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The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 Wave Report The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 March 5, 2024 The 12 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up March 5, 2024 KLKate Leggett with Linda Ivy-Rosser, Sara Sjoblom Summary In our 39-criterion evaluation of customer service solutions providers, we identified the most significant ones and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps customer service solution professionals select the right one for their needs. TOPICS Great Customer Service Solutions Underpin Great Customer Relationships Evaluation Summary Vendor Offerings Vendor Profiles Evaluation Overview Supplemental Material Great Customer Service Solutions Underpin Great Customer Relationships Great customer service sets companies apart. It supports customers on the channels and touchpoints of their choice, and it helps agents deliver personal service in line with service-level agreements (SLAs) and service policies. Great service delights customers and, as a result, impacts top-line revenue. Modern solutions have recently expanded their capabilities to support customers over self-service and asynchronous digital channels. They have evolved to arm agents with insights and allow them to collaborate with subject-matter experts to rapidly solve cases. These solutions now enable supervisors to manage the quality of service, gather customer feedback, and identify coaching opportunities. They enable service operations to optimize service processes and next best actions. Business and IT leaders understand the economics of great customer service, and the vast majority of enterprises invest in modern solutions. These solutions enable organizations to serve and retain customers, reduce tech sprawl to manage cost, and modernize core applications. As a result of these trends, buyers of customer service solutions should look for providers that: * Provide a complete suite of customer service applications. Customer service agents often use dozens of different technologies to support their day-to-day work. Modern customer service solutions deliver broad swaths of functionality with consistent UX, allowing organizations to minimize tech sprawl, simplify agent onboarding, and speed up time to proficiency. They offer role-based experiences for agents that support high-velocity, highly automated customer service as well as longer-running cases that often require collaboration with other agents or employees outside of the customer service organization. They offer web- and mobile self-service experiences, as well as engagement over voice, digital, and social channels. They embed knowledge management capabilities that are extended via communities. They offer customer feedback management and capabilities for quality management and agent staffing. They also offer experiences for customer service managers to optimize service quality and for service operations to optimize routing, queues, and workflows. * Assist agents in meeting SLA and quality targets. Today, customer service vendors put extraordinary effort into offering simple yet productive experiences. They offer tools embedded in the UI that assist agents as they create, work on, and resolve a case. Leading customer service solutions, for example, autocategorize and route incoming cases to agents based on presence, skills, schedule, capacity, and workload. They nudge and guide agents through the right processes, and they surface knowledge, similar cases, and next best actions in the flow of work. They provide quick replies, agent scripts, and macros as well as broader workflow automations. They offload repetitive tasks like wrapping up cases and drafting resolution notes. They allow agents to easily collaborate with others in the flow of their work. Collectively, these tools help agents diagnose problems, find resources to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks. * Deliver better customer experiences with AI and automation. There has been explosive growth in process automation and embedded AI technologies — conversational, predictive, and generative AI (genAI) — within customer service solutions that drive enterprise-scale automation. These technologies standardize and automate service processes, cut time spent on data entry, capture conversations, extract sentiment and intent, and surface next best steps. They also help manage the quality of service and identify coaching opportunities to optimize performance. Embedded AI learns from historical patterns of interactions, cases, and quality to make operations smarter over time, enabling companies to meet customer expectations and SLAs. This allows organizations to manage the ballooning volume of customer inquiries and preserve customer satisfaction without the need to add agent headcount. Vendors offer a range of prepackaged automations, AI, and insights scenarios within their customer service solutions and tooling to define workflows and new AI models. * Preserve business agility and resilience. Modern customer service solutions allow organizations to easily adjust their use based on customer demand. They offer composable architectures, open APIs, and microservices that allow organizations to deploy — and pay for — only those capabilities that are required, capabilities that can be assembled in