Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining this latest metrocyte episode. I'm Beth Schultz. I'm the vice president of research and principal analyst here at Metro G.
And with me is Robin Garris, who's our CEO and a principal analyst for cx. And then Lainey Hoxma, who is a senior research analyst. Today we just announced the winners of our annual CX Metrostar Award program. And based on the analysis for this program, we wanted to take the time today to discuss what CX providers are doing right and what they're doing wrong in their customer's eyes and how their technologies are impacting critical business metrics for them based on our results. So first, let's put some context around the conversation. Robin, what should our listeners know about this awards program?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Hello, Everybody. So our MetroStar program, this is our sixth year doing it. It is a program where it's specifically and solely based on responses from customers from people who buy these technologies, who participate in our annual Metrocast Market study. There's no input or judgment from us as analysts. It's not our opinion like some, you know, some of these types award programs or designations are. This is, you know, strictly from customers. And so in this particular study for 2026, we went out and had 1437 IT or CX leaders or companies, I should say companies.
Those are the total number. Companies from 10 countries in North America, Europe and Asia, PAC and they shared feedback on their providers, also on other things like, you know, what their plans were, where they're spending money, what, what technologies they're going to be increasing, decreasing, where they're going to switch vendors, all sorts of things. So they rated their providers and how they perform across all sorts of areas like technical features, AI capabilities, for sure, product and service reliability, value. There's all sorts of factors. And from these ratings, we determine an overall average customer sentiment score and then, you know, compare each provider to one another based on that average. But then we also look at individual sentiment scores as we're doing strategy sessions for companies, as we're helping enterprise organizations when they want to decide on which vendor they should be using. We drill down into these numbers and if customer service is really important to them, that, you know, we'll really look at, okay, which companies scored really well there? If AI innovation is really important. Okay, which companies scored really well there. A lot more granular than we're going to talk about today. The other thing we look at then is how all of these vendors impact any company's business success.
So by using your product how do I become more successful? So what we looked at is how does the use of your product improve my customer satisfaction, my agent efficiency, my revenue and my operational costs? And we look at the percentage changes for those who've recorded either increases or decreases.
And we basically use an index formula where we subtract, you know, essentially subtract the lowest scores. From the highest scores. We come up with a total number, we weight a little bit higher the significant ratings on each side. So it's a five point scale. And so anyway, we, we come up with a point system there. So from that analysis we identify winners in three categories. So there's the metrostar Top provider and that recognizes companies whose customers have achieved the highest of business success and also that have received at or above average customer sentiment ratings. Then we also look at those who have done well in either one of those areas. So either top business success provider. So yeah, I as a provider have really helped my customers improve their business success scores or, you know, success metrics, or, you know, I'm a provider that really gets high sentiment ratings from my customers. So those are the three areas that we look at or the three awards essentially that we give. And for the CX area this year we have measured nine categories. So CCAAS Contact center as a service, CPAAS Communications Platform as a service, all your API is there.
CRM Agent Assist, AI Agents, Interaction Analytics, Workforce engagement Management, Voice of the customer and Knowledge management. So that kind of gives you a summary, right?
[00:04:43] Speaker A: And as you can see there on the slide, in total we gave out 74 Metrostar awards for CX this year, 43 top providers, which is up from 32 from last year, plus 19 top customer sentiment awards and 12 top business awards.
Lany Robin, what are some of the individual winner highlights that we saw this year?
[00:05:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I can go first with the topics that I covered. So for CRM specifically there were five winners overall. But the, the top providers that really stood out were, I would say, Freshworks, Oracle and HubSpot. HubSpot got the highest customer sentiment score for the second year in a row. And Freshworks scored really well in the CSAT area improvement areas as well as the revenue and efficiency. And Oracle was, and HubSpot were in the top two for efficiency as well. So they, those companies did really well on the CRM side of things. That's voice of the customer.
Our metrostar top providers, there were six of them and the ones that stood out here were probably definitely Qualtrics. They were a high for customer sentiment, they had a 8.78 on their customer sentiment score compared to 8.29 as the average. So that was pretty high for the business success side of things. Qualtrics also was a top performer in CSAT improvement and that was a top performing area for Voice of the Customer as well. And then for efficiency, revenue, those things we saw nice scoring really well as well as customer gauge, confirm it and alita.
