What’s Changed: 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM and Customer Experience Implementation Services, Worldwide

The editors at Solutions Review highlight what’s changed since the last iteration of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM and Customer Experience Implementation Services and provide an analysis of the new report.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. has officially released its 2019 Magic Quadrant for CRM and Customer Experience Implementation Services, Worldwide. The report highlights some of the top providers specializing in helping organizations to implement CRM and CX solutions. According to Gartner, “By 2022, demand for consulting and implementation services for digital marketing and commerce initiatives (which are 40 percent  today) will exceed services for core sales and customer services (60 percent today).”

What is CRM and CX Implementation?

CRM and CX Implementation is defined as any service provided to an organization to assist them with making the absolute best out of their respective solutions. Gartner writes that “These projects have goals of improving customer satisfaction, acquiring new customers, retaining customers, creating a single view of the customer, cross-selling/upselling to customers, improving campaign response rates, transacting commerce, increasing customer advocacy/referrals and/or improving margins via improved pricing.” Gartner’s assessments exclude work done by brand agencies, media buying, and image projection.

What’s Changed: 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM and Customer Experience Implementation Services

The Magic Quadrant evaluates the credentials of 18 providers that offer their own services for organizations with new CRM/CX products. As with Gartner’s other Magic Quadrants, the providers featured herein were assessed based on customer accounts and scored into the four categories: Leaders, Visionaries, Challengers, and Niche Players.

The providers included in this year’s edition of the report are Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Wipro, PwC, Publicis.Sapient, IBM iX, Reply, EY, Virtusa, NTT Data, HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, BearingPoint, Tech Mahindra, and Salesforce Success Cloud.

We took a look at the report and pulled some key points of interest. Here’s what you need to know.

Leaders

Based on their scoring, Gartner has named eight providers as leaders in the CRM/CX Implementation space: Deloitte, Accenture, IBM iX, PwC, Wipro, Cognizant, Capgemini, and Publicis. Sapient. These vendors were evaluated based mainly on their completeness of vision which factored in market understanding, their offering (product) strategy, innovation, and vertical/industry strategy.

Gartner also assessed the vendors as to their ability to execute, which included their overall viability, sales execution/pricing, marketing effectiveness, and actual product/service.

Among the most notable changes from last year’s edition of the report is NTT Data’s exit from the Leader’s quadrant. Granted NTT was already relatively low on the Leader ladder and the shift was only slight, but it was slight in the wrong direction. Gartner notes that the provider’s weaknesses in CX Strategy and Business Consulting, Proactive guidance and resource management ultimately led to them not maintaining their spot in the Leader’s bracket. This, however, should not take away from NTT’s continued strength in it’s CRM technology integration and implementation, Flexibility and client commitment, and operational understanding, which still hold strong from last year’s assessment.

While the rest of the Leader’s quadrant remained the same, two vendors have also slipped down a ranking in their assessment. New to the Niche Player Quadrant, BearingPoint, which Gartner describes as a “good candidate for enterprises looking for assistance with their CX strategy, digital commerce or Salesforce solutions,” was found to be lacking when it came to their digital marketing and design, project resources, and geographic consistency. Despite this, Gartner noted that BearingPoint remains strong with its operational management and overall CX management, making them a worthy contender for more CX-focused organizations.

Reply faces a similar situation. Formerly a Challenger, this year’s Magic Quadrant sees them placed as a Visionary. This is largely due to their lack of geographic diversity, as they are largely a European entity with little presence in North America. That being said, Gartner ranked Reply above average when it comes to digital marketing and commerce, multidimensional teams, and CRM technology and architecture expertise.

Another fairly dramatic shakeup this year was the complete removal of several of the providers featured in the quadrant in years past. Though Atos, North Highland, and Slalom Consulting are not spotlighted this year, Gartner maintains that their absence is not related to their actual product and is more so due to their qualifications for assessment changing in the last year. All three vendors continue to provide CRM/CX implementation services and can be more fully researched in the last edition of the Quadrant.

Gartner recognizes the continued and exponential growth of the space as we head into the 2020s and advises organizations to plan accordingly for the ever-growing relevance of CRM and CX systems and the need to implement them effectively. The report predicts that as early as 2022, demand for consulting and implementation services for digital marketing and commerce initiatives will exceed services for core sales and customer services, which are currently at 40 and 60 percent, respectively.

Read Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report