innovative ways. They also expose low- or no-code platform services to allow business users to customize workflows, user experiences, data models, and connectors. * Leverage an extended ecosystem for customer service success. Customer service vendors invest in curated marketplaces that contain an ecosystem of point solutions to extend their solution. Vendors offer training and certification programs for administrators and cultivate developer networks. They leverage partnerships with systems integrators and independent software vendors (ISVs) that offer accelerators and extensions — all of which extend and enhance the reach of the customer service solution. Evaluation Summary The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market; it doesn’t represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in our report on The Customer Service Solutions Landscape, Q4 2023. We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see Figures 1 and 2). Click the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to download the tool. Figure 1 Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 Figure 2 Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions Scorecard, Q1 2024 Vendor Offerings Forrester evaluated the offerings listed below (see Figure 3). Figure 3 Evaluated Vendors And Product Information Vendor Profiles Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors. Leaders * Salesforce differentiates with an exhaustive offering that supports every type of service. Salesforce’s Service Cloud is Salesforce’s largest revenue-generating cloud. It supports high-velocity engagement and complex service processes. Its pragmatic vision is to use customer and behavior data coupled with AI to automate routine interactions and focus agents on high-value engagement. Its roadmap centers on increasing self-service automation and arming agents and managers with broader insights to uplevel high-touch engagement and service operations. The product is supported by a partner network exceeding 200,000 credentialed individuals, plus an exhaustive developer network, app ecosystem, and learning platform that have collectively attracted more than 100,000 customers. Salesforce recently introduced suite pricing to create a complete package and customer success offerings to increase adoption. Service Cloud offers complete capabilities. Self-service portals for knowledge and service requests are extended via Salesforce’s Experience Cloud. It supports automation-first digital channel management and unified routing for all channels. Case management, knowledge management, process automation frameworks, and agent-assist tools including genAI copilots are very robust. Of particular strength are its service operations capabilities, such as real-time SLA management and inquiry trend analytics with contact drivers identified to uplevel self-service. Basic agent shift management is supported, but forecasting is provided via partners. Reference customers were positive about Salesforce’s ability to innovate, but they complained that the products are complex, with a long time to competency. Salesforce is best suited for enterprises that view Salesforce as a strategic partner to their customer transformation efforts. * Pegasystems excels at automating and guiding service journeys to the best outcomes. Pegasystems’ outstanding vision is to guide and automate every customer service journey. Pega Customer Service, part of its unified CRM, combines workflow automation, real-time decisioning, and a low-code platform that’s particularly geared to large enterprises that support complex processes not necessarily contained to the front office. Its roadmap focuses on increasing the breadth of AI and automations and deepening the support for its composable architecture. Pegasystems is one of the few vendors to offer flexible licensing based on deployed capabilities, and it offers both user-based and consumption-based pricing. This allows organizations to modernize one workflow at a time. It pursues an industry-first go-to-market approach in financial services, insurance, communications, healthcare, and government. Pegasystems uses real-time customer context, history, and journey data to anticipate needs and proactively engage — for example, understanding a customer’s intent or guiding agents through workflows that transition from self-service to agent-assisted based on outcomes. Its outstanding case management is the backbone that orchestrates work, providing robust SLA management and automations. Its agent desktop, which can be embedded in other applications, provides a full view of the customer, services, orders, etc., regardless of where that data is stored. Workforce engagement is provided by a partner solution. Reference customers praised the real-time decisioning features but highlighted that it was difficult to find skilled resources. Pegasystems best suits large enterprises with complex processes where customer value management is a top objective. * Microsoft doubles down on AI-driven insights and platform uniformity. Microsoft’s vision is broader than just customer service, and it’s firmly grounded in three principles: Engagement must be personalized via AI; customer service must be highly collaborative; and outcomes must drive improvements. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service actualizes this vision. It is part of a unified suite of business, collaboration, and productivity applications on the same platform that share the same data, which allows for continuous optimization. Three themes dominate its roadmap: AI for customer self-service, agent assistance, and operational efficiency gains; deepening omnichannel routing; and enhancing workforce management. Microsoft’s strong vision, investments in genAI, exhaustive partner ecosystem, adoption, and success frameworks contribute to the product’s 40% year-over-year growth, especially in financial services, healthcare, and retail. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers conversational chatbots, portals, knowledge management, and communities. Agent-facing genAI Copilot, available on all channels, assists agents in the flow of work by summarizing cases and customer history and generating answers. The product provides work prioritization, robust SLA management, and agent guidance. Channel support is comprehensive, including native voice. The product enables lightweight workforce management. Microsoft Teams, embedded in Dynamics, enables swarming and supervisory collaboration. Reference customers praised Microsoft’s broad partner ecosystem and technical support programs such as FastTrack, but they complained about UX and licensing complexity. Microsoft best suits midsize and larger enterprises with relationship-based engagement that leverage the Microsoft business application suite. * ServiceNow uniquely focuses on resolution-centric customer service. ServiceNow Customer Service Management is part of a broad offering of employee experience (EX), customer experience (CX), and enterprise service management (ESM) products. ServiceNow’s unique vision is to orchestrate customer workflows that are not solely contained in the front office, measuring results to continually improve CX and costs. Roadmap items include packaged workflows for returns, replacements, recalls, and refunds; enhanced self-service portals with configurable widgets; broader channel management; and integrations with contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) and workforce engagement management (WEM) vendors. Strategic company initiatives include growing the global partner and talent ecosystem. The product has over 4,000 large customers, primarily in process- and asset-centric industries such as telecommunications, media and technology, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and public sector. ServiceNow supports broad self-service capabilities, including knowledge, processes, communities, and chatbots. Digital channel coverage is fair. Case management is excellent. Agents are guided through the case lifecycle, and the agent desktop includes the case progress, summaries of completed activities, timeline, and SLAs. AI models predict estimated resolution times to prevent SLA breaches and track costs. Workflows are created using low-code tooling and leverage reusable components. The solution also includes out-of-the-box workflows for common service processes. Reference customers praised the strength of its case management but complained about access to technical resources. ServiceNow best fits companies with process- and asset-centric service requirements in target industries, or those that use ServiceNow elsewhere. Strong Performers * Oracle enhances the Fusion stack with customer service with a new product. Oracle Fusion Service is part of Oracle’s full front- and back-office Fusion stack. The product supports digital customer service, complex agent operations, knowledge management, and field service with consistent tooling, UX, and extensibility. Oracle’s straightforward vision centers on two key concepts: 1) Automation is the primary way to solve customer problems; and 2) service organizations augment automation when needed. Roadmap themes add customer service capabilities to industry clouds and other Fusion back-office products. This is a new product, with few customers. It is purchased by the Oracle Fusion installed base or by enterprises in key industries (manufacturing, high tech, and utilities), or as a modernization path from Oracle RightNow. Oracle excels at supporting asset-based service where Oracle’s AI leverages customer intent and history, and the product couples it with asset data to create service plans that optimize uptime and service operations. The product offers distinct experiences for handling high-velocity and longer-running interactions. Self-service journeys are robust and can be composed to drive containment through guided resolutions. Of notable strength is Fusion’s knowledge management with advanced search and optimization capabilities. GenAI creates draft content and service replies. Agent workforce engagement is offered via a portfolio solution. Reference customers were pleased with the product’s depth but complained that reporting was cumbersome. Oracle Fusion Service best suits companies in Oracle’s target verticals that need to modernize complex multichannel service workflows. * Zendesk offers a broad but not necessarily deep customer service application. A consortium led by Hellman & Friedman and Permira acquired Zendesk in 2022 and has funded acquisitions in AI, workforce management, and quality management to extend the product. In the past year, it has also focused its go-to-market strategy on priority industries, simplified its