With the passing of the autumnal equinox, it’s time to rake leaves, sip pumpkin spiced lattes, and take stock of the summer’s activities.  For most CI pros, this summer was spent wrangling and analyzing customer data for insights- hopefully with some much-needed R&R sprinkled in.  For me, this summer was also busy and productive resulting in two seminal reports on customer analytics – both of which went live today!

The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Service Providers, Q3 2017 evaluates the top 10 vendors who specialize in turning large, diverse, and distributed customer data sets into insights to help their clients win, serve, and retain customers.  I evaluated the current offering and strategy of Allant Group, BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions, Clarity Insights, CSS Corp, Experfy, Fractal Analytics, Genpact, LatentView Analytics, Mu Sigma, and Tiger Analytics against 33 different criteria and identified Leaders, Strong Performers, and Contenders.  This is a must read for customer insights professionals looking for external help meeting their organization’s analytics needs.  Also, remember the Forrester Wave™ evaluation is downloadable and customizable so you can change the weightings of individual criteria to meet your business needs.

The eagerly anticipated State Of Customer Analytics 2017 report also went live today.  Forrester regularly partners with Burtch Works an analytics recruiting firm to distribute an in-depth survey to customer analytics and measurement professionals.  This year, over 220 CI pros responded to questions about their top drivers and challenges, the data sources they analyze, the types of analytics they perform, and what they’re planning for the coming year.  While some things never change (data remains a key challenge!), we also saw some promising shifts in overall maturity.  As the “Benchmarks” report in Forrester’s Customer analytics Playbook, this report is intended to help CI pros keep compare their efforts to the market overall.

So please grab yourself a spiced pumpkin latte, put on some flannel pajamas, and cozy up to these two reports.  And as always, feel free to reach out via inquiry with any questions: inquiry@forrester.com.  Enjoy!