Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the New Digital Customer Service Era

    Gartner

    Customers demand equal and fair assistance for CRM services related queries. Gartner’s magic quadrant says engagement strategies have shifted from self-service to complete hand-holding, using AI.

    The market trusts Gartner’s magic quadrant for examining the global market trend for customer service and support agents, resolving queries through preferred communication channels. This survey covers a wide range of applications used by small, mid-sized, and large companies for customer management. This is one of the burgeoning application software markets attracting new vendors. Out of hundreds of vendor providing competitive services, Gartner has listed the top 13 in this report.

    Tailored services for customer satisfaction drives the need for vendors to offer channel synchronization for team collaboration. This ensures event-centric treatment using contextual knowledge. By 2020, 70% of customer interaction is expected to be conducted using machine learning apps, mobile messaging, or chatbots. As per strategic planning assumptions, by then, 20% of all customer queries will be resolved by AI with no human interference. The percentage of case handled by AI independently has massively blown up by 400% since 2018. Phone-based communication is expected to drop down over 10% by 2022. Human agents will be responsible for overseeing the entire functioning of AI-assisted system, taking charge of complicated cases.

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    The core of the customer service industry has a strong need for a tailored CRM solution, that maintains complete customer records along with detailed purchase or transactional data. It tracks all incidents like trouble ticketing, escalation details, and problem resolution, for efficient case management throughout the entire product or service lifecycle. The report evaluates various functionalities like knowledge-enabled service resolution, mobile messaging, interaction assistance, social media management, and also service analytics dashboards. Another critical factor assessed was the smooth escalation process of cases from digital self-service to human agents or vice versa.

    In the world of AI and robotic automation, the need for human insight will be more critical as extensive reviews are required. In limited cases, to manage customer dialogue, human communication interference remains the preferred mode. In this digital customer service era vendors focus on digital engagement through chat, chatbots, messaging, and outbound, and social media engagement. Future research will study this rapidly evolving market space to understand the wake of digitalization and its pros and cons.

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    Leading the quadrant, the giants are aware of the growing influence of AI in the “mobile-first” future. They engineer flexible products that have transparent changeable business rules. They have greater reach and impact on customer service requirements of advanced analytics, social media engagement, and the IoT.

    The companies who lead the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center are- bpm’online, CRM NEXT, eGain, Freshworks, Microsoft, Oracle, Pegasystems, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, SugarCRM, Verint Systems and Zendesk. These leaders understand their clients’ evolving needs and lead them into new functional areas with strong vision and technology leadership. They strategize continuously to win new business in the CRM CEC market outside their installed base. These leaders exhibit valuable products with unique CRM CEC functions or offerings for particular industries or geographic areas.

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