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 Journey Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

ISG Research defines Customer Journey Management (CJM) software as a component of broader experience management platforms that allow organizations to design the pathways customers take as they interact with businesses. The underlying metaphor behind managing customer experiences is that of the journey: Customers follow a path through distinct stages, with different needs and modes of contact at each stage. The default mode for controlling experiences has long been to react to what the customer does and, to a great extent, build an enormous and costly infrastructure around waiting for customers to decide to engage.

CJM software helps automate that process. It makes the reactive processes smoother and easier. The information gathered about interactions provides context for agents, self-service systems and anyone in the enterprise who faces the customer. CJM turns the passive act of responding to service calls into a deliberate, organized effort to optimize customer experiences and, through that, relationships.

As journey management developed into a discipline, it has acquired some aspects of the customer success process as part of its framework. This makes sense, as post-sales engagements with customers require a highly detailed, logically sequenced series of contacts measured for their impact on customer health and longevity.

The point of journey management is to strengthen an enterprise’s ability to influence customer behavior. When an enterprise can map the journey or life cycle, it can potentially identify moments of influence that can be used to drive added business or turn customers into advocates. CJM software includes capabilities for orchestrating interactions, personalizing them to individual (or group) preferences and managing proactive communication efforts by marketing and sales teams.

Even though most customer communication happens through the contact center, it is in most enterprises’ interest to carefully design inbound and outbound pathways beyond reacting to expressed customer desires. For a long time, organizations wanted to personalize interactions at scale, but the technology was not available or able to make it easy. Orchestrating experiences now is not only possible but should also be the next logical step in technology deployment and process design. Software providers are improving the tools, platforms and analytic capabilities to help businesses map customer journeys, integrate channels, personalize experiences and automate processes. By 2027, one-third of enterprises will be using AI applications to map and manage customer journeys that integrate sales, service and marketing processes.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Customer Journey Management evaluates a set of software providers and products that support dedicated capabilities related to CJM, one of the core areas that make up CXM suites. We considered how products align processes across different departments, how software tracks customer information at different stages of the customer life cycle and who receives that information. We also examined how this software tracks customer outcomes and helps users derive insights related to behavior, sentiment and revenue at different stages.

To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include CJM capabilities as part of an overall CXM platform. We considered features related to orchestrating specific customer outcomes, including preference management, planning proactive communications and preserving a 360-degree view of the customer throughout the journey. The capability model for CJM in this research included: analytics, customer journey management, marketing and sales support and resource management. Separate Buyers Guides on Customer Experience Management and Knowledge Management are available to more specifically examine those software categories and requirements of enterprises.

This research evaluates the following 28 software providers that offer products that deliver customer journey management as we define it: Adobe, Braze, 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 journey 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 journey 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 Journey Management in 2025 finds Salesforce first on the list, followed by Oracle and Verint.

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.
• Oracle.
• Adobe.

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.
• Adobe, Genesys, SAP, Verint 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 journey 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 journey 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.