With wave after wave of cloud-based innovations and new AI solutions sweeping across the CX space, customer journey orchestration has never been so crucial.
Recognizing this, more CX vendors have moved further into the field.
From CCaaS stalwarts like Genesys and NICE to voice of the customer (VoC) pioneers such as Medallia and Qualtrics – these providers have poured funds into their orchestration platforms.
That investment has enabled brands to build more comprehensive views of their customer journeys, remove pain points, and become more strategic in their AI strategies.
However, some vendors have gone further than others in building out their customer journey orchestration platforms and aligning their innovation efforts with a compelling vision.
Thankfully, Forrester has isolated “the most significant” nine providers and evaluated them to help brands select the best-suited platform provider for their businesses.
How Forrester Defines “Customer Journey Orchestration Platforms”
A customer journey orchestration platform “connects journeys and fosters a culture of data-driven decision-making based on a customer’s path and perceptions as they pursue a goal,” as per Forrester.
Yet, in leveraging such platforms, some businesses face issues like integrating real-time data sources and running hyper-personalization strategies for “ever-changing” customers.
In light of these problems, Forrester urges customer journey orchestration platform buyers to consider providers that:
- Expedite seamless data integration to deliver insights at speed.
- Facilitate the adoption of responsible AI.
- Optimize journeys to align customer outcomes with business goals.
Forrester goes into much more detail on each of these within its study.
Yet, for the most part, the report offers an analysis of the nine vendors, which Forrester splits into four groups: leaders, strong performers, contenders, and challengers.
In doing so, the analyst evaluates each vendor across 30 criteria, divided into three central themes: current offering, strategy, and market presence.
How Did the Vendors Perform?
Across the three central themes, here are Forrester’s five top-performing providers of customer journey orchestration platforms.
Current Offering
- Alterian (4.30/5.00)
- CSG (4.00/5.00)
- Qualtrics (3.84/5.00)
- Genesys (3.44/5.00)
- Medallia (2.92/5.00)
Strategy
- CSG (4.50/5.00)
- Qualtrics (4.50/5.00)
- Alterian (4.20/5.00)
- Genesys (3.00/5.00)
- Medallia (3.00/5.00)
Market Presence
- Genesys (5.00/5.00)
- Qualtrics (5.00/5.00)
- CSG (3.00/5.00)
- Medallia (3.00/5.00)
- Engage Hub (2.00/5.00)
5. Quantum Metric (2.00/5.00)
Forrester sheds more light on these scores by offering an overview of the 12 vendors’ portfolios and services.
While the study provides many more insights into each vendor’s strengths, cautions, and roadmap, here are the headline takeaways for each.
CSG – CSG Xponent (Leader)
Since its 2021 acquisition of Kitewheel, CSG has stayed at the forefront of the customer journey orchestration space. In doing so, it has established data integration, identity privacy, and impact analysis as core strengths. Forrester isolates these while highlighting how CSG’s customers highly rate its real-time orchestration and data fusion capabilities. The vendor also stands out for its orchestration maturity model, sector-specific design, and generative AI (GenAI) use. Its Bill Explainer tool – which auto-summarizes changes to a customer’s bill – is an excellent example.
Qualtrics – Qualtrics Customer Journey Optimizer (Leader)
Like CSG, Qualtrics bought its way to the top of the market and has stayed there. Indeed, with its 2021 roll-up of Usermind, the vendor acquired advanced journey discovery, success analysis, and storytelling capabilities, which – as per Forrester – customers give high ratings. Other strengths include the platform’s ability to surface emotion-driven insight and deliver operations intelligence. Such intelligence allows brands to spot patterns in CX, EX, and business data. Finally, the vendor will invest $500MN to bolster its AI portfolio, having already released many GenAI-infused innovations.
Alterian – Alterian Real-Time CX (Leader)
Alterian has a much smaller market presence than many other vendors in the Forrester Wave. Yet, it outranks them with core strengths in its journey path and success analysis, real-time decisioning, and GenAI strategy. Yet, Forrester also gives plaudits to its orchestration playbooks, no-code data integrations, and “instant journey insight”. The latter allows customers to learn from data gathered from 100BN+ anonymized journey events. Meanwhile, those customers commend the vendor’s identity resolution, journey discovery, and storytelling capabilities.