And then finally for my coverage areas here, workforce engagement, management, there were three Metrostar top providers, Aspects, RingCentral and Zoho, and they all kind of did really well in different areas. So Ring Central scored the highest in customer sentiment. When we're looking at CSAT improvement, again, Zoho and Aspect were the top two performers in that category. And then when we look at efficiency and cost reduction, Aspect did really well in those metrics as well.
[00:06:59] Speaker B: Yeah, and I'll jump in with a couple more in CCaaS. You know, so sort of like the, the big contact center platform that's, that's very important, sort of serves as sort of a, you know, like a central communications hub for everything that we're doing. ICE is sort of the big news there. They, they had the highest sentiment score and it was among the highest, I think it was the second highest in the entire study and that was 8.88. So on a, on a 1.1 to 10 scale, it's a really good sentiment average score. So they, they did very well in this area, but so did a few others, so. Nice. And TalkDesk actually did best overall in the business success CSAT improvements, so they kind of had the most impact there. Although any of the metrostar top provider or business success winners did well in these areas, these were just kind of the top ones that we saw. Nice. And Cisco did the best for improving agent efficiency. And then RingCentral and UJET actually did the best for revenue growth. So using the CCAAS platform to help increase the revenue at your company.
And then 8x8 and 5,9, they were best for reducing costs. So for companies that really want to go out there, use their CCAAS platform, reduce some costs, those are the two providers that are doing the best there.
Another area that I really investigated was AI agents and kind of an interesting one because this is the first year we really got a really good response on AI agents. We did get some last year, but this year we got a lot more. And honestly, I think this is our first year we've got a really good showing for Cresta. So I think that's one of the big Things I want to point out in AI agents is that Cresta is actually here in this topic and actually in a few others as well.
Cresta and Acera did the best in these areas. Cresta was the top sentiment score, also a very high score, 8.87 for business success.
Saw CSAT being the one that moved the needle most on business success and Nice and Acera did the best in those areas. And Nice, of course, keep in mind, is now made up of Nice and Cognigy.
We did gather some data separately on Nice and Cognigy and the Cognigy AI agents scored very, very well if we just looked at those in isolation. But we combined the two companies, agent efficiency, ETA and Acera are the best there. And then revenue again, Acera shows up here with Cresta. So that's those two companies helping their customers increase revenue through the use of AI agents. So using your EI agents to upsell, cross sell, renew subscriptions, things like that. And then lastly for cost, and as I bring these up, by the way, I'm doing these in order of what, like moved the needle most in business success. So it was CSAT followed by agent efficiency followed by revenue. And then the last area at moved the needle was in costs. Still saw some cost reduction, just not as big percentage improvements as the other areas. And ADA and Cresta did the best in those areas as well and the last one. But to me, honestly, this is what I think is the most important area right now. Just my opinion in cx and that is interaction analytics. That's using AI, using analytics and automation to really get to what's happening in our conversations and in our interactions with our customers. Because so much comes out of those, those interactions. It's not just, oh, what happened, what do we talk about? It's, you know, what had. Did they say something that would give me an indication that there's erosion to our brand? What do they say about our competitors? You know what, what do they talk about with our products that might help our product development team in their next steps? I mean, there's so much I can go on and on about interaction Analytics. I would say there are three companies that really kind of stood out here. Nice, Cresta and aws.
So nice, by the way. I mean, they scored, they won more top provider and even the individual awards than any other company.
Creston AWS also won quite a few. And so I think that they did very, very well in interaction analytics. I would say it's also important to kind of point out a newcomer and that is Spearfish they're a newer company. We didn't get as many ratings on them as we did with some of the other providers, but we got enough to include them, you know and there, there are certainly many companies that get some ratings but not enough. But Spearfish is relatively new to the interaction analytics scene and they, they actually did, they did really well. They're making an impact pretty quickly. So when it comes to customer sentiment in this area, NICE scored best 8.66. So companies are happy with what they're doing in Interaction analytics. You know, they, they'd like to see with them and, and many other providers in this space even quicker innovation. So like okay, we have all this information, give us recommendations on what to do with it, make it automated, that some policies that if we see something happening in conversations, there's things we can automate with changes. So there's a lot of interest in making Interaction analytics and even more feature rich technology for the business success area.
