Gartner defines customer management and experience solutions as part of business support systems (BSS) solutions for CSPs, and as commercial off-the-shelf software solutions that address CSPs’ all customer-facing operational requirements. This includes managing customer channels, customer information, incidents, products, pricing, quotes and offers, order and partner management. CM&X solutions often work together with revenue management and monetization solutions as part of a complete BSS stack.
Sentiment Analysis Tools enable organizations to analyze all forms of text data to determine the overall sentiment, opinion, or emotional tone expressed by the users in their messages. These tools use technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), text analysis, and biometrics for analyzing and breaking a large amount of text data into small chunks to identify the underlying sentiment of a message. The underline sentiment can be positive, negative, or neutral, which is calculated by assigning the sentiment score based on a pre-determined scale to each chunk. These tools also provide multilingual support to enable sentiment analysis across different languages. These tools are commonly used in marketing, customer support, e-commerce, and finance.
Social analytics is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas from social media sources. This market examines social analytics solutions covering social filtering, text analytics, sentiment analysis, image analysis and public-facing social media analytics. It focuses on solutions that derive at least 60% of their revenue from software versus solutions that are mainly based on consulting services.
The social customer service market comprises applications that support social media as a component of an overall customer service strategy. Gartner classifies an application provider as a social customer service vendor if it supports customer service in one or two specific types of function: External communities: Often referred to as peer-to-peer communities, this software enables customers and partners to blog, post, rate products/services and construct ideas, as well as support peer interactions and offer incentives for loyalty. Social media engagement: Going beyond just monitoring social media for brand mentions, these applications are capable of responding to constituents on popular social networks and have case management.
Gartner defines Social Monitoring and Analytics as the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas from social media sources. These solutions are different from social marketing management tools that may include social analytics capabilities as part of a broader platform, which also include capabilities for content publishing, distribution, and engagement and customer service capabilities. Social Monitoring and Analytics vendors enable users to monitor and analyze conversations happening on social media about their brand, competition industry, and topics relevant to their target customer segments. These tools collect data from various online sources and help users analyze themes, sentiment and perceptions
Gartner defines a voice of the customer (VoC) platform as one that integrate feedback collection, analysis and action into a single unified solution that helps organizations to understand and improve the customer experience. Feedback inputs extend beyond direct surveying to include other direct, and indirect and inferred sources. Voice of customer (VoC) platforms enable revenue and retention leaders to better manage the customer experience (CX) through a deep understanding of customer needs and perceptions. The resulting insights trigger recommendations and actions across the enterprise.
Gartner defines voice of the employee (VoE) solutions as those that collect and analyze employee opinions, perceptions and feelings. They use surveys, feedback tools and other data sources to gather worker sentiment and infer preferences, opinions, and well-being. They deliver insights with actionable guidance to help improve employee engagement, experience, productivity and performance. These solutions are delivered via cloud-based technologies, often augmented by managed services.