The Forrester Wave™: Conversation Intelligence For Customer Service, Q3 2023

Conversation Intelligence for Customer Service Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

Key features and pros and cons of top Conversation Intelligence for Customer Service products:

CallMiner - Leaders

Pros:

Mastery of operational workflows with highly configurable and flexible taxonomy management
Vast library of prebuilt categories delivering immediate value
Quality scoring product enables teams to go beyond compliance tracking and translate scores into meaningful coaching moments
Early to market with real-time guidance features
World-class support services with collaborative approach and responsiveness to feedback

Cons:

Insights discovery capabilities are subpar with significant onus on users to make sense of unsupervised model outputs
Lags behind in automating agent workflows despite early real-time guidance features

ASAPP - Strong Performers

Pros:

Unwavering commitment to user adoption, particularly agent adoption, by designing software people want to use
Leading innovation in vertical AI for contact centers
Exceptional speech analytics and top-scoring insights discovery
Strength in real-time guidance and natural language generation through innovative digital messaging augmentation
Innovative products including generative AI call summarization and messaging autocompose

Cons:

Lack of user-facing admin tooling necessitates reliance on services team
Limited availability of in-product dashboards requires customers to consume data feeds in their own BI tools
Pricing model lacks transparency compared to other vendors
Limited investment in partner ecosystem

Cresta - Strong Performers

Pros:

Impressively complete suite of conversation intelligence capabilities in relatively short timeframe
Early adoption and practical application of generative AI
Unparalleled strength in coaching with market-leading supervisor-led and agent self-coaching capabilities
Strongest score in agent augmentation with excellence in real-time guidance and comprehensive generative AI approach
Market-leading tooling for guidance management

Cons:

Partner ecosystem, supporting services and offerings, and adoption programs lag more established vendors
Does not handle omnichannel analytics - customers cannot view chat and voice analytics holistically
Enterprise service model still maturing due to focus on product innovation

Qualtrics - Strong Performers

Pros:

Sharp focus on connecting customer feedback with contact center insights
Excellence in insights exploration, harmonizing conversation insights with business outcomes
Top score in enterprise insights adoption with tailored dashboards and unlimited user access
Strong and diverse partner ecosystem
Powerful supporting services and offerings with willingness to drive measurable outcomes

Cons:

Behind in frontline enablement, particularly agent augmentation, coaching, and real-time analytics
Real-time guidance capabilities still in beta
XM Discover buyer does not always have decision-making power for agent-facing tooling
Would benefit from more ambitious roadmap and competitive pricing strategy

Verint - Strong Performers

Pros:

One of the most comprehensive quality solutions in the market with 'Total Quality' approach
Seamless combination of manual and hybrid scoring workflows
Screen recording includes desktop and process analytics beyond agent dialogue
Excels in enterprise readiness with top marks for partner ecosystem, adoption, and supporting services
Industry expertise and knowledgeability

Cons:

Vision hindered by legacy perspective of contact center operations
Innovations do not challenge operational status quo
Not first to market with leading-edge capabilities
Real-time guidance has unacceptable latency of 1-5 seconds in fast-paced environment

Cogito - Contenders

Pros:

Excellence in coaching enablement with AI-generated customized goals for each agent
Strong real-time behavioral guidance capabilities
Vision rooted in blending emotion and conversation analytics
Rejects conventional quality scoring in favor of behavioral insights enhancing CX outcomes

Cons:

Best paired with existing conversation analytics platform for behavioral insights
Relatively recent conversation analytics (semantic-based) deployment still in early stages using rudimentary regex rules
Lacks coherent approach for omnichannel analytics
Customers find it challenging to measure business impact
Pricing model features significant professional services component

Gridspace - Contenders

Pros:

Excels in regulated environments with complex integration requirements
One of few vendors excelling in real-time speech analysis
Advanced voice technology with foundation from SRI Speech Labs (Siri and Nuance)
Leveraging LLMs for years including building own LLM tailored to contact center use cases
Unified and extensible platform experience with developer APIs

Cons:

Partner ecosystem more nascent than established players
Hands-off approach to client adoption
Focus primarily on voice with lack of comprehensive omnichannel analytics
Limited insights-to-action guidance places onus on users to draw conclusions
Reference customers desire more user-friendly tooling

Invoca - Contenders

Pros:

Only vendor with top score for service-driven revenue
Excellence at insights to action
Analytics dashboards designed to track topics and behaviors related to conversions and call outcomes
Automated workflows in platforms like Google Ads
Creative solutions empowering teams with limited access to contact center insights

Cons:

Primary emphasis on marketing campaign optimization rather than contact center operations
Automated quality scoring and insights discovery compelling but not market leading
Emotion analytics limited to sentiment
Real-time guidance capabilities absent from product and roadmap
Adoption strategy and supporting services weaker than others evaluated

Medallia - Contenders

Pros:

Excellence in enterprise insights adoption and insights to action
Unlimited user licenses for seamless data access
Top-notch omnichannel analytics with contextual channel-specific insights
Strong professional services team
Refreshing approach seeking to dismantle enterprise silos

Cons:

Failed to properly integrate acquired assets (Voci 2020, Stella Connect 2021) resulting in fragmented workflows
Weak approach to innovation
Could not provide feature-level roadmap details or delivery dates
Automated and hybrid quality scoring lags with separate systems
Does not expose self-service redaction tooling for speech
Requires professional services for building and maintaining automated scoring model

NICE - Contenders

Pros:

Largest customer base in evaluation
Only top score for agent workflow automation via NEVA Discover with Automation Finder feature
Comprehensive quality scoring blending automated and human scoring
Robust suite of analytics capabilities
Diverse partner ecosystem and extensive supporting services
Strong capabilities for real-time analytics

Cons:

Breadth of solutions can be overwhelming making it difficult to understand needed functionality
Product vision lacks clarity for standalone conversation intelligence
Limited innovation resources in this area with stronger commitment to broader CXone platform
Real-time guidance product lackluster compared to others
Notable variation between Nexidia and CXone capabilities

Amazon Web Services - Challengers

Pros:

Strong tooling to instrument speech analytics for post-call and real-time analytics
Custom vocabularies and custom language models to enhance accuracy
Native real-time speech streaming and analysis
Flexible redaction tooling to ensure compliance
Vast partner ecosystem including certified consulting and ISV partners
Only vendor with list pricing on public website

Cons:

Data export requires significant prework limiting portability and time to value
Could benefit from more standardized dashboards for business users
Undifferentiated vision that does not challenge operational status quo
Does not seek innovation leadership in this market
Limited pricing flexibility

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

A: CallMiner

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

A: Leaders in Forrester Wave evaluations demonstrate the strongest current offering and strategy. CallMiner's leadership stems from its mastery of operational workflows, highly configurable taxonomy management, vast library of prebuilt categories, and quality scoring that translates system scores into meaningful coaching moments. Leaders excel at empowering mature operations clients to drive customer-centered enhancements through incremental and adaptable evolution of traditional contact center programs.

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

A: https://www.forrester.com/policies/forrester-wave-methodology/

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Conversation Intelligence for Customer Service in 2023

Conversation Intelligence for Customer Service Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2023?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in Forrester Wave terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Forrester Wave?

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