Nowadays, delivering great customer experiences is no longer optional. Brands must focus on customer loyalty or they risk losing relevance. The stakes are particularly high for CRM vendors.
This article will show a comparison of the SPARK Matrix™ for CRM Customer Engagement Centers (CEC) for 2023 and 2024, published by QKS Group (formerly Quadrant Knowledge Solutions). Let’s have a closer look at the leaders, unchanged contenders, and one bold newcomer who shook things up.
Here’s what we learned and why it matters.
The Leaders
Consistency is an undeniable strength in a rapidly changing tech market. These six vendors have stayed put in the Leader quadrant for two consecutive years:
Salesforce remains the benchmark for enterprise CRM and service delivery. Its AI-driven Experience Cloud and strong vertical focus are some of its core strengths and explain why it has been positioned as a leader for both 2023 and 2024.
Pegasystems, with its real-time decisioning capability, which helps organizations analyze customer interactions and provide personalized experiences within seconds, as well as its process-first approach, enables large service teams to move fast and smart.
ServiceNow helps businesses deliver personalized experiences based on customer data and preferences. It also automates and streamlines complex customer workflows. Its unified data model and seamless integration ensure improved visibility and scalability.
Freshworks, Zendesk, and Creatio offer cloud-native solutions with quick deployment, clean UX, and AI tools for personalized experiences muscle to keep agents productive and customers happy.
These leaders are innovating at speed and building for scale, and it shows.
New Face in the Leaders Club: Kapture CX
One interesting development can be seen in this comparison. While Kapture CX did not feature in the 2023 SPARK Matrix, it made its way straight to the leader quadrant in 2024. This could be because of its focus on industry-specific CRM, including logistics, e-commerce, and logistics. It also improved automation and NLP-driven workflows. Instead of trying to be everything for everyone, it preferred focusing on a few industries —going deep, not wide. This is a smart move considering the typical offering of generic software in this market space.
The Contenders: Reliable, but Room for Reinvention
A number of vendors continued to be in the contender section of the quadrant in both 2023 and 2024.
Some names emerged as strong contenders in both years but didn’t quite make the leap to leadership. For instance, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Zoho, Verint, eGain, SugarCRM, and BUSINESSNEXT were positioned as contenders for both years.
Their consistency indicates that they are trusted, enterprise-grade platforms. While these vendors have resources, customer bases, and technology depth, it may appear that they are prioritizing stability over speed, or not focusing enough on market-specific innovation.
Since CX is a fast-moving space, stability may not always be considered as the most important factor. Buyers may opt for platforms that support composable, modern architectures. It goes without saying that AI-driven automation and personalization are also generally preferred. Several buyers may also look for solutions that provide faster and more flexible implementations that are suitable for real-world business models.
No Vendor Left Out in 2024
Interestingly, no vendors from the 2023 SPARK Matrix were dropped in 2024. Apart from Kapture’s breakout moment, the matrix looks largely familiar. This could mean one of two things: the market is maturing as the players have held their position, or that the benchmark for entering and staying in the Matrix remained the same.
Last Word
The SPARK Matrix evaluates key vendors for various market, providing a comprehensive research-driven evaluation. Overall, the SPARK Matrix for the Customer Engagement Center study in 2023 and 2024 shows a few changes in vendor positions. The rankings show more than tech specs and reflect real-world outcomes as well, including platform agility, customer satisfaction, and implementation speed. The entry of a Kapture CX straight into the leader quadrant shows that there’s room at the top for smart, focused, and fast-moving vendors.