Recently, in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center report, Pega, for the 11th running year, has been named a Leader. At the same time, Freshworks, after moving up from its position as a Niche Player in the previous report, is the only vendor to be named a Visionary.

Salesforce was the only vendor amongst others that were placed higher on both axes than Pega.

Other Quadrant changes were ServiceNow, moving from Visionary to Leader, and introduction of two new vendors as Niche Players, namely, Kustomer and Zoho.

Gartner evaluated 16 CRM vendors in the report son the basis of their completeness of vision and execution performance.

According to Gartner, “Gartner defines the CEC market as the market for software applications used to provide customer service and support by engaging intelligently – both proactively and reactively – with customers by answering questions, solving problems and giving advice.”

A report from 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center has mentioned the AI’s increasing role stating that “by 2025, customer service organizations that embed AI in their multichannel customer engagement platforms will elevate operational efficiency by 25%.”

Pega

About Pega, the report says, “Pega has transitioned its business to the cloud. It has enhanced its digital engagement capabilities and self-service offering and has lowered the total cost of ownership for customers. Pega has also invested in rapid deployment with Pega Express Methodology. Consider Pega Customer Service when you need the ability to make frequent changes to highly innovative customer service processes.”

Freshworks

Prakash Ramamurthy, Freshworks’ Chief Product Officer, says, “Through our strategic acquisitions of AnsweriQ and Natero, we’ve added greater artificial intelligence capabilities that expand our usefulness to mid-market and enterprise customers. As a result, large-scale Freshdesk Omnichannel deployments have grown to almost 50% of Freshdesk’s current revenue.”

ServiceNow

The report notes that “ServiceNow has strengthened its AI capabilities on the platform, as well as in the CSM solution. Consider ServiceNow if you are a technological, asset-intensive, and case-centric service organization with a need for flexible and elaborate workflow options.”

Kustomer

For Kustomer, the report states that the company “focuses on digital customer service and has fewer case management capabilities than other vendors evaluated. Its platform strategy places AI and machine learning (ML) in its digital customer service and support solution. B2C organizations looking to move away from traditional customer service tickets and case management in favor of more first-contact resolutions should consider Kustomer.”

Zoho

The report says to “(c)onsider Zoho if you are an SMB organization in need of low-code platform capabilities with a breadth of customer service functionality,” as it “offers the enterprise-scale of a global SaaS-plus-PaaS provider.”