Genesys – Genesys Journey Management (Strong Performer)
Like CSG and Qualtrics, Genesys entered the space in 2021. Then, the vendor snapped up Pointillist, pairing the standalone platform with the native journey orchestration capabilities available on Genesys Cloud. The combined offering has strengths in its employee and partner orchestration, strategy optimization, and journey hierarchy features. Forrester recognizes these while noting how customers score the platform highly for its ease of adoption, scalability, and security. However, the analyst highlights content personalization, journey simulation, and testing as areas for upgrades.
Medallia – Medallia Experience Orchestration (Strong Performer)
A year after Genesys, Medallia moved into the journey orchestration market, acquiring Thunderhead. In doing so, the vendor rolled-up a broad, rich platform that allows brands to build interactive journey flows, sunburst charts, and more. Within that platform, Forrester isolates the real-time decisioning, analytics, and community-building features as core strengths. Meanwhile, customers reportedly highly rate its cross-channel data fusion and success analysis capabilities. However, the study suggests Medallia lags behind leaders in its predictive AI and employee orchestration.
Engage Hub – Engage Hub Customer Journey Tracker (Contender)
Engage Hub puts forward a platform with an emphasis on contact center automation and use cases. Yet, beyond that, it offers robust customer journey analytics, data fusion, and GenAI capabilities. Forrester isolates these as strengths while its reference customers highlight customer orchestration across channels and experience storytelling as plus points. Nevertheless, some also reported dissatisfaction with the platform’s dynamic content personalization, while Forrester spots opportunities for Engage Hub to improve predictive journey AI and operations intelligence.
inQuba – inQuba Platform (Contender)
With little more than 40 customers, inQuba is a surprise addition to the Forrester Wave. Yet, it shows vision with capabilities like advanced ROI analysis to enable journey intervention strategies. Moreover, Forrester suggests inQuba’s business impact analysis, cross-channel customer journey orchestration, and operations intelligence are central strengths. Customers also give plaudits its security and employee orchestration features. However, some report dissatisfaction with cross-journey orchestration, while Forrester identifies identity resolution as an area for improvement.
Quantum Metric – Quantum Metric Inbound Data Enrichment (Contender)
Expanding from the digital analytics space, Quantum Metric enters the journey orchestration market with innovative capabilities, such as Session Replays to discover and address pain points. The vendor then pairs that ability to surface insight with workflow automation, which Forrester recognizes as a critical strength, alongside employee and partner journey orchestration. As such, Quantum Metric may prove an excellent partner for brands to overcome issues isolated by digital analytics. However, the study cautions about the platform’s strategy optimization and data integration functionality.
Roojoom – Roojoom Platform (Challenger)
Roojoom primarily focuses on customer support journeys, from troubleshooting to up- and cross-selling. In doing so, it has created a library of reusable journey “building blocks” and uses AI to generate real-time journeys. Indeed, AI is a specialist area for the vendor, with Forrester noting its strengths in predictive and generative AI alongside journey simulation and testing. However, the analyst found flaws in its strategy optimization, journey hierarchy, and operations intelligence features. Meanwhile, some customers seek upgrades in the platform’s cross-functional collaboration.
Why Did Forrester Select These Customer Journey Orchestration Platform Providers?
Many vendors offer piecemeal solutions for customer journey discovery, testing, automation, and/or optimization. Yet, Forrester only includes vendors with a “comprehensive” platform within its study.
As such, it has shunned providers that deliver “one-off, custom-coded journey analytics systems”, which loosely integrate the solutions above.
Meanwhile, the analyst also spurned those that build over the top of another vendor’s software.
In addition, each participating provider had to:
- Provide evidence of its journey orchestration customers’ success.
- Enable access to a broad range of data sources.
- Demonstrate “strong” customer interest.
Following this criteria, Forrester identified the nine vendors it believes matter the most in the customer journey orchestration market.
Forrester also evaluates the vendors “that matter most” across several other enterprise technology subsets. For takeaways from its other CX-related Waves, read our rundowns of:
