Leading analyst Forrester has published its much-awaited 2022 Forrester Wave for People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms (Q2).
Vendors in this space aim to keep tabs on customer desires, preferences, and brand alliances, which can switch in a split second. After all, the modern consumer is always exposed to new brands through advertising and social media.
To compete in such an environment, brands must alter their experiences and products based on an advanced understanding of customer needs and behaviors in the digital space. People-oriented text analytics platforms enable companies to do so.
In this report, Forrester has assessed what its analysts believe to be the 13 most significant players in the space, isolating five market leaders.
The Definition of People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms
People-oriented text analytics technologies transcribe customer conversations and mine insights, which companies can act on to improve products, services, and CX.
Thanks to the emergence of the cloud, the technology is rapidly evolving, delivering real-time customer insights with an increasing ease of use.
Yet, more players are entering the field, including global enterprise technology pioneers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. As such, it is difficult to set the major players apart.
Fortunately, Forrester helps companies navigate the crowded arena, using a 29-criterion evaluation to divide vendors into one of four segments: Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. Here, we review them all.
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The Forrester Wave for People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms 2022 (Q2)[/caption]
The 2022 People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms Forrester Wave Leaders
Forrester Wave leaders boast a robust current offering and market presence. As such, they provide relevant, specialist use cases. These include: CX analytics, conversation intelligence, EX analytics, social listening, and market intelligence. Moreover, they excel at natural language interpretation (NLI) and have invested in transformer networks. This year’s leaders are:
- Mi
- Qualtrics
- InMoment
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Medallia
Since 2008, Medallia has embedded analytics into its platform. Nowadays, over 90 percent of Medallia Experience Cloud customers use its text analytics capabilities. They will soon enjoy new video insights, out-of-the-box predictive models, and a low-code automated machine learning product – highlighting how ease of use is at the forefront of its future visionsas. Forrester also pinpoints NLI, data visualization/dashboards, native video, and speech analytics as notable strengths.
Qualtrics
Following its 2021 acquisition of Clarabridge, Qualtrics has leaped to the front of people-oriented text analytics. The vendor will soon roll out interaction analytics enhancements, videoconferencing as a data source, and a conversational UI to continue this momentum. However, for now, Forrester isolates knowledge-based AI, comprehensive NLI, and document-level text analytics, while users suggest that the platform’s scalability is a significant differentiator.
InMoment
Again, InMoment has benefitted from recent acquisitions to catapult its way to market leader status, with the provider now striving to consolidate its offerings. This includes improving its insight self-service capabilities, bolstering its workflow automation functionality, and adding more out-of-the-box features. However, according to Forrester, it already boasts numerous strengths, including omnichannel data integration, embedded text analytics, and comprehensive NLI.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS packages a whole host of cloud AI services for text analytics, including Textract, Kendra, Transcribe, and many more. As such, Forrester recommends the solution for customers looking to build their own text analytics applications. Such a unique offering has allowed AWS to establish a significant market presence, with prominent strengths including machine learning-based AI, the full ModelOps cycle, and real-time digital care.
Similar to AWS, Google has built a series of cloud AI services on Vertex AI, its ModelOps platform. From this, the vendor offers contact center AI, document AI, and "Discovery Solutions" for multiple industries, creating a unique offering. Forrester pinpoints the image/video-to-text capabilities, machine learning-based AI, and complete ModelOps cycle as significant strengths. It also indicates that companies looking for CCaaS solutions or building text analytics applications on Google Cloud will realize the most value.
The 2022 People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms Forrester Wave Strong Performers
Strong performers in the Forrester Wave exhibit a track record of implementing many successful people-oriented text analytics use cases. While they fall a little short of market leaders, they partner their robust offering with a significant global presence in the space and an innovative vision for the future. This year’s strong performers are:
- Microsoft
- Verint
- SAS
- ai
- Micro Focus
- IBM
Microsoft
Microsoft offers many text analytics capabilities through its Azure platform under the guise of cloud AI services. The prominent vendor continues to enhance these while leveraging investments in Azure Search, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365, challenging data scientists and app development pros to build innovative solutions. Alongside its global capacity, this challenge may appeal to many. However, those with limited IT resources may look elsewhere.
Verint
According to Forrester, the contact center technology veteran has developed "formidable" analytics across all contact center channels. It also recognizes this while lauding its omnichannel data integration and real-time digital care with complex workflow capabilities. However, the market analyst warns that beyond speech analytics and conversation intelligence, the vendor perhaps lacks depth in CX and EX use cases and applications.
