Account planning tools (APTs) help B2B sales organizations improve sales outcomes such as revenue growth and customer retention throughout the customer life cycle. APTs help sales organizations in two unique and complementary ways. First, they improve seller precision and effectiveness by synthesizing information to provide a consistent, enhanced analysis of large, complex, multifaceted accounts. Second, they improve seller scale and efficiency by aggregating data from multiple accounts, enabling sellers to identify and prioritize expansion, upsell and cross-sell opportunities as well as risks to customer retention. Today’s B2B buying groups are often made up of many diverse stakeholders, all with their own varied perspectives on the proposed purchase. As a result, sales teams face exponentially increasing complexity when retaining and expanding relationships with existing customers, causing CSOs to struggle to drive value from account planning initiatives with their teams. APTs offer sales organizations an opportunity to improve customer outcomes while supporting their teams tasked with engaging complex customer groups. Account planning is often static, done once a year and solely owned and completed by sellers tasked with retaining and growing accounts. As such, account plans do not reflect the evolving partnership with the customer or capture knowledge from other customer-facing functions as they engage with the account. Account managers also face difficulties in regularly updating disparate systems not embedded in daily workflows. They struggle to have full visibility into the account itself, the customer stakeholders involved, the additional cross or upsell opportunities that exist and changing customer priorities, jeopardizing retention and growth outcomes.
Advertising technology (ad tech platforms) help digital marketing leaders plan, buy and manage digital advertising campaigns across channels including but not limited to: display, video, streaming TV and audio, mobile, social and search. They provide functions for campaign planning, media buying, advertising analysis and optimization and automation. Ad tech platforms can be used by buy-side and sell-side agents; this definition focuses exclusively on the buy side.
Reviews for 'Application Development, Integration and Management - Others'
Application platforms provide runtime environments for application logic. They manage the life cycle of an application or application component, and ensure the availability, reliability, scalability, security and monitoring of application logic. They typically support distributed application deployments across multiple nodes. Some also support cloud-style operations (elasticity, multitenancy and self-service).
Gartner defines B2B customer community platforms as software that enables organizations to offer and manage a branded online community. These communities permit visitors and members to learn how to use products, connect with peers and advance their skills and careers. Platforms offer self-service and collaboration capabilities such as discussion forums, knowledge base access and user groups. In addition, platforms include gamification features to motivate and reward member engagement. B2B customer community platforms help organizations provide a branded online community for visitors and members who typically work for companies that have purchased or are evaluating products and solutions.
Gartner defines B2B marketing automation platforms (B2B MAPs) as software applications that support demand generation processes at scale. B2B MAPs help marketers capture and qualify leads and accounts, orchestrate marketing-driven engagement across the full customer journey, and use analytics to optimize and measure performance. B2B MAPs enable marketers to automate a wide range of activities intended to drive new customer acquisition, retention and growth. To support the pursuit of new commercial opportunities (from current or prospective customers), marketers use B2B MAPs to generate, prioritize, and manage leads and buying teams across the revenue life cycle. This includes the distribution of marketing-generated and qualified leads to sales teams for further pursuit.
Gartner defines the CRM Customer Engagement Center market as a cohesive set of software built around core case management tools, used to provide customer service and support by engaging with customers, while intelligently orchestrating the processes, data, systems, and resources of an organization. CEC applications offer workflow management capabilities and may be used as a system of record for customer interactions. The orchestration of customer service and support processes through a CEC application involves both assisted and self-service moments within customer journeys. It is built around case management records and processes. Workflow is an important CEC component, in terms of an organization being able to orchestrate the processing of customer engagements for the best outcomes in an effortless, effective and timely way. In addition to case, workflow, and knowledge management, personalization and enrichment of customer engagements are crucial.
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 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.
Gartner defines cloud AI developer services (CAIDS) as cloud-hosted or containerized services and products that enable software developers who are not data science experts to use artificial intelligence (AI) models via APIs, software development kits (SDKs) or applications. Core capabilities include automated machine learning (autoML) including automated data preparation, automated feature engineering and automated model building, and model management and operationalization for language, vision and tabular use cases. Optional and important complementary capabilities include AI code models and assistants. Cloud AI developer services help organizations embed intelligence, such as AI and ML insights, into their applications. While that is what cloud AI developer services offer, it is more important to note how they accomplish this. These services democratize and increase the availability of AI and ML to software engineers through the automation and features offered. Traditional activities regarding data acquisition, data quality, feature engineering, algorithm selection and model training are augmented by the technology. Cloud AI developer services open up a world of possibilities for software engineers to build AI and ML production capabilities and features for enterprise-built applications.
