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.
NICE
Unsurprisingly, NICE receives acclaim for its abilities to harness AI and analytics to generate journey insights that empower contact center agents. Indeed, it is a leader in the CCaaS space. Nevertheless, Forrester notes several other strengths, including deep integrations with CRM and collaboration tools, alongside its advanced workflow automation features.
Qualtrics
After acquiring Usermind and Clarabridge, Qualtrics now offers the tools to orchestrate many journey orchestration use cases, such as service recovery, curbside pick-up, and customer onboarding. Those managing these journeys may also gain deep insights into customer sentiment, intent, and effort. As a result, users may access power visualizations, which can inform future-state maps they may design within the solution.
The 2022 Journey Orchestration Platforms Forrester Wave Strong Performers
In this year’s edition of the Forrester Wave for Journey Orchestration Platforms, the market analyst does not class any vendor as a “challenger”.
The 2022 Journey Orchestration Platforms Forrester Wave Contenders
While these contenders trail market leaders, they demonstrate a proven ability to deliver on particular journey orchestration use cases and offer a promising future strategy. Alongside this, they provide access to an array of data sources, a comprehensive orchestration and improvement toolset, and increasing customer interest. This year’s strong contenders are:
- Coveo
- Engage Hub
- Roojoom
Coveo
Well-established in the space, Coveo invests in AI to orchestrate hyper-personalized customer journeys that tailor recommendations, content, and website navigation to individual customers. The vendor also offers many integrations, alongside innovative testing and persona creation features to improve journeys further, which Forrester notes as critical strengths. Yet, according to the analyst, Coveo lags in its sharing and co-creation capabilities.
Engage Hub
Engage Hub offers a highly practical solution, which Forrester claims: “Moves firms from campaigns to a journey mindset.” Yet, it does provide innovative features, such as a journey tracker to assess CX in real-time and an orchestration engine that analyzes how journey improvements impact critical customer, employee, and business outcomes. Unfortunately, its customers report a chasm in its ability to connect various data sources and create a unified view of CX.
Roojoom
With a meticulous focus on service experiences, Roojoom simplifies journeys such as troubleshooting, customer onboarding, upselling, etc. In doing so, the vendor aims to invest in AI to support these experiences, including autonomous AI that empowers more complex journeys. Such a vision intrigues Forrester, yet the analyst notes the lack of journey behavior analysis as a concern.
The 2022 Journey Orchestration Platforms Forrester Wave Challengers
Although challengers trail when compared to the offerings of leaders and contents – as per Forrester’s evaluation – they are significant players within the space, as the industry analyst pinpoints them as a top ten industry player. As such, they have a proven ability to execute particular journey orchestration use cases and meet client expectations. This year’s strong challengers are:
- inQuba
inQuba
Forrester claims that InQuba tracks journey performance across “functional, economic, experiential, and symbolic value for the customer.” This approach differentiates the vendor, which builds cohort insights, operational metrics, and collaboration tools into its roadmap. While this vision is promising, the analyst believes that the platform currently misses these collaboration tools greatly.
What Lies Ahead for the Journey Orchestration Space?
As brands become increasingly experience-driven, investment in journey orchestration platforms will likely continue.
Indeed, more traditional contact center players – alongside Genesys and NICE – will likely enter the fray, while enterprise tech giants – including Microsoft, Google, and AWS – may start making moves.
Yet, by securing the acquisition of Thunderhead and Usermind respectively, significant VoC players Medallia and Qualtrics continue to gain ground in the space.
Perhaps this trend will persevere, and the likes of InMoment and ConfirmIt may break into Forrester’s top ten picks for 2023. Only time will tell.
Uncover Forrester’s findings when it assessed people-orientated text-analytics platform providers by reading our rundown of the Forrester Wave for People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms 2022
