2024’s Top Trends from the Gartner Voice of the Customer Report for CDPs

Choosing the right technology solution means understanding the real, authentic experiences of your peers. With the Gartner Voice of the Customer report, brands can do just that. The Gartner Voice of the Customer Report consolidates reviews and peer insights, guiding leaders through a crowded vendor landscape with ratings and reviews of each CDP product and service. In this post, we’ll explore how the report’s user reviews impact vendor selection and showcase the current trajectories in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) market.

Key Takeaways

• The Gartner Voice of the Customer Report is a comprehensive guide to the CDP market from the customers’ perspective, demanding product reviews and a strong presence on the Peer Insights platform for inclusion.
• ActionIQ’s CDP excels in personalizing customer experiences, gaining recognition in the Gartner report for its ability to transform data management and marketing strategies, leading to increased engagement and revenue.
• Current trends in the VoC market center on empathy, innovative technologies like AI, AR/VR, and composability to enhance the understanding and security of customer feedback.

Understanding the Gartner Voice of the Customer Report

As a synthesis of reviews and insights from Gartner Peer Insights, the Gartner Voice of the Customer Report is an important resource for decision-makers. For customer data platforms, it’s a game-changer, shaping industry perception and informing decisions. This report is a complementary tool to the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, offering a unique end-user perspective on vendors and their products. But earning a spot on this report is no easy feat. It requires a mature market presence on the Gartner Peer Insights platform and representation of at least five vendors.

The Gartner Voice of the Customer Report serves as a guide, leading brands towards solutions that customers love, with a detailed breakdown of why. The report helps brands navigate the landscape of customer platforms to make informed decisions. It functions as a resonating voice of the customer within businesses, affecting decisions and molding the customer experience.

How the report is compiled

The Gartner Voice of the Customer report is no ordinary document; it’s a meticulously curated compilation of Gartner Peer Insights content, structured into four quadrants that represent different combinations of Overall Experience and User Interest and Adoption. The User Interest and Adoption scores encompass review volume, user willingness to recommend, and market coverage across various segments to gauge user engagement and breadth of use. The Overall Experience is assessed through a composite score, which includes the average overall rating and sub-ratings for ‘Capabilities’ and ‘Support/Delivery’, emphasizing the aspects Gartner Peer Insights considers most critical.

Gartner ensures a transparent and robust report methodology behind the scenes. They routinely refine their criteria to mirror the evolving market, preserving full transparency. Hence, when you’re exploring a Gartner document, bear in mind that it is more than just a report – it provides a holistic view of vendor performance and customer satisfaction, backed by Gartner expert research.

Inclusion criteria and service marks

Inclusion in the ‘Voice of the Customer’ report is no small achievement. The eligibility criteria demand:

• A certain level of market maturity on the Peer Insights platform, with at least five vendors represented
• Vendors must have a product listed in the Peer Insights market under evaluation
• Receive 20 or more eligible reviews during an 18-month submission period to qualify for the report

Beyond these core requirements, the report applies a Segment View methodology to offer nuanced insights, considering factors like company size, industry, or region. Category cuts ensure diverse representation, allowing vendors to be included in category-specific analyses regardless of their presence in the main report. Vendors are categorized into four quadrants based on their Review Coverage and Overall Market Rating, helping users evaluate and compare vendor performance.

ActionIQ’s Leadership in the Gartner Voice of the Customer for CDPs

Within the customer data platform landscape, ActionIQ has emerged as the leader in customer satisfaction, gaining acknowledgment in the Gartner Voice of the Customer for CDPs with a 100% willingness to recommend it to others.

ActionIQ’s leadership in the Gartner Voice of the Customer for CDPs is the outcome of our dedication to partnering with customers to achieve better outcomes for their customers. An adaptable, composable Customer Data Platform transforms how brands construct intelligent audiences, incorporate data warehousing, and design customer experiences that get better and better. Leveraging ActionIQ turns every customer interaction into a chance to grow engagement, tailor experiences, and generate revenue across the customer lifecycle.

“ActionIQ is leading the way with their Composable CDP and best-in-class strategic support.”