In every other category we looked at, CSAT was the where we saw the highest percentage improvement except for an interaction analytics. Agent efficiency was actually the top area and Spearfish and AWS did the best there. So they really worked hard at, you know, getting agents to become more efficient. From the information that you have through those conversations, what can we tell them they should do differently or better? Right behind that was CSAT and 5, 9 and Cresta did best there. The next one was using Interaction analytics to grow your revenue. Cresta and AWS did well there.
And lastly cost savings. We see NICE and Google doing the best with their interaction analytic tools and telling companies how can you save money, how can you automate more things like that?
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Thank you guys. And yeah, thank you guys. Let me go into the last three topics technology categories that we covered with this year's CX metrostar report. So the first is of those is Agent Assist, another really important CX application for today.
One of the top three I think that we see companies deploying overall in this category. ADA comes up high as well for customer sentiment. It scored a high of 9.05 overall customer sentiment score compared to the 8.38 average. So you know, really sits well above average there. And then I also wanted to point out Forethought, which is now a Zendesk company, but Forethought received the highest customer sentiment score across all technologies and that was a 9.09 which it received for it's the analytics capabilities available with its Agent Assist applications. In terms of business success metrics, Observe did really well here. A Top performer, I should say observe. AI did really well here. So a top performer for csat, revenue and agent deficiency. Other top performers were forethought again. They came up high for CSAT and efficiency.
And then AWS scored as a top performer for revenue improvements. And then Dixa and Cresta, you heard Robin mention Cresta, they performed well in this category for reducing operational costs. For knowledge management, we saw Zoho really performed well in customer sentiment. It was the performer there. Zendesk also did well in customer sentiment as well as Varant for our business success metrics.
Knowledge management category, ServiceNow did really well. It was a top performer for CSAT, revenue and agent efficiency improvements. And then Zoho also came up among the top performers for CSAT and revenue. Zendex, Zendesk did well for agent efficiency and then for operational cost reductions, we see that Live Agent and Nice performed well there. The last category that we covered as part of the CX Metrostar award program is CPAs. There we had, we saw sort of a range of providers. Bird was the highest in customer sentiment.
Syniverse also performed well in customer sentiment. And then for business success, opshop out of India really did perform well across the board. It was a top performer for csat. It was a top performer for revenue as well as for agent efficiency and operational cost reduction. So across the board, you know that that's a company to watch for. Sure. Other top performers are 8x8 and Route Mobile for CSAT and 8x8 also and for revenue and Route Mobile for efficiency. Those are some of the highlights of the providers and how they, you know, how they performed for customer sentiment and business success. Lainie, you did some more analysis on customer sentiment kind of across the board. So what features and capabilities are customers most and least positive about for these CX technologies that we covered?
[00:15:59] Speaker C: Yeah. So across, I ran some analysis across all of the different categories. So this isn't specific necessarily to one of the technology areas, but overall we're seeing platform reliability and the security capabilities that these vendors are are providing as being the highest customers are rating it with the highest satisfaction. The satisfaction score for both of Those is around 8.0.44 out of 10.
So that's. Those are the two highest rated across all of the areas.
On the flip side of things, we looked at kind of the two lowest across all the areas and we're seeing that AI capabilities was the lowest rated category overall still at 8.24 out of 10. So you know, it's not not to say that it's a negative sentiment rating, but. And then also the value or like bang for the buck that rated the second lowest at 8.25. You know, companies, they're trusting that these platforms are going to stay online and they're secure, but we're still struggling to see like the mature AI functionality. Maybe they're still seeing some errors and the, the price tags might not be able to just to justify the current feature sets yet.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Those are great points, Robin. Anything else that you'd like to add there?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: I think that platform reliability and security, I mean, it kind of makes sense to me because we have been seeing for a while now companies wanting to move more into a platform environment with their cx and I think that that's going to expand even more looking into other areas of CX like marketing, automation, sales, frontline, really looking more into the whole customer experience realm. And so I think that those strong platform providers today are only going to just expand.
And they've been focusing on that for a while. They've been focusing on their platforms for a while. So those should score high security. I mean, this has always been an issue and a concern. So vendors should be doing well there. So if they weren't, that would be a bigger concern.
