Report: Medallia, Qualtrics, InMoment among the top players in customer feedback management

Forrester has released its Forrester Wave: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q4 2018 report, detailing the nine providers who are transforming customer feedback management (CFM) and therefore the customer experience (CX).

CX professionals rely on CFM technologies and services to obtain, analyse and measure feedback from key customers across channels, distribute feedback, and monitor progress. CFMs centralise and automate voice of customer (VoC) programs, which is becoming increasingly vital in a customer-centric marketing environment. 

Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of top CFM vendors (with more than US$50 million in revenue from CFM), and found Medallia, Qualtrics, InMoment, and Clarabridge lead the pack; Confirmit, MaritzCX, and SMG are strong performers; and NICE Satmetrix and Verint are contenders.

Forrester said leader, Medallia, drives CX improvement from the top down and the bottom up, bringing the voice of customer (VoC) to the frontlines and incorporating the voice of the employee.

Qualtrics' 'land and expand' strategy continues to evolve and it lets clients meet customers wherever they are, collecting feedback across a variety of channels and locations and adding a number of new offerings.

The report states, though smaller than either Medallia or Qualtrics, InMoment punches well above its weight by blending strengths in strategy, technology, services, and people.

Clarabridge differentiates from the rest of the CFM pack through its strong focus on data integrations and the power of best-in-class text analytics.

Forrester explains that since 2017, the CFM space has seen significant growth, because more CX professionals see the technology as essential to addressing top challenges and transforming CX. In fact, in the 2011 Forrester Wave evaluation, CFM revenue for 2010 ranged from $10 million to $30 million or more. In the 2017 Forrester Wave evaluation, revenues for 2015 ranged from $20 million to $180 million. And for the 2018 evaluation, vendors reported 2017 revenues starting at $50 million and exceeding $250 million.

“CX is becoming more essential and core across all companies and verticals,” said InMoment CEO, Andrew Joiner. “We appreciate being recognised as a leader among CFM providers, and feel that the evaluation echoed our strategy, which is to move companies from metrics to more meaningful analysis. Executing on that strategy requires that we take a fundamentally different approach to evolve feedback beyond traditional surveying techniques, and leverage our differentiated technology platform and advanced data science.”

But CFM vendors are also operating in a problematic market, due to a lack of cooperation within organisations when it comes to CX, difficulty of differentiation in the crowded CFM market, and the current limitations of AI.

‘Nearly 40 per cent of CX pros cite a lack of cooperation across their organisation as a key challenge when it comes to improving CX. Nearly 25 per cent cite a lack of CX measurement data, less than half of CX pros are responsible for their enterprise VoC program, and 65 per cent say that there are other teams in their organisation that are also focused on CX. This often results in multiple technologies being used to collect the VoC across the enterprise, bringing redundant costs,’ the report states.

‘A race for the most sophisticated tech like AI and machine learning. The current CFM landscape is packed with vendors touting AI capabilities. That's exciting because true AI-enabled solutions aim to mimic humans' abilities to think and sense the world around them, reason through the information, and then act. That potential AI future is easy for buyers to fall in love with, but today's AI reality has a long way to go before it can deliver.’

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