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Customer Experience
Why the Forrester CFM Wave Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story About CX Vendors
Today, Forrester published The Forrester Wave: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q1 2023. In that Wave, Forrester evaluated Qualtrics Foundational CX - just one of four modules in CustomerXM™ - as our Customer Feedback Management (CFM) offering against the other top vendors' full customer feedback management offerings.
In our opinion, a fraction of Qualtrics’ CX capabilities went up against the other platforms’ full capabilities – and we still ranked as a strong performer. This wasn’t the result we expected, but we’re proud of the fact that just ONE module of our offering performed as well as it did. It has to make you wonder how much different this Wave would have looked if our entire CFM suite had been evaluated, as we intended.
But let’s back up: You might be wondering why Forrester evaluated only one piece of the CustomerXM suite instead of the whole thing. Didn’t Qualtrics submit our full CFM product?
That’s a great question and the answer is, of course, we did. And we did so with confidence. Qualtrics has the #1 Customer Experience Management product by revenue and users. Our CFM offering, CustomerXM, enables CX leaders to analyze and act on customer feedback captured at any point along the customer journey—including through surveys—within the digital and in-app experience, and in unstructured data from contact center calls and chats, social media, product reviews and more.
CustomerXM is made up of four purpose-built and highly integrated modules—Foundational CX, Digital CX, Frontline CX, and XM Discover—intentionally designed to meet CX teams where they are today and helping them easily scale their programs, whether that’s by expanding listening posts or diving deeper into specific use cases, such as the in-app experience or customer service experience. Our modular approach means they don’t overspend on capabilities that they are not yet ready to leverage.
But CX Foundational is just one aspect of CustomerXM, our CFM suite. CustomerXM is built on our cloud-native platform and leverages industry-leading feedback collection capabilities, speech and text analytics, predictive analytics, an intelligent workflow engine, and native closed-loop-ticketing. Imagine if our full CustomerXM suite was evaluated, including purpose-built modules for capturing feedback across Digital, Customer Care, and Location experiences, had also been included. Or if the capabilities of our XM Discover solution for unstructured data analysis were evaluated. Where would we rank in that case? We might be so up and to the right that we’d be off the report!
Consider that, while Qualtrics acquired Clarabridge in 2021, to us, the Forrester evaluation for this Wave didn’t include any of the value of the Clarabridge acquisition.
Every year, companies rely on Forrester to help them evaluate key investments for their business. There is so much to think about when choosing a CFM partner, from ensuring that the technology meets your needs today to ensuring it is future-proofed for your needs tomorrow. CX programs need to be dynamic, changing, and evolving at the speed of your business. You have to consider how easy it is to set up your program initially, whether you want point solutions or one integrated solution. You’ll need to think about how seamlessly new solutions integrate with your existing business systems, and also how quickly, and cost-effectively, you can make changes as business needs evolve.
We encourage you to ask these questions of yourself and your partners to make sure you design a program that meets your needs today and can scale with you as your program matures.
While we appreciate being recognized for our CX Foundational module, we believe there's more to the story. And so do more than 18,000 brands who trust us to be their partner on their experience management journey. Check out a few of their stories:
And if you were at Qualtrics’ X4 Experience Management Summit, you also heard from brands like Delta, KFC, UPS, AMEX, Abercrombie & Fitch, StockX and so many others! We’ll be posting their stories on XM+ soon.
If you want to learn more about how Qualtrics is empowering brands across industries and around the globe to close experience gaps, get in touch today.