Have you ever felt like this…

Our vendor has some great capabilities that we are not leveraging, but I would place the blame on us.

Well, you’re not alone. That’s actually a direct quote from one of the 74 customer references we surveyed for the Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q3 2015. In general, we found that most customers are deploying real-time capabilities across only a few channels today. The most prevalent real-time interaction management (RTIM) use cases? Web personalization and dynamic email content are well ahead of other deployments, in use by 62% and 60% of survey respondents, respectively.  Decision management for contact centers and eCommerce recommendations are next in line, but the former may not be connected to digital channels, and the latter may leverage its own set of tools. Real-time mobile app deployments are surprisingly few – 8th in our list of digital and off-line channels – but by far the highest number of respondents (49%) plan to add mobile capabilities.

Why are RTIM deployments behind vendor capabilities? Respondents told us their biggest challenge simply lies in orchestrating real-time, cross-channel interactions. Although they are able to address real-time requirements in one or two critical channels, they have not addressed the holistic cross-channel customer journey.  In fact, understanding the optimal customer journey is their second biggest challenge. And despite leveraging multiple RTIM capabilities from their vendors, minimizing the effort to integrate real-time data remains the number one area where they would like to see vendors improve their offerings.

For complete details on real-world RTIM use cases, deployment challenges, and feedback on vendor solutions, see Putting Real-Time Interaction Management Into Context. This document also provides insights on the scale of current RTIM environments, including figures for annual interaction volumes, with some leading-edge firms managing more than 500 billion interactions with more than 100 million customer contacts. As organizations incorporate more channels into the mix – especially mobile – expect to see these figures grow rapidly.

As always, feel free to send me an email or set up an inquiry to discuss RTIM and/or the enterprise marketing technology landscape. If you are considering enterprise marketing software investments and want to discuss priorities, challenges or vendor capabilities, we’re here to help.