Director of Marketing Technology Strategy and Measurement, Media | Gartner Peer Insights

Product capabilities and customer experience

ActionIQ’s Customer Data Platform is more than just a tool. It allows brands to:

• Build smart audiences by leveraging data from any source
• Integrate data warehousing and customer experience tools without the need to create data copies
• Orchestrate personalized brand experiences in real-time
• Partner with customers for substantial growth and efficiency gains

Our platform facilitates real-time personalization of customer interactions and empowers the orchestration of customer journeys across any channel. By reducing technical complexity in marketing operations, it streamlines audience segmentation efforts. With a more sophisticated CDP, every customer interaction becomes an opportunity to deepen engagement, personalize experiences, and unlock revenue throughout the customer lifecycle.

“The product is amazing with its advanced data integration capabilities as user-friendly interface. But what I like most is the continuing support they provide us…”

Global Head of Marketing Operations, Software | Gartner Peer Insights

Commitment to innovation and growth

Innovation is at the heart of ActionIQ’s product. By enhancing our CDP with GenAI models that incorporate real context from the customer experience, we help customers stay ahead of the curve with more efficient advertising spend and identity resolution. The composable architecture of our Customer Data Platform allows secure activation of data across various customer experience touchpoints, significantly catering to enterprise scalability needs.

“After several failed attempts in the CDP space, AIQ has been a breath of fresh air and serves the complex needs of our business… The platform’s data model is extremely flexible. We have several layers of relationships and the platform could fit to our needs.”

Technical Program Manager, Software | Gartner Peer Insights

How Brands Can Leverage the Gartner Voice of the Customer in Buying Decisions

As a brand or a decision-maker, you might be wondering: How can the Gartner Voice of the Customer report guide me in my CDP selection process? The answer lies in the wealth of insights that the report offers. By capturing firsthand enterprise experiences with technology solutions, the report allows brands to compare vendors on a level playing field, making it a valuable Customers Choice resource.

The Gartner Voice of the Customer report:

• Provides real, authentic insights into customer experiences with CDPs
• Gives references with specific industry and role information
• Provides product and service ratings within the overall rating
• Gives decision makers actionable insights into the CDPs they are evaluating

Analyzing direct peer experiences

The importance of scrutinizing direct peer experiences in the report is undeniable. Aggregated peer perspective, collective peer perspectives, and individual detailed reviews contribute significantly to providing decision-makers with a holistic view of vendor performance and customer satisfaction. The Gartner Peer Insights Reviews undergo rigorous validation and moderation processes to ensure authenticity, giving brands the reliability of these peer experiences when assessing and appraising vendors. By leveraging the insights from peer contributors, companies can make more informed decisions.

Current reviews are particularly valuable in the buying process. As 85% of consumers find reviews more than three months old to be irrelevant, the importance of recent user feedback in understanding the latest market trends and influencing purchasing choices is clear. Prospective buyers can dive into these reviews, particularly when vendors have significant volume and diversity of feedback, offering in-depth insights into vendor performance.

Assessing market average user interest and adoption

When it comes to assessing vendor performance, the Overall Market Rating in the Gartner Voice of the Customer report is a great benchmark. Derived from the average review ratings of all eligible vendors, it helps brands evaluate market average user interest and adoption. Vendors with average ratings at or above the overall market rating are recognized in the upper quadrants of the Gartner report, reflecting their higher customer satisfaction and implying greater user interest and adoption.

Learning from ActionIQ’s Customers

ActionIQ’s customers go beyond the curve as trailblazers towards enhanced customer engagement and business outcomes through the implementation of ActionIQ’s customer data platform. Their experiences and feedback give important insights into ActionIQ’s offerings, partnership and contribution to business outcomes.

By incorporating customer feedback, curating personalized experiences, and preserving adaptability in managing customer data, these brands have established a standard.

Case studies and success stories

If you want to dig further into how our customers are growing while driving efficiency gains across the business, we’ve got some stories ready for you to check out. Take Atlassian, for instance. Upon integrating ActionIQ’s Composable CDP, they reported a significant 71% increase in customer conversion rates and a 65% reduction in campaign production time. With 10 terabytes of data and 288 million customers, Atlassian needed a way to harness information swiftly, securely and seamlessly, but there was a gap between their data goldmine and their marketing team’s activation.

Atlassian could rely on ActionIQ’s Composable CDP to tap into its ever-growing Databricks lakehouse and activate campaigns across the customer experience. With a marketing-friendly user interface, Atlassian’s marketing team could use ActionIQ’s activation layer on top of its complete, real-time set of data in Databricks to launch audiences — SQL-free.

For leading luxury brand Saks, data is incredibly powerful. It empowers team members across the organization to make decisions that are always smarter and better, through both success and failure. But in order to unlock that data-driven strategy, you need a CDP to democratize and activate that data-driven decisioning and action — from the analytics team all the way to the marketers and beyond. Enter ActionIQ’s Composable CDP.

Saks’s data is all in Snowflake, where it’s managed by Nivy Swaminathan, Vice President of Advanced Analytics and Personalization and her team. They build data science models, predicting outcomes at a user level, and all of that rich data gets written back into their Snowflake data system. ActionIQ mirrors that work to allow marketers access and activation of all of those insights-driven audiences. With ActionIQ, Saks activates audiences in 10 channels (and growing) through integrations, with first-party data as a signal to activate on different platforms.

These narratives surpass just facts and figures; they encompass the tangible impact of ActionIQ’s platform. They demonstrate how the apt tool can refine operations, amplify customer engagement, and fuel business growth. They function as motivation for other brands to utilize ActionIQ’s CDP and launch their journey towards customer-centricity.

Key takeaways for businesses

Learning from ActionIQ’s customers reveals a few key takeaways for businesses. First, integrating customer feedback into the data ecosystem improves data coherence and customer understanding. Second, creating a personalized customer experience is key, as seen in case studies where bespoke solutions based on customer data increased engagement and satisfaction.

Agility in handling customer data, along with the ability to scale, allows companies to:

• Adapt quickly to market changes and customer needs
• Drive growth by actionable insights derived from customer data
• Align product development and marketing strategies with customer preferences

These takeaways provide a blueprint for brands seeking to elevate their customer engagement and drive business success. For more customer inspiration, see our customer stories.

Emerging Trends in the VoC Market

Looking forward, the VoC market is set for transformation. A budding trend is the incorporation of empathy into customer interaction strategies, fostering a personalized and humanized approach to customer engagement. This shift toward empathy transcends merely understanding customer emotions; it involves harnessing these insights to craft more meaningful, tailored experiences. Another huge trend is composability – giving brands the flexibility to only adopt the functionality they need, with a CDP that taps directly into the brands’ existing data warehouse, like Teradata VantagePoint, Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery or Amazon Redshift.

But the evolution of the VoC market doesn’t stop there. It extends to the adoption of cutting-edge technologies and innovative approaches that are set to redefine the voice of the customer, whose experiences are shaped by each CDP’s ability to support them with adaptable solutions.

Summary

In conclusion, the Gartner Voice of the Customer Report is a powerful tool that provides a unique end-user perspective on vendors and their products. From understanding how the report is compiled to learning from ActionIQ’s customers, we’ve delved into the depths of this influential resource. As we navigate the evolving VoC market and embrace emerging trends, it’s clear that customer-centricity and innovation will continue to be instrumental in driving business success. So, as we journey into the future, let’s keep the voice of the customer ringing loud and clear in our ears.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CX in Gartner?

CX in Gartner refers to the Customer Experience (CX) Pyramid, a strategic model outlining customer needs. It helps organizations measure and improve customer interactions and relationships. This model is crucial for enhancing customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy.

What exactly does Gartner do?

Gartner provides practical insights, advice, and tools to help businesses make faster, smarter decisions and achieve better results. They conduct research and analysis in areas such as technology, marketing, and strategy, and share their findings through consulting, executive programs, and conferences.

What is the voice of the customer?

The voice of the customer (VoC) refers to gathering and understanding customer feedback to enhance products and customer experience, focusing on their needs, expectations, and preferences. It involves listening to customers to directly improve the product and overall business performance.

What is the Gartner Voice of the Customer Report?

The Gartner Voice of the Customer Report compiles reviews and insights from Gartner Peer Insights, helping IT decision-makers, especially for customer data platforms (CDPs). It gives a comprehensive view of customer experiences and opinions.