Gartner defines contact center as a service (CCaaS) as solutions offering SaaS-based applications that enable customer service departments to manage multichannel customer interactions holistically from both a customer-experience and employee-experience perspective. CCaaS is a key technology platform used to support the customer service experience, whether it be self-service or assisted by customer service representatives. All organizations need to offer customer assistance. The preference is for remote support via voice and digital channels over physical presence in offices and stores, though it is common for organizations to offer multiple options.
Gartner defines content marketing platforms (CMPs) as software solutions that support the practice of content marketing. These solutions facilitate creating and curating text, video, images, graphics, audio, e-books, white papers and interactive content assets that are distributed through paid, owned and earned channels. These assets are used to tell stories that help brands engage with and nurture customers, prospects and other audiences. The goal of content marketing is to drive awareness, demand, purchases and loyalty through deeper engagement with customers. CMPs enable the fundamentals of content marketing — specifically, ideation insight, editorial planning, creative workflow and performance analytics to drive a unified strategy and production at scale. CMPs collect and analyze data to inform content creation and reuse, streamline operations and iterate on content to improve marketing effectiveness. These platforms can also generate branded iterations of content for different audiences and enable internal teams, contributors and agencies involved in content creation to coordinate efforts. As a result, CMPs help connect content marketing efforts to business objectives across channels, ensuring organizational alignment and broad scope for managing content. CMPs also drive iterative content improvements, including capabilities to evaluate and test operating models and governance to drive collaboration across siloed teams. This supports faster time to market at scale. Many CMPs complement their software with optional services, such as content strategy development, creative marketplaces, and training to drive adoption and utilization.
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.
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.
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
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.