Managing customer feedback effectively is an essential part of customer experience management.
While contact center analytics provide insights into metrics like handling times and team performance, deeper investiagtion is necessary to unearth gamechanging insight.
This requirement to think outside the box and look beyond core customer feedback management (CFM) solutions was key to Forrester’s latest Wave report.
The 2024 study has identified and analyzed nine of the “most significant” CFM vendors in the space and assessed them against 26 criteria across two areas of evaluation.
Each company is then ranked as either a Leader, Strong Performer, Contender, or Challenger.
Let’s take a look at how this year’s vendors performed.
How Did the Vendors Perform?
Here are Forrester’s five top performing vendors across the two areas of evaluation:
Current Offering
- Medalllia: 4.36/5
- Qualtrics: 3.92/5
- InMoment: 3.54/5
- Sprinklr: 3.42/5
- Concentrix: 2.5/5
Strategy
- Medalllia: 3.7/5
- Qualtrics: 3.6/5
- Concentrix: 3.2/5
- InMoment: 3.1/5
- SMG: 2.7/5
As well as the scores, Forrester also provides an overview of each vendor’s portfolios and solutions. Below is a summary of each.
Medallia (Leader)
Retaining its 2023 position as a Wave Leader, Medallia’s Experience Cloud (MEC) offering garnered praise for its ability to deliver “robust” analytics and voice of the employee (VoE) capabilities to a global network of industries.
Forrester also outlined the company’s dedication to accessibility, its impressive text mining features, and its active use of client feedback in informing feature development.
The report described Medallia as being “particularly suited” to enterprises focused on organization-wide CX engagement, who are seeking a vendor with proven success in large-scale implementations.
Qualtrics (Leader)
Having been listed as a Strong Performer last time out, Qualtrics’ repackaged CX offering, XM for Customer Experience, has helped push the vendor back into the Wave’s top tier.
The solution boasts a survey-focused Text iQ feature, rage click detection, and integration with digital tools like Adobe, which Forrester believes helps to provide “deeper understanding.”
The vendor’s generative AI (GenAI) and self-service features were also discussed, with the report commending the former for its ability to untangle unstructured data and the latter for helping to enforce Qualtrics “strong community strategy.”
InMoment (Strong Performer)
InMoment retained its Strong Performer ranking after impressing Forrester with its mix of technical and strategic CFM features.
The vendor’s new Spotlight solution is allowing InMoment to maximize the text mining expertise it acquired through the purchase of Lexalytics. The tool’s more polished user experience and promise of further enhancements has led to excitement amongst early users.
While Forrester highlighted the positive impact that the purchase of ReviewTracker has had on the company’s ratings and reviews management features, it lacks the seamlessness of other platforms because certain features, like review responses, are managed in a separate UI. The vendor was also marked down for its lack of client community.
Sprinklr (Strong Performer)
New to the Wave and to the CFM market, Sprinklr’s recently launched Surveys solution has made a splash, impressing Forrester with its “superior” roadmap, social media usage, and ratings and reviews.
In addition, the report also praised Sprinklr’s “strong” GenAI and text mining features, as well as its process for gathering and evaluating innovation ideas from clients and partners.
However, as a newcomer, Sprinklr understandably struggles to match some of the more established vendors in the field when it comes to CX partner network, measurements, and domain-specific templates.
Concentrix (Strong Performer)
Despite being better known as a global business process outsourcing partner, Forrester believes that Concentrix’s “quality” supporting services make it a serious CFM operator – particularly in the North American market.
The vendor’s attitude towards surveys and end-user experiences, GenAI usage, high customer adoption rates, hybrid text mining capabilities, and dashboard improvements were all also highlighted in the report.
Yet, despite the improvements, Concentrix’s overall UI is still less modern and business-user-friendly than some of its competitors. Forrester also described its innovation roadmap as “less detailed and ambitious.”
SMG (Contender)
Unfortunately, 2024 has seen SMG slip from Strong Performer to Contender.
In spite of this, Forrester still described the vendor as a “strong choice” for consumer, food service, retail, and B2C organizations.
SMG’s mobile app and report builder function were commended for their capacity to support frontline employees at scale; while the company’s benchmarking, account, and analytics capabilities were also applauded.
Where the company falls short is its lack of self-service features, sub-par text mining offering, and the overall cohesiveness of the solution.
It is important to note that SMG’s acquisition of customer community vendor Bulbshare was not taken into account during the Wave analysis.
Alchemer (Contender)
The second newcomer on the list offers a self-service focused product with a quick-to-deploy, easy-to-use platform.
The vendor’s purchases and collaborations also impressed Forrester, with the acquisition of Apptentive bolstering its mobile app feedback capabilities, and the partnership with Chattermill helping Alchemer to deploy ML and GenAI-based text mining.
However, the company lacks the product depth and robustness to realistically attract enterprise-grade customers and does not possess any standout innovations.
PG Forsta (Contender)
Like SMG, PG Forsta has fallen from Strong Performer to Contender, with its healthcare and retail-focused offerings not doing enough to impress Forrester this time around.
That’s not to say that the vendor is without its merits. Indeed, the report complimented its “unique” frontline feedback collection features and “standout” visuals used for linking employee and customer data.
The company is let down by its complex pricing model, a lack of granularity and filtering options for its dashboard, and a platform that requires too many vendor interventions.
Verint (Contender)
Where SMG and PG Forsta dropped down a rung, Verint managed to move up a tier from Challenger to Contender, thanks, in part, to its strong CX background and legacy infrastructure.
The vendor also received plaudits for its “well-established” website feedback tools, particularly its rage-detection feature.
Despite these positives, the company fails to deliver clear roadmap and innovation plans for its enterprise CX products and remains too contact center orientated, with Forrester advising that its CMF offerings are only really desirable to existing Verint customers.
Customer Feedback Management Essential Criteria
Alongside a breakdown of the pros and cons of each of the nine vendors included in the report, Forrester also provided some general advice on what any prospective CFM buyers should be on the lookout for.
The analyst believes that any CFM provider should meet the following three criteria, which it dives much deeper on in the report:
- Buyers must consider the role of services beyond implementation. Despite the expectation around self-service capabilities, users need to be aware that CFM solutions are not strictly self-service or service-driven, and service quality varies.
- Buyers should evaluate these options as they pertain to their organizational maturity, resources, and speed requirements, and avoid the assumption that greater maturity reduces the need for services. This applies to the current must-have tech in the CX industry: GenAI. More specifically, knowing how ready the buyer and vendor are for GenAI.
- Buyers should assess how vendors prioritize and align GenAI capabilities with their own AI needs to ensure meaningful integration and value. Similarly to GenAI, the final criterion also considers an organization’s readiness for CX ops and data management strategies.
Forrester suggests that potential buyers should consider aligning their data strategies with their CFM capabilities to maximize value.