But as far as like AI capabilities and value, I will say that value is always one of those ones that is going to score low no matter what. It's just like value and cost is always one of the reasons companies leave their providers. You know, they always kind of feel like they should be getting more for what they're paying. So, you know, and honestly, because the bar is always moving, like you can buy a new product, think, wow, I'm getting great value here. And then a new competitor comes in or technology changes and you start saying, well, wait, what I was getting a year ago for this, I can get a lot more now because things have changed. So kind of value and bang for the buck is always one of those things that I think will score relatively low AI. I mean, I look at that as something where it's changing so rapidly. It's just hard to keep up with the pace of change. It's hard to keep up with all the new things that are coming out with AI, you know, and it's hard, I think, for a lot of IT and CX people to feel that they really have an expertise and an understanding of what's going on. And as a result they may have, you know, some sort of negative look at what the providers are doing with it, you know, so those, those all resonate with me and make sense.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Yeah. The AI capabilities is a tough one because it's kind of the expectation versus the reality. And the expectations these days may be a little bit high. That's right.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Okay. So Laney, you also did a deep dive on business success. So what does your analysis show is there?
[00:19:24] Speaker C: Yeah, and this is probably not going to be much of a surprise. Just bouncing off of what our highlights were from each of the areas and who, who the top vendors were. So we looked at this and across all the technology areas we for business success was csat, employee efficiency, operational costs and revenue. So vendors are doing the best job overall across the board at helping companies improve their CSAT that achieved the highest market wide business success rating, employee efficiency, followed closely that. The ratings here were only like five points apart. But then, you know, just as Robin was talking about, we go into like the revenue, driving revenue and reducing operational costs and those score lowers. We do see though that the driving revenue is second to last. So it is actually 40 points most. 40 or no, a little more than 40 points higher than the operational costs when we look at business success. So it is like these vendors are helping their companies drive revenue. They are. But the operational costs were the lowest here. That was at just for comparison. Like CSAT was 85 and operational costs is 34. So that's the big difference there where companies are just struggling most to help these companies reduce their costs.
It definitely bodes well with everything that Robin just said about the bang for the buck with our sentiment.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: You know, obviously, you know, the CX metric cast where all this data comes out of, it's not our only CX study that we do, that we do every year. So Robin, what do you, you know, how does what we found here, particularly around those business outcomes, compare to what we see with our other CX research studies?
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I mean, it's pretty well aligned, frankly.
And it's always so interesting to me because when you talk to a lot of the vendors or even when you're at conferences or when you look at a lot of use cases, you see that companies will say, oh, we want to, we're using this technology to reduce our costs. But whenever we do the research, cost reduction is always the lowest improvement. It's always like this big thing that they think that they should be doing. But honestly, the biggest improvement on every study we look at is csat.
So what we're doing is improving customer satisfaction. And then the only difference I see, I mean, revenue and employee efficiency in this study are pretty close, but revenue is Usually the second most, you know, improved metric when it comes to using AI and CX technology. So it's like, all right, we're going to, either everyone wants to say we're either going to reduce costs or we're going to increase our revenue. And we see a better improvement in increasing revenue than we do at reducing costs for sure. But CSAT is the one, I think that's an important one. If your customers are happy, all these other metrics kind of fall in line. But I just think that overall from a technology standpoint and other research studies we've done, you know, it aligns. I would say kind of what I said about sentiment platforms continue to be important. I think interaction analytics is super important and applies to almost everything we talked about here today.
And I also, one other point I would make, and this is just more topical than it is on the business success is I find it interesting when I look at the metrics and I look at the numbers and the, the ratings and everything. Agent Assist is, I think, you know, more important these days than AI agents for self service. Customers are a little bit slower than I think a lot of people thought about, you know, at adopting AI for self service. They're doing it and they're coming around. But we're seeing a lot better results on Agent Assist. So using AI to help the humans to serve the customers better, I think vendors are doing better with these products and I think customers are seeing more of an impact using Agent Assist than AI agents. For now, I think you have to invest in both. But, but for me right now I would focus a little bit more heavily on Agent Assist. You know, how can agents be helping humans? And I would be focusing more heavily on interaction analytics as products.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: It is interesting on Agent Assist in some ways you can use. Companies can almost use Agent Assist as a proving ground for AI agents.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Well, on that note, I want to thank you guys, Robin and Lainey for joining me today. And then listeners, thank you for tuning in and continue. Congratulations to all of our CX Metrostar 2020 listeners. You can find all of our CX Metrostar award reports as well as all of our CX AI and other research and reports on our website at www.metrogy.com. as always, we're happy to hear from you. So feel free to reach out to us directly or via the contact button on the metrogy website. That is all for now on behalf of Robin and Lainey and the rest of the MEXG team. Goodbye till next time and take care everybody.
