CX market analyst Forrester has published its 2022 Wave for Journey Orchestration Platforms (Q2).
With many acquisitions and prominent new entrants making their way into the space, leading CX vendors are hedging their bets on it becoming a significant market for growth.
Indeed, in little more than a year, Medallia acquired Thunderhead, Qualtrics snapped up Usermind, Genesys secured Pointillist, and CSG completed its takeover of Kitewheel.
Interestingly, each of these four acquired businesses was a leader in the 2020 edition of this Forrester Wave report.
Yet, their solutions are diverse, as Forrester notes while inspecting the vendor offerings it deems to be the "most significant" within the journey orchestration field.
The Definition of Journey Orchestration Platforms
These platforms connect customer data and place it in the context of the customer journey, enabling real-time, relevant, and personalized customer experiences.
In addition, most offer measurement capabilities that track an array of CX metrics - such as net promoter scores, repeat purchases, and churn – so companies can monitor the impact of customer journey adjustments.
Finally, Forrester adds that those that excel in journey orchestration offer two further features:
- Internal stakeholder alerts to relevant customer journey insights
- Predictive models to trigger the "next best experience" in real-time
Yet, many may include additional technologies, such as journey design tools.
With so many aspects of customer journey orchestration technologies to consider, CX management teams may struggle to navigate the market and assess the best-placed software.
Fortunately, Forrester is here to help with a 27-criterion evaluation that divides vendors into four categories: Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. Here, we review them all.
The 2022 Journey Orchestration Platforms Forrester Wave Leaders
Forrester Wave leaders demonstrate a robust current offering and future strategy. Their platforms must surpass industry standards for client experience and data fusion, while including journey automation, discovery, optimization, orchestration, and testing. Meanwhile, their strategies must feature planned enhancements to partner ecosystems, commercial models, professional services, and – of course – native technologies. This year’s leaders are:
- CSG
- Genesys
- Alterian
- Thunderhead (Medallia)
- NICE
- Qualtrics
CSG
Following its acquisition of Kitewheel, CSG combined the power of journey analytics, a customer data platform, native channel applications, and an experience design practice. As such, its platform is comprehensive, with Forrester also praising the vendor for its journey visualization tools, partner ecosystem, and future roadmap to enhance customer and employee experiences.
Genesys
Leading CCaaS provider Genesys received acclaim for its use of AI to scale CX management and optimize customer journeys. An excellent example of the latter is how it incorporates automated journey insights across its portfolio to increase CX sophistication and enable hyper-personalization. Other strengths include journey behavior analysis, KPI dashboarding, and alerts-driven collaboration.
Alterian
Insight and analytics stalwart Alterian has evolved its orchestration platform to connect numerous data sources, surfacing journey improvement opportunities and real-time insights that inform next best action. Combining these capabilities – and others – the vendor offers a set of journey orchestration playbooks, which Forrester lauds, alongside its capabilities to calculate the impact of CX adjustments on cost and revenue.
Thunderhead (Medallia)
Thunderhead – now part of Medallia – splits its platform into three layers, one for listening, another for customer intelligence, and a final one for orchestration. Such a system enhances usability – a strength Forrester highlights, alongside its advanced use of AI across its offer. The analyst also notes that Thunderhead customers enjoy its data integration, insight visualization, and scalability.