Executive Summary
Key Takeaways
Emerging customer experience management (CXM) providers reflect a shift away from monolithic suites toward focused platforms that prioritize orchestration, integration and rapid value delivery. These providers are less constrained by legacy architectures and instead design around journeys, data flow and specific customer experience (CX) outcomes. As enterprises adopt more incremental and use-case-driven CX strategies, this approach aligns with the need for flexibility and faster deployment. CXM is increasingly delivered as an enablement layer that coordinates across existing systems rather than replacing them.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Customer Experience Management Emerging Providers evaluates 14 software providers offering products supporting journey orchestration, analytics and cross-system coordination. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as Exotel, CallMiner and Forsta. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. ASAPP, Birdeye, CallMiner, Exotel, Forsta and Quantum Metric were rated as Exemplary, with ChurnZero rated as Innovative. KMS Lighthouse and Tidio were rated as Assurance; and Alida, Custellence, Hiver, Insider One and Sogolytics were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%), which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Exotel, Forsta and CallMiner achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strong capability depth across analytics, interaction management and journey orchestration and robust platform foundations enabling integration, governance and scalability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. Exotel, CallMiner and ASAPP were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Prioritize emerging providers that integrate cleanly into existing CX and operational ecosystems without requiring full platform replacement. Focus on solutions that tightly couple journey orchestration, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver measurable improvements in targeted use cases. Assess platform strength in integration, governance and usability to ensure sustainable adoption beyond initial deployment. Select providers that demonstrate clear alignment between product capabilities and specific CX outcomes.
The Findings
The software providers and products evaluated in this research offer product and customer experiences, but not every feature is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to support the relevant business processes and use cases. Moreover, having too many product capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities is important and meets your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes in line with TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is evident throughout the provider’s website, the buying process and the customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds Exotel atop the list, followed by CallMiner and Forsta. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. CallMiner and Exotel have done so in four categories; Forsta in three; and ASAPP, Hiver, Insider One and Quantum Metric in one category.
The quadrant chart below presents ratings for Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x- and y-axes, respectively, to visually classify software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience has above-median weighted performance on the axis, in aggregate across the two product categories, place farther to the right. The performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determine placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. Placement represents the software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements of product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) applies to those providers that performed above the median on Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: ASAPP, Birdeye, CallMiner, Exotel, Forsta, and Quantum Metric.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) applies to those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The provider rated Innovative is: ChurnZero.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) applies to those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: KMS Lighthouse, and Tidio.
Merit: This rating (lower left) applies to those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Alida, Custellence, Hiver, Insider One and Sogolytics.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent a provider’s value nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
