The 2017 CRM Service Leaders
The past 12 months have seen great change for the customer service and support industry, with continued advancement in the areas of predictive and prescriptive analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing. The end result is that the technologies contact center agents use every day are now smarter, faster, and more in tune with customer needs than ever before. They are better at deriving context from each customer interaction and preserving it across channels, and then guiding agents in how to best answer customer questions and resolve issues.
This was also a year of great economic shake-up for the industry, with a number of key vendors being acquired, an influx of venture capital investments, and a collection of new contract signings.
The winners of this year’s CRM Service Leader Awards have all played a role in and benefited from these activities in one way or another. And just to further show how much the industry has changed, 11 new vendors appear on this year’s leaderboards across the eight categories evaluated, showing that there’s plenty of room in the industry for new ideas. Luckily, this year’s award winners have plenty of those.
View the 2017 CRM Service Leaders in each category listed below:
Customer Case Management
Contact Center Infrastructure
Interactive Voice Response
Web Support
Workforce Optimization
Contact Center Search
Enterprise Feedback Management
Contact Center Outsourcing
The editors of CRM magazine extend their sincerest heartfelt gratitude to the industry analysts and consultants who took time out of their busy schedules to evaluate the vendors for this year’s CRM Service Awards. The 2017 awards would not have been possible without the contributions of the following judges: Dick Bucci, chief analyst at Pelorus Associates; Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at G2 Crowd; Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting; Olive Huang, research director at Gartner; Ian Jacobs, a senior analyst at Forrester Research; Esteban Kolsky, principal and founder of Thinkjar; Mitch Kramer, senior vice president and analyst at the Patricia Seybold Group; Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research; Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and president of McGee-Smith Analytics; Paul Stockford, president and principal analyst at Saddletree Research; Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research; and Rebecca Wettemann, vice president at Nucleus Research.
CATEGORIES AND CRITERIA CRM magazine’s 14th annual Service Leader Awards names one winner and four leaders (listed alphabetically) in each of eight categories, using a proprietary selection formula. The overall award rating is based on a composite score of company revenue and analyst ratings for deployment costs, customer satisfaction, depth of functionality (or breadth of services, in the case of outsourcing), and company direction. (These ratings are based on a five-point scale, with 5 being the highest.) In addition, each category cites one “one to watch”—companies deemed worth tracking for their potential to appear on that leaderboard in the future.