The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Software Solutions, Q4 2008

Forrester evaluated the leading customer service solution vendors across an average of approximately 180 criteria and found that the vendors still need to be grouped into three groups: interaction-, process-, and record-centric. Forrester found the Leaders in the customer-interaction-centric products to be eGain Communications, KANA Software, RightNow Technologies, Talisma, LivePerson, and KNOVA; the Leader in the business-process-centric products is Sword ciboodle; and the Leaders in the customer-record-centric products are Microsoft, salesforce.com, Oracle Siebel, SAP, Oracle CRM On Demand, and Entellium. Among interaction-centric products, Genesys Telecommunications Labs, InQuira, and Numara Software are Strong Performers. Pegasystems, Chordiant Software, and Consona CRM are Strong Performers within the process-centric category. And within the record-centric category, NetSuite, Oracle PeopleSoft CRM, Maximizer Software, Oracle E-Business Suite CRM, SageCRM, SugarCRM, Infor, and Sage SalesLogix are all Strong Performers. A careful review of a company's customer experience requirements must be weighed against the capabilities and individual strengths of each of the vendor's solution. To provide great customer experiences, the deployment and integration of more than one vendor's solution may be necessary.