I am excited to announce The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Services, Q2 2025. The customer analytics services market has always evolved alongside emerging technology — from big data to cloud to AI. Like other service providers, customer analytics service providers (CASPs) have kept pace through tech adoption and strategic partnerships, but they face a distinct challenge: bringing their customers along for the ride. Today’s enterprises expect seamless experiences, fast support, and intuitive interfaces. And if a vendor brand falls short, enterprise buyers know they can easily find one that doesn’t.

As end users become increasingly comfortable using applications such as ChatGPT or Gemini every day, enterprises are looking for ways to embed the same level of intuitive experience into their customer-facing channels. Similarly, enterprises — the buyers of customer analytics services — are now demanding this same seamlessness and demonstrable effectiveness from their analytics services and solutions. Their key questions reflect this urgency: How do I determine high-value customer segments and deliver next-best experiences in real time? How do I reduce time between campaign cycles? How do I communicate insights or quantifiable measurement of analytics effectiveness to executive teams? The list goes on.

This shift in end-user and enterprise expectations has revealed several notable capabilities to look for in a customer analytics service provider, such as:

  • Depth of insights. While the commoditization of customer analytics — churn and propensity models, lifetime value analyses, segmentations — has accelerated insights, vendor differentiation now depends largely on the depth of those insights. Advances in technologies such as graph databases and vector embeddings enable richer contextual understanding by incorporating diverse data types (text, image, video, audio, document, etc.). For example, service providers help retailers leverage graph databases to analyze customer emotion and personalize creative content, resulting in a significant increase in customer engagement. When choosing a CASP, look for providers that can help you uncover deep insights from traditionally elusive data sources.
  • Impact and actionability. Beyond data processing, leading providers distinguish themselves by focusing on impact. They apply advanced decision optimization, real-time feedback mechanisms, and explainable AI to drive smarter, faster outcomes. Budgeting constraints have further driven businesses to emphasize value measurement to justify spend on analytics, something many service providers do very well. As one customer reference mentioned about their customer analytics partner, “One successful project could pay for the entire engagement.” Several participants in this year’s Wave offer interactive dashboards and data hubs that enable real-time value measurement of their analytics initiatives. These tools help clients monitor key aspects of their insights operations and more effectively calculate ROI.
  • Preparation for agentic AI. The aim of many leading CASPs is to prepare themselves and their clients for an agentic shift. Agentic systems refer to automated processes and systems that can perform tasks independently, reducing the need for human intervention. A shift toward AI agents will place far more emphasis on building automation pipelines and far less emphasis on consulting services. Consulting will always have a role to play to integrate agents, monitor performance, and consult enterprises on their agentic priorities. Even so, leading CASPs foresee their role shifting to aid businesses in making the transformation to become more automated.

Forrester clients can read our full Wave evaluation and our market overview research on the 2024 CASP landscape. Please schedule a guidance session with me to learn how to use this research to identify best-fit providers for your needs. I can guide you through my findings and help you identify the vendors that should make your shortlist.

Customer analytics vendors: Please schedule an inquiry or advisory session with me to discuss what my findings mean for the industry and your offering.