packaging, and matured its partner practices. Yet, despite solid growth, Zendesk’s vision echoes common themes: using AI to make customer service more proactive, personal, and automated. Its well-aligned roadmap includes strengthening its AI for self-service and conversational experiences, including support for industry AI models. Zendesk sees healthy upmarket growth, with over 50% of its revenue coming from companies outside the US. It boasts over 100,000 customers, with 6,000 of those having 1,000 or more agents. Zendesk’s engagement capabilities shine with broad channel support, including voice, messaging, chatbots, and portals that all embed pervasive automation. The agent experience is supported by AI-powered bots that predict answers to questions, generate replies, and integrate with external systems to perform actions. Good visual dashboards help managers understand real-time trends in inquiries. Workforce engagement is provided via Tymeshift, a recent acquisition that’s now integrated with the product. Improvement areas include more robust process management. Reference customers praised its usability and ease of customization but said that communications around ownership have been challenging. Zendesk best suits midsize and larger enterprises that have high interaction volumes and a strong digital presence. * Creatio offers a fully composable solution but lacks mindshare in customer service. Creatio offers a customer service solution as part of a unified CRM, where experiences are composed via a no-code platform. This perfectly matches its vision of composable service to accelerate digital transformation, personalization, and AI-driven agent empowerment, all underpinned by a unified platform. Its roadmap builds on this vision. It expands its no-code capabilities, including increasing composable apps and components, increasing verticalization, and embedding AI/ML in the product. Creatio’s partner-driven go-to-market priorities focus on expanding its already robust partner network and increasing strategic alliances with global systems integrators. Creatio has over 1,000 customers primarily located in Europe and the US. Creatio provides customer service elements — for example, a full-journey customer 360, case management, and knowledge management — that are assembled using a library of UI design elements to create unique experiences. At the heart of the product is a robust process management engine that enables citizen developers to model, deploy, and optimize workflows. The product includes a comprehensive set of AI/ML models to derive customer intent, classify cases, and route, prioritize, and summarize work. The product has gaps: Chatbots, communities, and workforce engagement are provided via partners and their marketplace. Reference customers praised the solution’s pricing and its customer-centric culture, but they highlighted operational issues such as with customer service. Creatio is best suited to midsize and large organizations that support unique processes that must be easily changed. Contenders * Freshworks delivers end-to-end engagement, but some parts must mature. Freshworks’ customer service suite comprises two products: Freshdesk, a ticketing platform; and Freshchat, which provides bots and chat. Its vision doesn’t deliver beyond a common promise of autonomous service that anticipates, resolves, and optimizes every aspect of the customer service from proactive contact prevention to self-service and escalation. Its roadmap hardens the product. Themes include scalability and trust, quality and workforce management, genAI copilots for agents, and extensions into field service. Freshworks has doubled down on maturing its primarily regional partner practices and its postpurchase customer engagement motion. It pursues a product-led growth strategy in addition to a field sales motion that fuels its robust growth, resulting in more than 45,000 customers. Freshworks’ digital service capabilities are above average and support multilingual bots and modern messaging channels, including over-the-top (OTT) channels. The solution also supports native voice. Agents are guided via a bot that suggests best resolutions based on case history, provides communication guidance, and helps generate service replies. Conversational intelligence extracts sentiment and recommends next best actions to impact outcomes in real time. A post-resolution quality coach scores interactions and identifies training opportunities. Basic agent scheduling and forecasting are extended via third parties. The product has straightforward reporting and dashboarding with AI-driven insights. Reference customers praised the product’s ease of use but would like a more mature partner and support organization for larger customers. Freshworks appeals to smaller digital-first enterprises looking for a full-featured solution. * Verint boasts a complete product suite, lacks market share for agent desktop operations. Verint’s Open CCaaS Platform provides a suite of products for customer service built on a singular platform. These products are Workforce Management Essentials for workforce engagement, quality management, and process and desktop automation; and digital and self-service essentials, which include case management. Verint’s vision is one of CX automation where bots and agents work together to elevate CX. Verint backs its vision with a