Gartner defines the customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience (CX) implementation service market as project-based services to help clients develop a CX strategy and transform a customer relationship with consulting expertise. Providers in this market design, build, integrate and deploy process change and technology solutions that improve interactions between organizations and their customers. These services are specific to improving clients’ sales, customer service and marketing operations, and they focus on interactions with customers, including commerce transaction enablement.
Gartner defines customer data platforms (CDPs) as software applications that support marketing and customer experience use cases by unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels. CDPs optimize the timing and targeting of messages, offers and customer engagement activities, and enable the analysis of individual-level customer behavior over time. The purpose of a CDP is to centralize data collection and unify customer data from disparate sources into profiles. CDPs enable marketers to create and manage segments and push those segments to priority channels without requiring coding or use of advanced querying techniques. While CDPs originated to serve marketing use cases, interest from data management roles, IT and other customer-facing roles (e.g. sales, service and support) is on the rise. Digital marketing leaders have long used a variety of systems to design, orchestrate and measure multichannel campaigns. While many of those systems also manage customer-level data and audiences for targeting, they do so in a way that makes both data governance and orchestration across channels (and across competitive vendor solutions) a challenge. CDPs aim to address that challenge by collecting and unifying disparate customer data in a centralized location accessible to marketers. The CDP is not a substitute for an enterprise’s master data management, but it can ensure that customer profile data, transactional events and analytic attributes are available to marketing when needed for real-time interactions.
Gartner's definition of business process outsourcing (BPO) is the delegation of one or more IT-intensive business activities; specifically, BPO contracts that always include the outsourcing of business process administration to a third-party service provider, which may include outsourcing the infrastructure along with application maintenance and ownership. Customer management (CM) contact center BPO is the processes linking an organization with its existing and potential customers (such as marketing, sales and customer services), which can be categorized in four subsegments: *customer selection *customer acquisition, * customer retention *customer extension. The four subsegments should also consistently be executed across the following five primary channels: * telephony * business process as a service (BPaaS) * email response management * web/mobile chat * knowledge management for web and mobile-based self-service.
Digital technology and business consulting services reflect the intermingled nature of information, technology and business. This market is increasingly driven by joined, interdependent actions and initiatives, rather than characterized by layers of the traditional technology stack. Digital technology and business consulting services reflect project-based consulting services that create the ambition and design for information, technology and business processes for clients.