service calls into a deliberate, organized effort at optimizing customer experiences, and through that, relationships.

By 2027, one-third of enterprises will have developed initiatives to map and manage customer journeys by integrating sales, service and marketing processes. When an enterprise can map the journey or life cycle, it can potentially moments of influence that can be used to drive added business or turn customers into advocates. CJM software includes capabilities for orchestrating interactions, personalizing them to individual (or group) preferences, and managing proactive communication efforts by marketing and sales teams.

Even though most customer communications happen through the contact center, it is in most enterprises’ interest to carefully design inbound and outbound pathways that go further than just reacting to expressed customer desires. For a long time, organizations have wanted to be able to personalize interactions at scale, but the technology was not available able to make that easy. The technology landscape has changed significantly enough that orchestrating experiences is not only possible, but it should also be the next logical step in technology deployment and process design. Organizations now have access to tools, platforms and analytic capabilities that help them map customer journeys, integrate channels, personalize experiences and automate processes.

This research evaluates a set of software providers and products that support dedicated capabilities related to CJM, one of the five core areas that make up CXM suites. We took into consideration how products align processes across different departments; how software tracks customer information at different stages of the customer lifecycle, and who it provides that information to; and how it tracks customer outcomes and helps users derive insights related to behavior, sentiment and revenue at different stages.

We also considered features related to orchestrating specific customer outcomes, including preference management, planning out proactive communications and preserving a 360-degree view of the customer throughout the journey. A separate Buyers Guide on Customer Experience Management and Knowledge Management are available to more specifically examine those software categories and requirements of enterprises.

To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must have included CJM capabilities as part of an overall CXM platform. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that deliver Customer Journey Management applications as we define them: Adobe, Emplifi, Freshworks, Genesys, NICE, Salesforce, Sprinklr, Verint, Zendesk and Zoho.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of customer journey management software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating customer journey management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Customer Journey Management in 2024 finds Salesforce first on the list, followed by Verint and NICE.

Providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Oracle
• Salesforce
• Verint

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Salesforce
• Verint
• NICE

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Salesforce, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• NICE and Verint in five categories.
• Adobe in two categories.
• Genesys and Zoho in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle customer journey management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our customer journey management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.