roadmap that primarily delivers specialized bots to augment agents. It also offers compelling proof points of the tactical value of its specialized bot strategy. Verint has a global network of channel, technology, and consultancy partners, as well as a small marketplace. It has over 2,000 customers. The suite provides a complete customer service solution. The Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) delivers consistent experiences across voice, chat, and messaging. Case management, agent guidance, and next best actions are primarily rules-driven. Although the product lacks native voice capabilities, it offers strong omnichannel routing and reporting. It also offers robust knowledge management. Of particular note are the available single-purpose bots, like the interaction wrap-up bot, knowledge suggestion bot, and agent transfer bot, which are embedded in workflows to increase agent capacity. The suite provides comprehensive dashboards and surfaces call drivers to manage service operations. Robust workforce scheduling, forecasting, and quality management are provided via well integrated products. Reference customers were delighted with Verint’s account management but expressed difficulties with the heavy reliance on vendor professional service resources. Verint best suits high-volume, process-driven B2C companies with self-service needs. * SAP pursues industry-first service, which lacks visibility outside of the SAP ecosystem. SAP’s vision is for customer service to help deliver on brand promise with insightful, connected, and adaptable service processes. SAP Service Cloud, part of the SAP CX portfolio, natively integrates with SAP ERP and SAP S/4 HANA. This allows easy access to back-office operational data to increase service speed and efficiency. SAP’s public roadmap focuses on deepening case management and SLA capabilities; agent desktop usability improvements; and incorporating more intelligence scenarios, including genAI. It increasingly pursues an industry-first approach, targeting (for example) manufacturing, chemicals, utilities, and wholesale distribution. SAP has thousands of enterprises using its solution, which are almost exclusively from its installed base. SAP Service Cloud’s strength is its support of complex B2B service processes that extend into field service. The agent desktop includes guided workflows, core case automations, proactive knowledge, and customer 360, but it lacks the deep AI-assist features of Leaders. It supports bidirectional integration with Microsoft Teams for swarming. SAP boasts real-time analytics to identify service trends and patterns and to adjust operations. However, digital engagement capabilities cover only the basics. GenAI scenarios are limited to automated case and email summaries. SAP also does not have the breadth of packaged predictive AI models that the evaluated Leaders do. SAP Service Cloud best suits companies that are committed to SAP in its target industries. SAP declined to participate in the full Forrester Wave evaluation process. * Zoho provides a straightforward solution but is primarily rules-driven. Zoho Desk is part of Zoho’s unified CRM. Its vision is to remove friction from all interactions to raise service quality. It does this by providing omnichannel self-service and agent-assisted service, surfacing areas of optimization for service operations and making it easy for IT teams to support the product. Its roadmap consists of AI-driven guidance and insights for agents; AI-driven predictions, shift management, and ticket assignments for leaders; broader integrations with CCaaS, field service, and workforce optimization solutions; and performance enhancements for IT teams. Zoho has a unique regional focus on growing local sales and product operations around the globe. Freemium editions, coupled with traditional sales motions, have resulted in more than 100,000 paid and unpaid customers with primarily small and midsize deployments. Zoho’s channel support is fair, but it lacks the breadth of native digital support found in Leaders. Agent operations are supported with AI-assist tools that identify key terms in tickets and sentiment to suggest knowledge base content. AI also analyzes ticket types and spikes in volume, allowing managers to adjust staffing. Customer service operations allow SLA management with rules-driven guidance and next best actions. Zoho does not support quality management, forecasting, or agent staffing. Core reporting is weak. Reference customers praised Zoho’s ease of deployment and use, low cost, and configurability, but they complained about feature depth and lack of best practice guidance. Zoho best suits B2B and B2C organizations with moderate process management needs. Challengers * SugarCRM delivers relationship-oriented service but features lack depth. Sugar Serve is part of a unified CRM that supports the full customer journey. Its vision centers on the role of automation to deflect simpler issues and, more importantly, empower agents in complex interactions that demand human understanding. This vision is common, but it’s firmly aligned to SugarCRM’s market focus. The tactical product roadmap improves self-service, embeds AI in the agent experience (including genAI for summarization), and enhances reporting and no- code configurability. SugarCRM boasts a regional sales and service partner network that spans