Report Ranks Healthcare Customer Experience Platform Vendors

By John Zimmerer, VP of Healthcare Marketing at Smart Communications 

A report entitled “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Experience Platforms For Healthcare, Q3 2024” (Forrester Research, Inc., September 23, 2024) evaluates and ranks eight member engagement and patient engagement solution vendors. Smart Communications was profiled in the report. 

In this post, I’m going to highlight a few points about the report itself and our placement in it. 

The Requirement for Data and Trust 

In the opening paragraphs of the report, Forrester observed that, “CX and digital leaders at healthcare organizations (HCOs) contend with legacy technology platforms with limited interoperability, analytical capabilities, and data integration.” Per the report, the symptoms of that underlying condition are: 

The prescription for relief, as written by the analysts, is for HCOs to “move beyond systems capable of only transactional engagements. To create value for customers, they must foster personalized customer experiences designed to sustain engagement, not just drive acquisition. CX platforms for healthcare can help HCOs eliminate point-solution fatigue and reduce a narrow focus on the digital front door.” 

Vendors Profiled in the Report 

This Wave report follows a market landscape report, where Forrester initially identified 29 vendors in the healthcare CX space. The Wave focuses on eight of those vendors. The inclusion criteria were rigorous. Vendors needed to demonstrate their ability to design, manage, and customize customer journeys with an omnichannel interface that appears seamless. Vendors also needed to evidence their ability to provide multiple customer experience (CX) solution types and categories. 

Vendors also needed to be, for lack of a better word, relevant in the marketplace. To be in the Wave, a vendor needed a history of effectively facilitating healthcare experiences, a significant market presence, and Forrester client mindshare. 

Smart Communications is ranked as a Challenger in this report, and we are identified as a non-participating vendor. 

Our take: We are a Challenger largely because the Conversation Cloud platform enables our customers to build a wide range of experiences that expand beyond the core use cases covered in the report, whereas the other vendors provide a set of those specific experiences out of the box. Customer experience management products have some features, such as audience segmentation, that our Conversation Cloud does not. And, as Forrester points out in our profile, we leverage a very large partner network to provide that and other functionality. That said, we have identified several of the evaluation criteria where we believe we’ll be able to demonstrate improvement in subsequent Wave evaluations. 

As for being a non-participating vendor, that comes down to how the Wave criteria and process were defined versus our unique offering. 

When analyst firms do evaluations like this one, they send vendors a description of the use cases they want the vendor to demonstrate, functionality to highlight, etc. Since we’re a platform for building experiences, we didn’t feel the criteria applied to us in the same way they would to the other products being evaluated.