Gartner defines cloud application platforms as those that provide managed application runtime environments for applications and integrated capabilities to manage the life cycle of an application or application component. They typically enable distributed application deployments and support cloud-style operations — such as elasticity, multitenancy and self-service — without requiring infrastructure provisioning or container management. Cloud application platforms are designed to facilitate the deployment, runtime execution, and management of modern cloud-native or cloud-optimized applications (e.g., web-based apps, back-end services with/without APIs, etc.) without the need to manage any underlying compute infrastructure. Also, they are designed to enhance developer productivity, accelerate development and deployment cycles, and increase operational effectiveness by making it easier to scale on demand.
Gartner defines the market for cloud database management systems (DBMSs) as the market for software products that store and manipulate data and that are primarily delivered as software as a service (SaaS) in the cloud. Cloud DBMSs may optionally be capable of running on-premises, or in hybrid, multicloud or intercloud configurations. They can be used for transactional work and/or analytical work. They may have features that enable them to participate in a wider data ecosystem. Must-have capabilities for this market include: Availability as SaaS on provider-managed public or private cloud systems; Management of data within cloud storage — that is, cloud DBMSs are not hosted in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), such as in a virtual machine or a container managed by the customer.
Gartner defines community development, regulation and licensing (CDRL) for state and local government as a market for application technology that supports the automation of permitting, land management, planning, zoning, regulation and licensing. CDRL applications are also provided a SaaS or platform-based subscription license model, where application support and infrastructure provisioning and management are the responsibility of the vendor. Gartner defines the market for CDRL applications as those in support of community planning, development and regulation functions within state and local governments. CDRL solutions support numerous types of licenses, such as professional, business, driver, hunting/fishing and animal licensing. Permitting solutions support various permissions related to land, resource and facility use, special events, and construction. Inspections and code enforcement ensure adherence to local building codes and the ability to enforce remediation of violations. These solutions may also enable issuance of certificates of occupancy (CofO) when facilities meet expected health, safety and building code standards.
Gartner defines configure, price and quote (CPQ) applications as software that enables sales organizations to automate and optimize the creation of quotes and capture of orders. A CPQ application is a sales tool that captures the new goods and services a customer wants to buy or the changes a customer wants to make to existing goods and services. While generally focused on assisted sales channels, CPQ capabilities such as product configuration and pricing must be shared with the self-service commerce channel. The new purchases and changes must be priced and a binding contract must be formed with the customer before sending an order to downstream fulfillment systems.
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.
Reviews for 'Customer Relationship Management - Others'
Reviews for 'Data and Analytics - Others'
Gartner defines digital commerce as the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment. The commerce product must support interoperability with customer data, product content (e.g., price, availability) and order functionality and data via APIs. Digital commerce is commonly delivered as single or multitenant SaaS, or as single-tenant hosted or managed hosted (PaaS) applications. It could be offered for on-premises implementations in some circumstances. Digital commerce enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience, providing the necessary information for customers to make buying decisions.
A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of technologies designed for the composition, management, delivery and optimization of personalized digital experiences across multiple channels in the customer journey. A DXP binds capabilities from multiple applications to allow the creation, orchestration and presentation of seamless experiences. It also forms part of a digital business ecosystem via API-based integrations with adjacent technologies. DXPs are applicable to business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-employee (B2E) use cases.
E-commerce optimization services are specialized strategies designed to improve and optimize the performance and effectiveness of an online store. These services focus on various aspects, including enhancing the user experience, increasing website traffic, boosting conversion rates, and ultimately driving more sales. They deliver personalized content based on user behavior and implement algorithms to suggest relevant products. They also generate detailed reports that provide insights into site performance and areas for improvement. The overall goal of ecommerce optimization services is to fine-tune every element of an online store, making it more effective in attracting visitors, converting them into customers, and maximizing revenue.
Email marketing is the use of the email channel to deliver and optimize marketing messages — such as brand newsletters or contextually relevant, real-time and personalized communications — in support of engagement across the customer journey. Email service providers often bolster their technology platforms with supplementary managed services to improve the value and scalability of the email channel.
Gartner defines the enterprise conversational AI platform market as the market for software platforms used to build, orchestrate and maintain multiple use cases and modalities of conversational automation. The enterprise conversational AI platform consists of: A capability layer providing runtime capabilities that include: Natural language understanding (NLU), Dialogue management, Channel integration, Back-end integration, Access control for platform users, Life cycle management; A tooling layer geared toward business users that includes: A no-code environment for building and maintaining, applications, Analytic tools for understanding dialogue flows, NLU intent and entity tuning tools, A/B flow testing tools.
