Forrester published a new report with highlights of changes among customer feedback management (CFM) vendors to give you the crucial insights you need to understand your CFM options. Why? Since the 2014 reports on the VoC vendor landscape and VoC vendor go-to-market strategies, we saw some big changes in the CFM market. Many changes are good news for CX pros who are looking to support their enterprisewide VoC and CX measurement efforts. But they don't make navigating this market any easier. 

 

Key changes in the CFM market include:

  • Consolidation of established CFM vendors. CFM vendor Mindshare acquired Empathica in September 2013 and then relaunched the newly combined company in June 2014 under the name InMoment. Maritz Holdings acquired Allegiance and merged it with Maritz Research to launch MaritzCX in January 2015.

  • Entry of new CFM vendors. Clarabridge, formerly a specialist vendor that focused on text analytics, moved into the CFM category by adding significant capabilities to support all stages of the VoC cycle through a combination of an acquisition and native development. Qualtrics, formerly a survey platform specialist, entered the CFM category by adding capabilities to interpret unstructured feedback and act on VoC.

  • Enhanced capabilities to better tap into customer feedback. The report includes a table with highlights of changes among CFM vendors. In a nutshell, CFM vendors built out capabilities to better solicit data (e.g., InMoment's Active Listening or Clarabridge adding text-to-speech as a source), deliver enhanced insights (e.g., Medallia’s text-based root-cause analysis and Confirmit’s SmartHub), as well as provide more detailed guidance (e.g., IBM, Nice, and Verint’s engagement analytics), workflows, and better tracking (e.g., Medallia’s frontline-level mobile dashboards). Through interface improvements, they made their increasingly complex platforms easier to use (e.g., Qualtrics’ self-service tools). Moving beyond products and including services, vendors invested in strategic consulting to drive VoC programs' success.

Click here to read more about how the market is evolving and highlights of changes Clarabridge, Confirmit, IBM, InMoment, MaritzCX, Medallia, Nice Systems, Qualtrics, Questback, ResponseTek, Satmetrix, SMG, and Verint Systems made recently.

 

And what's next? The success of CFM vendors will depend on their ability to drive business outcomes by embedding customer feedback into how their clients make decisions. So CX pros, expect vendors to invest further in those capabilities.