The Best Customer Experience Suite: The 2024 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Customer experience (CX) has been defined as the sum of all the interactions customers have with companies, covering all aspects of the customer journey. Fortune Business Insights valued the global customer experience management (CEM) market at $16.9 billion in 2023 and projects it to reach $19.3 billion by the end of this year and $70.2 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 17.5 percent. Analysts credit the rising adoption of artificial intelligence and augmented reality with fueling the growth of customer experience suites, which Fortune says enable businesses to reduce customer churn, improve customer loyalty, and strengthen their brand presence.

Because customer interactions with businesses typical go through several touchpoints, omnichannel capabilities are a key element of the CX suite market. The market consists of many technologies to manage contact centers, websites, mobile applications, email, social media, virtual assistants, and more. Also key for the market going forward will be channel orchestration; team collaboration with other areas of the business to prevent issues that cause customers to reach out in the first place; and generative AI.

The Top Five

Five9’s Intelligent CX Platform, which recently received a large infusion of artificial intelligence thanks to Five9 Genius AI, provides a comprehensive suite of solutions to power AI-elevated, hyper-personalized customer experiences in one unified cloud-native offering, analysts maintain. It “leverages model-agnostic embedded AI to drive personalized workflows, and its GenAI Studio enables non-expert users to rapidly build and customize experiences for deployment across multiple channels,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir.

Genesys’ CX suite pulls together a large number of capabilities, including cloud contact center, workforce engagement management, generative AI, analytics, and automation, making it “a very complete platform,” according to Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. And with a large investment in research and development and partnerships, it’s only going to get better. “Genesys pitches its solution as an experience orchestration solution where native embedded AI powers personalized experiences,” Wettemann says. “Its investment in partnerships, particularly with Salesforce and ServiceNow that enable it to orchestrate both front- and back-office integrations, will drive greater efficiency and visibility for customers.”

NICE launched its CXone platform in 2017 following its acquisition of inContact a year earlier. The cloud-native platform originally contained omnichannel routing, analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence, and it has been bolstered ever since with what Fluss calls “a large R&D investment.” The most recent product of that investment is CXone Mpower, which NICE introduced at its Interactions event in June. Mpower is designed to bring together all of the company’s CX features, including Copilot, Autopilot, and Actions, in one platform. Barry Cooper, president of NICE’s CX division, at the time called it “the holy grail of CX.”

Oracle Customer Experience offers a connected suite of applications that goes beyond traditional CRM to help users create, manage, serve, and nurture lasting customer relationships. Wettemann calls it “an attractive CX offering, particularly for organizations that use it in conjunction with Oracle’s broader suite of products.” Together, Oracle lets users build a complete view of customers and their every interaction, no matter how, when, where, or with whom they engage, empowering the entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences—from acquisition to retention—and everything in between.

When it comes to CX automation, that’s precisely where Verint has built its market positioning, according to Fluss. The company, she says, offers “strong workforce engagement, AI, knowledge management, analytics, conversational AI, dozens of prebuilt automations, and native CRM capabilities.” Verint’s one flaw, she adds, is that it “doesn’t have its own [contact center-as-a-service],” but it meets this challenge through its ability “to support a wide range of digital channels and integrate with as many contact center infrastructure and CCaaS vendors.”

Niche Players

Analysts this year named USAN as a niche player to watch in the CX Suite category.