Gartner defines enterprise low-code application platforms (LCAPs) as platforms for accelerated development and maintenance of applications, using model-driven tools for the entire application’s technology stack, generative AI and prebuilt component catalogs. Enterprise LCAPs target software engineering teams responsible for custom application development and maintenance. Enterprise LCAP features include support for the collaborative development of all application components; runtime environments for high performance, availability and scalability of applications; application deployment and monitoring with detailed usage insights. Enterprise LCAP platforms feature governance controls and success management through self-service capabilities and APIs, developer documentation and training, and service-level agreements for platform operations. Enterprise LCAPs provide the foundation for developing a wide range of application types and application components, including complex front ends, business process automation and distributed data sources.
Enterprise social networking applications facilitate, capture and organize open conversations and information sharing between individual workers and groups within an organization. In addition to capabilities that support conversations and information sharing, they can keep track of the network of relationships between participants (via social graphs), in order to deliver a personalized stream of updates about events or conversations to individuals (via news feeds and activity streams). These applications help people find out about each other, have discussions, share information and generally interact. Interaction occurs either at a one-to-one level, or in groups, teams, communities and networks, and in the context of structured or unstructured business activities.
Gartner defines FSM as software suites that support FSPs whose technicians typically travel to customer locations to provide installation, repair, inspection and maintenance services for equipment and systems (consumer, commercial or industrial). FSPs may also manage, maintain and monitor these assets under a predefined service or maintenance contract.
Generative AI (GenAI) apps use generative AI capabilities for user experience and task augmentation to accelerate and assist the completion of a user’s desired outcomes. Generative AI refers to technologies that can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. When embedded in the experience, generative AI offers richer contextualization for singular tasks such as generating and editing text, code, images and other multimodal output. As an emerging capability, process-aware generative AI agents can be prompted by users to accelerate workflows that tie multiple tasks together. Apart from helping save time and money, generative AI apps help improve branding of businesses by creating more engaging and effective content while also creating more engaging and immersive experiences for customers. Please note that this market is based on Beta research and is continuously evolving. We will be making changes as and when there are new updates.
Generative AI (GenAI) model providers focus on developing and providing generative AI technologies and make them available to other developers, businesses and general public through APIs or commercial licenses. Generative AI refers to technologies that can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. This layer of vendors offers access to commercial or open-source foundation models such as LLMs and other types of generative algorithms (such as GANs, genetic/evolutionary algorithms or simulations). These models can be provided for developers to embed into their applications or be used as base models for fine-tuning customized models for their software offerings or internal enterprise use cases. This helps businesses gain the benefits of advanced generative AI technologies while avoiding the high costs, expertise requirements and time needed to develop these technologies in-house. Please note that this market is based on Beta research and is continuously evolving. We will be making changes as and when there are new updates.
Gartner defines mobile marketing platforms (MMPs) as software solutions that help organizations create, activate, execute, analyze and optimize mobile marketing campaigns and experiences. The platforms target audiences on their mobile device through multiple message types such as SMS/text, push notifications, messaging apps and in-app messages. These platforms enable marketers to engage customers and prospects through a range of mobile-specific tactics — spanning mobile websites, mobile applications, smart device engagement, messaging (such as SMS and native applications), push notifications (such as on mobile apps and off websites), location-triggered interactions and mobile wallet cards. Mobile tactics are particularly suited to, for example, providing time-sensitive notifications to audiences, whether that’s in response to a live event, location-specific moment or a fulfillment update. MMPs also help measure and optimize the effectiveness of mobile strategy. MMPs can operate as stand-alone solutions within a marketing organization’s tech stack, or operate alongside other marketing technology. These technologies can include a set of capabilities within a multichannel marketing hub (MMH), marketing automation platform (MAP), customer data platform (CDP) or other marketing automation applications. Stand-alone MMPs are a more specialized solution, often used in conjunction with an MMH, email platform or B2B MAP.
Gartner defines multichannel marketing hubs (MMHs) as software applications that orchestrate personalized communications to individuals in common marketing channels. MMHs optimize the timing, format and content of interactions through the analysis of customer data, audience segments and offers. MMHs are foundational for multichannel marketing, customer journey orchestration and next best action programs.
An MXDP is an opinionated, integrated set of front-end development tools and “backend for frontend” (BFF) capabilities. It enables a distributed, scalable development approach (in terms of both teams and architecture) to build fit-for-purpose apps across digital touchpoints and interaction modalities. At minimum, an MXDP must support cross-platform development and building of both custom iOS and Android app binaries, responsive web apps, and at least one of the following: PWAs, chatbots, voice apps, wearables and Internet of Things (IoT) apps, and augmented-reality (AR) and mixed-reality (MR) apps.
