Since 2022, we have been watching the evolution of the customer experience management (CXM) market as it coalesced from multiple related point solutions spanning contact center, marketing and sales technologies. The theory I had at that time was that providers were creating platforms out of their CX-related niche tools and that those platforms would be used to knit departments and functions together to allow enterprises to control the breadth of the customer lifecycle. Since completing the latest ISG Buyers Guide on CXM earlier this year, some of my thoughts about, and assessments of, overall market direction have changed since we first tackled this segment.
I do still believe that CXM is where the collection of CX-related tools is headed. That is, I do see a role for a platform to contain and integrate diverse tools and their data. However, the market hasn’t developed in quite the way I expected: it’s moving in a platform direction, but slowly, and it’s not yet a fully unified software market in the way CRM or Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) are. What we have is a convergence layer across many elements: contact center, CRM, marketing automation, CDP, journey orchestration, customer success, knowledge management, voice of the customer (VoC), analytics and AI-assisted service. Combinations of these components are often offered as a platform, but they are still largely bought, implemented and budgeted through components. CXM is coherent as an architectural and business objective but fragmented as a purchasing category and product market.
Enterprise buyers increasingly recognize CX as an enterprise-wide issue, but they rarely start by asking “Which CXM suite should we buy?” More often, they start with a concrete operating problem: reduce contact center cost, improve containment, modernize CCaaS, unify customer data and so forth.
For example, consider journey management. In 2022, I considered it an important evolutionary step in CXM that was then merely aspirational. By 2025-26, it evolved from describing customer behavior toward orchestrating it. Journeys create a shared conceptual model that is useful across marketing, service, sales and success teams. But contact centers and marketers still mean different things by “journey”: contact centers often see a journey as the path from issue to resolution, while marketers see a broader lifecycle from prospect through repurchase and advocacy. This is a sign of a market not yet unified.
CXM’s center of gravity is shifting from “handle interactions” to “orchestrate outcomes” and from departmental tooling to cross-functional data, workflow and AI. But the market’s component roots persist and are still the basis for purchasing. All the elements—from contact center through CDP, journey orchestration, knowledge management, VoC and marketing automation—still have separate buyers, budgets, evaluation criteria and incumbent providers.
For enterprise buyers, this means CXM is usually evaluated in two layers. The first layer is the specific business problem that needs solving, wherever it lives. The second layer is the platform question: can the product extend into adjacent CX functions, share customer context, support common analytics, and avoid creating another silo? The idea of the “CXM suite” is becoming more credible because AI, journey orchestration and customer data integration require shared context. However, the dominant buying motion is still “solve this CX problem now, but don’t lock us into another silo.”
What that means is that going to market with a message built around “buy our unified CXM platform” is premature. Instead, what buyers want to hear is how a tool is going to solve a thorny but high-value departmental problem now, on an architecture that lets the buyer unify CX over time.
That fits how the market actually seems to be behaving. A buyer is more likely to fund a project framed around reducing service cost with AI-assisted self-service (for example) than one framed abstractly as “unify CX.” The unified-platform argument becomes more persuasive once it’s tied to a concrete operating pain, which is hard to distill into a message that hits all the buyers across the enterprise at once.
The broader CXM argument is more useful when it can demonstrate that a core high-value problem can’t be solved well in isolation. A contact center can’t deliver good service if it lacks customer history, order status, entitlement data and context. Marketing can’t personalize if it lacks service, commerce and behavioral context. CXM makes sense when the hardest problem is fragmentation and silos, not a suite for suite’s sake.
This also suggests that buyer behavior should focus on identifying (and unifying) business cases across different personas. Execs should care about elements that are more universal,
If it sounds like I’m backtracking on my enthusiasm for CXM as a platform, you’re not entirely wrong. Not because of the technology, but because the pull of departmental solutions (and departmental thinking) is still much stronger than I expected it to be. I think the idea of CXM is directionally correct, but it’s a longer-term prospect than I’d thought. And I think the specific combination of tools within a full CXM suite will be a little different than what we considered in 2022—less knowledge management, less CRM, more data platforms/CDP and more analytics and orchestration. Clearly, the presence of AI has helped change this trajectory.
Regards,
Keith Dawson