Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Customer Experience Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

Enterprises consistently view customer experience (CX) as an essential component in ensuring continued growth and profitability. The strategies and tools used to improve CX, however, are immensely varied. Businesses usually relegate CX issues to tactical operations departments, where it is rarely the responsibility of one leader to govern and optimize the CX across every channel of interaction.

ISG Research defines Customer Experience Management as software that combines business applications to impact customer outcomes across departments. CXM is best defined as a suite of applications built on a common platform that facilitates an interdepartmental view of customer activity and provides mechanisms for controlling that activity.

In recent years, technology has evolved to allow for a more centralized approach to many CX issues. Enterprises are now able to use more integrated software and platforms that tie together customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center processes typically dispersed across multiple parts of the organization. This can include marketing, sales, commerce, field service and locations where customers convene for purchases or services.

This evolution of CX is bringing about a shift in how enterprises purchase and deploy technology related to customer activities and how software providers package products to meet the needs of the workforce. There is an evolving synthesis of functions: a combination of systems for handling contact center interactions and those previously separate for proactively orchestrating interactions and influencing customer behavior towards desired business outcomes.

Some elements come from (and are primarily used by) the contact center, particularly interaction handling and engagement optimization. Others derive from marketing technology, like customer data platforms (CDPs) or journey management tools. The precise mix of applications in a software provider’s suite depends on the background expertise of the software provider. Whether a provider originates in marketing technology, contact center, CRM or data management deeply influences components that are front-and-center for that software provider. The divergence of origin points creates an imbalance of capabilities derived from the extreme variations in provider expertise and the primary users or buyers of the tools.

The evolution of CXM addresses the shortcomings of the decades-old CRM software category with its more departmental and application-centric approach. Instead, we see an approach that organizes based on the customer journey and the interactions a customer may have with the organization across any channel. That breadth of scope and expertise explains why the mix of components, users and use cases has been so diverse across CXM products. The broad outlines are clear: A CXM suite is a product family composed of applications collectively organized to optimize customer interactions, experiences and profitability.

From the point of view of the enterprise buyer, the most important criteria for selection should focus on three areas: First, how the software facilitates managing and measuring customer behavior across multiple stages of the customer lifecycle. Second, how well it presents senior leadership with a coherent picture of the customer base to understand direction and make plans or decisions. And third, how open it is to expansion laterally into adjacent software segments related to other CX departments. For example, if you are judging a marketing automation suite for CX, how well does it serve (or integrate into) contact center applications? Or, if you are judging contact center platforms, how integrable are the marketing, advertising, sales or IT applications?

It can be difficult for buyers to effectively compare similar or overlapping portfolios from providers that, in many cases, do not directly compete against one another. A tool set from a contact center provider will likely focus on communications, one from a marketing technology provider on audiences and analytics and one from an IT-centric company on service management or integration. A business buying tools for one or two of those use cases will need to understand how well they integrate with and support (or supplant) the tools used for all the other cases.

CXM systems should cover five core functional areas across departments. The first is interaction handling, covering the traditional voice-centric activities of contact centers and including contemporary digital customer contact channels. A CXM suite should also manage the data or context surrounding the interaction. In any customer journey, a contact or touchpoint is intimately influenced by what has happened in the past, either past (purchase histories) or the recent past (hopping from one channel to another in search of answers or results).

The second core area for CXM is resource management. “Resources” include people, as in the contact center agents who respond to customers or the knowledge workers who supply them with information. However, the resources most in need of management these days are knowledge and data resources and digital content. The pressure to deploy AI technology is especially urgent in CXM. The specific tools and use cases most directly affected by AI are those built around automating (and anticipating) customer activity and are largely the domain of a CXM suite. A CXM suite could include elements akin to a CRM or CDP, a digital asset manager, a knowledge management system and various content creation tools.

Third, CXM should orchestrate those processes and enable users to optimize automation across departments and workflows that touch different components and the teams working with customers. Because CXM is knitting together (and replacing) isolated point applications, it needs an underlying platform that integrates its wide spread of tools and users. It needs to function across data silos and create workflow automations that deliver specific information and work where it is needed at the moment it is needed.

The development of applications based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) fall into this category, including real-time agent guidance assistance and intelligent self-service engines. Other functions dependent on a strong platform include processing transactions, fulfilling service requests, segmenting customers into audiences, developing website offers and tracking customer behavior.

The fourth element to consider is the tool set’s capabilities for providing insights and analysis to users across the enterprise, including reporting, visualizations and dashboards, and predictions and planning. A system that collects information about customers, interactions and behavior—and then analyzes it—should be able to present its findings in forms relevant to a spectrum of different users. Ground-level workers need awareness of the specifics around particular customers, but executives need overviews of performance, outcomes and revenue.

Every department involved in CX has a unique set of key performance indicators and relevant metrics. One of the great values of bringing all CX applications and tools into a single platform is that it establishes consistency and continuity around data collection and metrics. It makes visible the big picture that would otherwise be lost in departmental minutia. By 2027, most CXM suites will, by default, include components that combine analytics, AI applications and customer data integration.

The fifth and last core capability set is customer journey management. This is key to the further development of the entire category of software, as it turns the passive act of responding to service calls into a deliberate, organized effort at optimizing customer experiences and, through that, relationships. When an enterprise can map the journey or life cycle, it can identify moments of influence used to drive added business or turn customers into advocates. Customer journey management contains software for orchestrating interactions, personalizing them to individual (or group) preferences and managing proactive communication efforts by marketing and sales teams. Customer success processes, normally seen as isolated post-sales matters, increasingly resemble this journey management component, and the technology is adapting accordingly.

Together, these five areas add up to an enterprise software of great utility and variety. CXM software is at the beginning of its development maturity, and it is rare to find a single offering that fits strongly into all five areas. Many software providers start out with an emphasis on their areas of origin and build out from there. Marketing technology software providers, for example, start with audience building and segmentation but often have little to do with interaction handling. On the flip side, contact center providers who excel at interactions often have very little capacity to manage journeys, knowledge or advanced analytics. Over time, we expect suites across the landscape to converge on these five areas through acquisition, partnership and organic development.

This research evaluates software providers in four of the five areas including AI and automation, analytics and resource management but excluding consideration of the interaction handling capabilities described in the first area, customer interaction. We evaluate the broad sweep of interaction handling tools in a separate set of Buyers Guides exclusively covering contact center systems.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for CXM evaluates software providers and products based on support for AI and automation, analytics, customer journey management, interaction automation, knowledge management, marketing and sales support, and resource management.

To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must offer capabilities from three of the following areas: Resource Management, Automation, Analytics and Customer Journey Management. Separate Buyers Guides on Customer Journey Management and Knowledge Management are available to examine those software categories.

This research evaluates the following 29 software providers that offer products to address key elements of customer experience management as we define it: Adobe, Braze, CallMiner, CSG, eGain, Emplifi, Exotel, Freshworks, Gainsight, Genesys, Hubspot, Insider, Medallia, Microsoft, MoEngage, Netcore, Nextiva, NICE, Oracle, Qualtrics, Salesforce, SAP, SAS, ServiceNow, Sprinklr, SugarCRM, Verint, Zendesk and Zoho.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of customer experience management software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating customer experience management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Customer Experience Management in 2025 finds Salesforce first on the list, followed by Verint and NICE.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Salesforce.
• Verint.
• NICE.

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• NICE.
• Salesforce.
• Verint.

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• NICE and ServiceNow, which has achieved this rating in six of the seven categories.
• Salesforce in four categories.
• Verint in two categories.
• Oracle and Zendesk in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle customer experience management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our customer experience management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.