the globe. It has over 3,000 primarily midmarket B2B customers concentrated in B2B business services, manufacturing, and technology — most of which use the complete CRM. SugarCRM offers a simpler customer service solution that lacks feature depth and broad automations compared to the Leaders. Common genAI capabilities for service replies and case and customer history summarization are still in beta. Despite this, the product covers all the basics. Digital channels are native. Case management is rules-driven, as are routing and escalation management. Agent desktops include prioritized case lists based on SLAs, as well as knowledge and case history in a timeline view. Built-in collaboration tools enable swarming. Product highlights include strong process automation supported with no-code tooling. Reference customers liked the partner network but complained about the speed of innovation and the small marketplace. SugarCRM best suits B2B organizations in target verticals. Evaluation Overview We grouped our evaluation criteria into three high-level categories: * Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions include case management, agent operations, customer service management, and workforce engagement. * Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendors’ strategies. We evaluated vision, innovation, roadmap, partner ecosystem, adoption, pricing flexibility and transparency, and community. * Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our market presence scores reflect each vendor’s revenue and number of customers. Vendor Inclusion Criteria Each of the vendors we included in this assessment: * Offers a multifunctional customer service application. Each vendor included in this Forrester Wave has functionality in the following customer service subdisciplines: case management, knowledge and content management, omnichannel engagement, workforce engagement, and business intelligence. Products promoted primarily as best-of-breed solutions for a single functional area are not included. * Has Forrester mindshare. To ensure relevance to Forrester clients and the quality of the references being provided, Forrester considers the level of interest from our clients based on inquiries, advisories, consulting engagements, and other interactions. * Has at least $100 million in product revenue. Evaluated vendors had $100 million or more in customer service product revenue in 2022. * Offers a solution targeted to multiple industries. Evaluated vendors target buyers across a diverse range of industries and business models, including B2B, B2C, and B2B2C organizations. * Supports multiple roles within customer service operations. Solutions in this evaluation offer capabilities that directly support the needs of multiple customer service roles, including agent, manager, and service operations manager. Supplemental Material Online Resource We publish all our Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file that provides detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings; download this tool by clicking the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com. We intend these scores and default weightings to serve only as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit their individual needs. The Forrester Wave Methodology A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options in a technology marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all participants, Forrester follows The Forrester Wave™ Methodology to evaluate participating vendors. In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to consider for the evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our final list based on the inclusion criteria. We then gather details of product and strategy through a detailed questionnaire, demos/briefings, and customer reference surveys/interviews. We use those inputs, along with the analyst’s experience and expertise in the marketplace, to score vendors, using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against the others in the evaluation. We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in the title of each Forrester Wave report. We evaluated the vendors participating in this Forrester Wave using materials they provided to us by December 6, 2023, and did not allow additional information after that point. We encourage readers to evaluate how the market and vendor offerings change over time. In accordance with our vendor review policy, Forrester asks vendors to review our findings prior to publishing to check for accuracy. Vendors marked as nonparticipating vendors in the Forrester Wave graphic met our defined inclusion criteria but declined to participate in or contributed only partially to the evaluation. We score these vendors in accordance with our vendor participation policy and publish their positioning along with those of the participating vendors. Integrity Policy We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in accordance with the integrity policy posted on our website. About Forrester Reprints https://go.forrester.com/research/reprints © 2024, Forrester Research, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. This website uses cookies to deliver functionality and customize your experience. By using this website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. View our cookie policy for more details. Accept cookies