The Forrester Wave for Customer Analytics Technologies 2024: Top Takeaways

SAS and Salesforce were ranked highest, while Microsoft, Medallia, and Adobe impressed.

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Published: August 6, 2024

Customer data is an essential part of any and all customer experience and service programs.

Yet, while there have never been more tools available for collecting data, companies still struggle with turning this information into accessible and beneficial insights.

This is where customer analytics technology comes in.

These solutions have the ability to collect, process, and analyze customer data, transforming it into deep, meaningful insights.

The latest Forrester Wave Report explores the credentials of 11 of the “top vendors in the market,” evaluating them on a set of 34 criteria.

So, without further ado, here are their performance results, along with key insights from the Report.

SAS (Leader)

As the only pure-play analytics vendor in the evaluation, SAS impresses with its delivery of robust and trusted analytical insights.

It achieves this through its Customer Intelligence 360 platform, which Forrester believes has the ability to speed up innovation and address growing client demand for generative AI (GenAI) and real-time decision-making capabilities.

SAS also deploys top-tier propensity modeling, churn analysis, and engagement analysis, complete with clear explanations and prescriptive insights.

Salesforce (Leader)

The Report compliments Salesforce’s Data Cloud for being able to “transform” data into value.

The company’s Einstein innovations are highlighted as being particularly useful for organizations that are “data rich and insights poor,” due to their capacity to provide deep insights to business users directly within their workflows.

The report also mentions the improvements made by the company, claiming that it now offers “market-leading” customer profile resolution capabilities, as well as excelling in data visualization through its Tableau software.

Adobe (Strong Performer)

The Adobe Experience Cloud combines with the company’s “thriving partner ecosystem” to provide a good value offering for customers, according to Forrester.

The Report also commends Adobe for its strong data enrichment and analysis capabilities.

However, Forrester believes that the company’s focus on GenAI-based features prevents it from reaching the upper echelons of vendors in the sector.

Microsoft (Strong Performer)

While the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform was the one evaluated, Forrester specified the company’s Azure ML custom modeling and extensive partner network as the “real stars” of its customer analytics strategy.

Microsoft is also praised for being one of the market pioneers of the LLM-driven “natural language segmentation” experience.

Yet, the organization has a similar issue to Adobe, with Forrester believing that Microsoft needs to pivot from focusing too heavily on upgrading GenAI, to prioritizing building its own predictive AI components instead.

Medallia (Strong Performer)

The Report suggests that Medallia’s strong customer experience background enables it to “thrive” on handling unstructured data, due to its natural language processing tech and the ability to process call center audio in real time.

The Medallia Experience Cloud also garnered praise for its go-to-market approach that sees unlimited seat licenses included as standard.

Despite these positives, as a relative newcomer to the customer analytics space, Medallia has some basic shortcomings, such as a limited partner ecosystem, and inferior analytics and propensity modeling capabilities.

Treasure Data (Strong Performer)

The patent-pending segmentation approach of the Treasure Data Customer Data Platform seems to have particularly impressed Forrester, with the Report claiming that it “glitters”. The solution utilizes clustering and lets users prioritize specific features, addressing the limitations of a purely algorithmic method.

Unfortunately, Treasure Data does not currently offer the ability to process unstructured data or out-of-the-box industry-specific customer data models.

Amplitude (Contender)

The Amplitude Digital Analytics Platform was praised by Forrester for its “strong” journey analytics capabilities, having recently added session replay to better identify the root causes of experience issues.

The Report also highlighted the company’s advanced optimization features like multivariate testing, multi-armed bandits, and reinforcement learning.

The biggest issue for Amplitude is its “self-healing products” vision, which Forrester believes could alienate CX professionals and marketers.

FICO (Contender)

The most impressive aspect of the FICO Platform is its mathematical and decisioning optimization capabilities, which Forrester believes “few vendors can match.” The Report is also complimentary of the company’s model monitoring and innovation record.

However, Forrester accuses the platform of being overly technical, suggesting that users may find it “intimidating or inaccessible.”

Zeta (Contender)

With a specific focus on marketing and a data asset of over 235 million individuals, Forrester believes that the Zeta Marketing Platform provides “strong” churn analysis and a “robust” collection of prebuilt integrations.

Yet, while this specificity has its positives, the Report argues that the “myopic focus” on marketing also hinders Zeta.

As the newest platform in the Report, unsurprisingly, it lacks the sophistication of its contemporaries, with several core, out-of-the-box customer analytics capabilities missing.

Oracle (Contender)

Interestingly, Forrester claims that Oracle views its Oracle Unity platform first and foremost as a CDP rather than a customer analytics solution.

Despite this, Oracle still boasts an enviable partner ecosystem and strong interoperability with other operational systems.

However, the Report implies that Oracle “treats analytics as an afterthought,” resulting in a limited approach to roadmapping and innovation, and a lack of responsible AI functionality.

Qualtrics (Contender)

Like Zeta, the Qualtrics Customer Experience Platform has a specific clientele (CX and customer service professionals), and like Zeta it also falls short in its overall customer analytics offerings.

While Forrester does compliment the platform for its “best-in-class” natural language processing capabilities and CX-specific features like customer effort and customer health scoring, its narrow focus limits its potential.

The platform lacks standard analysis tools such as churn, engagement, lifetime value, and propensity, as well as falling short on optimization, privacy controls, and responsible AI.

What Should Buyers Look for in a Customer Analytics Vendor?

As well as discussing the pros and cons for each of the platforms included in the Report, Forrester also provided some general insights on what users should consider when looking to implement a new customer analytics platform.

Arguably, Forrester’s most important piece of advice for potential customer analytics buyers, is to avoid being “beguiled by GenAI window dressing.”

As mentioned in some of the vendor profiles above, the Report believes that many companies are focusing too heavily on GenAI, which can provide some benefits but doesn’t guarantee the reliability of the underlying analyses.

Forrester also provides further insights on how companies can use customer analytics to combat the issue of unstructured data.

The Report recommends that businesses looking to unlock their data’s potential should target vendors with strong natural language processing capabilities, which can collect and process various types of data for analysis.

Another way in which companies can leverage customer analytics platforms to maximize the potential of data is by utilizing industry-specific solutions.

Forrester explains that some vendors offer vertical-specific customer data models, which provide analytical techniques tailored to the individual sector – allowing organizations to accelerate “time to value.”

Away from the data, Forrester also believes that buyers should look closely at a vendor’s decision-making capabilities before deciding which platform to go with.

The Report details how many companies struggle with the “decision gap,” where they have deployed a variety of tools and techniques to garner insights but are unsure what to do with them.

Companies with this issue should look for vendors that offer propensity scores and the capacity to proactively identify customer segments to engage or retain based on these models.