The Best Unified Customer Experience Platform: The 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Future Market Insights expects the worldwide customer experience platforms market to grow at a compound annual rate of 14.8 percent over the next 10 years, expanding from a current value of $13 billion to $51.5 billion by 2035.

The market research firm credits artificial intelligence-powered analytics, omnichannel engagement, and cloud-based solutions as key factors changing the way businesses communicate with their customers. They are now focused on instant customer insights, automation, and data-driven personalization for improved overall user experience at multiple digital touchpoints, it says. Additionally, low-code and no-code development in customer experience platforms will help businesses and technology work together, leading to even greater flexibility and scalability.

The next wave of CX platforms, it predicts, will be led by hyper-personalization, voice-enabled AI, and predictive analytics. CX solutions will have AI-driven sentiment tracking, and immersive customer engagement tools.

FMI expects that generative AI will enable real-time sentiment adaptation, dynamic content creation, and conversational AI for richer customer interaction; the union of augmented reality and virtual reality will revolutionize customer interactions; and emotion AI will allow companies to detect real-time emotional cues and tailor interactions.

By 2035, CX platforms will be predictive, real-time, and self-governing, rendering customer experiences seamless, intuitive, and emotionally intelligent, it says.

The Top Five

Like many traditional contact center/customer service software providers, Genesys has been integrating its various solutions, including its unified agent workspace, orchestration, unified communications, and workforce management, to provide a seamless and unified customer experience across all touchpoints. Following a $1.5 billion investment from Salesforce and ServiceNow, Genesys has connected its Genesys Cloud CX with systems from those two vendors to round out an already impressive ecosystem. “Genesys’ native embedded AI and broad capabilities, as well as its ecosystem and platform approach, make it an attractive option for customers looking for complete experience orchestration,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir.

NiCE embodies the concept of a unified CX platform with its CXone offering. The platform brings together omnichannel routing, customer analytics, workforce engagement, automation, end-to-end workflow orchestration, and more on a single, open, cloud-native foundation that delivers a consistent experience for customers and contact center agents. Analysts caution that the platform’s vast collection of features might be excessive for some, but that’s the point of a unified CX: to provide deep and integrated support across the CX process.

Not surprisingly, Service Cloud has become Salesforce’s largest revenue-generating cloud. “Salesforce continues to edge its way into the customer experience space, with recent product launches and partnerships positioning it to gain an even bigger piece of the CX pie,” Wettemann says. Kate Leggett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, calls Salesforce Service Cloud “a full suite of capabilities supporting everything from high-velocity engagement to complex service processes.”

While some analysts see ServiceNow as more of a customer engagement platform provider than a unified CX provider, others had no problem including it. “ServiceNow supports broad self-service capabilities, including knowledge, processes, communities, and chatbots,” Leggett says. She and other analysts hailed the company’s platform for its case management, agent desktop, AI modeling, and workflows.

Zendesk has worked to reposition its CX platform as a complete resolution platform, and customers and analysts have noticed. Leggett says that Zendesk’s customer engagement capabilities “are great, with broad channel support, including voice, messaging, chatbots, and portals that all embed pervasive automation.” Zendesk has also worked on the agent experience, which is “supported by AI-powered bots that predict answers to questions, generate replies, and integrate with external systems to perform actions,” she adds.

Niche Player

And though not as widely known as the other companies dominating this category, Sprinklr is making significant headway. The company entered 2025 with a new CEO, Rory Read, who McGee-Smith says is working to get things “back on track.” “With a strong marketing offer, an enviable customer base, and a solid elevator pitch, they definitely have a play in unified CX,” she says.