Market Perspectives

We are happy to share some insights about Salesforce drawn from our latest Value Index research, the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

Ventana Research analysts participate in many meetings throughout the year to learn about software vendors’ plans and product updates. We recently attended a meeting with SugarCRM to learn about its new management and direction. Founded in 2004 as an open-source project, the company has recently focused on becoming a full-service customer relationship management vendor.

The customer experience (CX) market is made up of a very diverse array of point solutions and suites designed to solve very specific but interlocking problems. They all focus on the difficulty organizations have in communicating effectively with their customers, either in response to customer inquiries or for proactive outreach purposes. Customer contacts have changed a great deal in the last decade; they now take place in fits and starts, on various channels, and are overseen by people across departments, not all of whom have the same agenda.

While there are a large variety of tools that play a role in helping organizations manage customer experiences (CX), there is a consensus emerging that applications controlling customer data should take center stage. Many organizations face the challenge of consolidating fragmented data that comes from siloed sources into a coherent view of the entire customer life cycle. To address this challenge, vendors from multiple market segments are coalescing around the customer data platform (CDP) as the coordinating system of inter-departmental CX practices. CDPs were originally developed for marketing use cases but are now being more widely adopted by service departments and contact centers. For some vendors, like ActionIQ, the CDP has become the central element in a platform that extends outward to put customer data at the disposal of multiple applications by ingesting and cleaning it.

Marketing and Customer Experience (CX) are typically treated as separate business functions or, in some cases, poorly connected. But there is a growing effort to (effectively) conjoin these areas as organizations are discovering that these departments and processes are more successful if they work together to facilitate/promote a unified approach to the customer life cycle.

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications as well as technology that contributes significantly to the improved processes and performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations to advance business and IT that optimizes organizational resilience and workforce readiness.

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications as well as technology that contributes significantly to the improved processes and performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations to advance business and IT that optimizes organizational resilience and workforce readiness.

In the present-day market where the gap between consumers and the vendors they engage is shrinking, an organization’s ability to deliver a personalized customer experience is more important than ever. Consumers expect interactions that are intuitive, agile and accessible across a wide variety of channels. Ensuring an experience that exceeds expectation and creates an environment that is relational rather than transactional, however, is becoming increasingly challenging.