As business processes become increasingly advanced, providers are creating reliable partnerships to scale profitable and growing markets in the PRM industry. Providers that have a large number of partnerships need assistance to reduce the administration complexities caused when working with each other. Hence, PRM software can play a vital role in reducing these business complexities. Partner relationship management (PRM) applications market as a set of tools used by providers to interact with their indirect channel partners on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis. PRM tools enhance communication, facilitate training, and support partner sales and marketing activities. PRM applications are used to help providers scale their partner programs and improve partner experience. PRM applications help organizations to simplify and integrate the process of working with partners, thereby providing partners with resources and efficient communication to increase sales on an organization’s behalf. PRM applications streamline both the management distribution and deal registrations to help reduce costs and labor involved. In parallel, they increase partner satisfaction and reduce channel conflicts.
Gartner defines personalization engines as technology that enables marketing professionals to identify, set up, conduct and measure the optimum experience for an individual based on knowledge about them, their intent and context. Personalization engines apply context about individual users and their circumstances to select, tailor and deliver messaging such as content, offers and other interactions through various digital channels in support of three use cases: Marketing: Delivering the right message to the right audience and in the right context (i.e., tone, timing and channel) to maximize marketing and advertising performance. It involves behavioral inference, segmentation, testing, targeting and optimization of marketing campaign content, messaging and engagements across marketing and communication channels. Digital commerce: Tailoring content, offers, recommendations and experiences across digital sales channels. It includes personalized site search and navigation and customized content across homepages, category landing pages and product detail pages, with the goal of increasing conversion and delivering online revenue growth. Service and support: Using customer insight, journey context and user feedback (i.e., surveys and stated intent) to customize online and offline experiences across business functions to reduce customer effort or increase customer satisfaction and advocacy.
Rapid mobile app development (RMAD) tools are a class of coding-optional tools that enable nonprogrammers to build mobile apps to support, at a minimum, iOS and Android devices. These tools offer high productivity for developers and nondevelopers alike through a variety of approaches that both automate and abstract app development efforts, including drag-and-drop editors, code generation and orchestration, model-driven development, virtualization, business process mapping, component assembly, app configuration and forms construction.
Sales engagement applications (SEAs) streamline how sellers execute sales activities and deal workflows at scale. They optimize seller productivity by combining three key capabilities into a single interface: multichannel engagement (e.g., email, voice, SMS, video, social media), outbound workflow execution and time-saving AI/automation. Sellers rely on SEAs to streamline guidance into whom to engage and when, and what messaging to use, while capturing sales activities back into sales force automation (SFA) platforms.
Gartner defines sales force automation platforms as AI-augmented tools supporting automation and capture of sales activities, processes and administrative tasks, facilitating initiation, engagement and documentation of buyer-seller interactions through multiexperience and channel-agnostic approaches and devices. They leverage advanced analytics to support actionable insights, tracking and monitoring sales contact, pipeline and opportunity management; guided selling; and forecasting process execution. Optimal UX for sales managers or leadership extends beyond internal use cases, and is scalable to support buyer-seller intermediation and shared prospect/customer experiences. These platforms incorporate AI features beyond add-on products in predictive and prescriptive analytics, ML and NLP, enhancing processes and customer interactions. Sales force automation (SFA) is a foundational sales technology implemented to automate and augment an organization’s core sales processes. Leveraging AI and advanced analytics, it enhances the seller’s ability to engage with customers across various interaction touchpoints and devices. It not only streamlines administrative tasks, but also provides actionable insights for improved sales contact, pipeline and opportunity management.
Gartner defines sales performance management (SPM) as a suite of applications that enable the implementation and administration of commission-based incentive plans for sellers and other revenue producers, with variable short-term incentives. Vendors typically offer seat-based platform access for sales operations leaders, frontline sales leaders, territory managers and finance roles. Clients may integrate SPM applications with their customer relationship management toolset for workflow and data connectivity, and for opportunity estimation to drive seller behavior.
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.
Social marketing management (SMM) tools equip organizations with the ability to orchestrate and manage a wide range of social communication efforts across various marketing teams and social platforms within a single tool. These software solutions help marketing leaders monitor, collect and analyze social data; develop, publish and promote content; identify and engage with their audience; and track the performance and impact of these communications.
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
The market for social software in the workplace includes software products that support people working together in teams, communities or networks. These products can be tailored to support a variety of collaborative activities. Buyers are looking for virtual environments that can engage participants to create, organize and share information, and encourage them to find, connect and interact with each other. Business use of these products ranges from project coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups, to information exchange between employees across an entire organization.