One of our 2019 B2C marketing predictions is that enterprise marketing technology will meld with customer experience (CX) investments to deliver the relevancy and consistency that consumers crave from brands. Real-time interaction management (RTIM) provides critical capabilities that enable marketers to realize their CX ambitions.

Forrester defines RTIM as:

Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer life cycle via preferred customer touchpoints.

In Forrester’s “Now Tech: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q1 2019,” we cover 42 vendors that offer RTIM solutions across five segments: next-best experience, cross-channel marketing, personalization, cross-channel communications, and loyalty marketing.

We then drill deeper — especially into the next-best experience segment — with “The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q1 2019.” In our 33-criterion evaluation, we identified the 12 most significant RTIM vendors — Adobe, Certona, Emarsys, FICO, IBM, Infor, Kitewheel, Pegasystems, Pitney Bowes, Salesforce, SAS, and Teradata — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. Our report shows how each provider measures up and helps B2C marketing professionals select the right one for their needs.

While our evaluation will resonate with all marketers, it will particularly appeal to those in sectors such as financial services, insurance, telecommunications, utilities, and airlines, as it favors next-best experience solutions that orchestrate two-way, interactive CX across multiple customer-facing functions.

If your needs are more aligned with customer acquisition or eCommerce optimization, you should consider the cross-channel marketing and personalization vendors included in the study (or the broader list of such vendors in the Now Tech report).

RTIM integrates both systems of insight and systems of engagement. It includes enabling technologies such as cross-channel identity resolution, predictive analytics and machine learning, and artificial intelligence. RTIM also closely aligns with other technology categories, including digital decisioning, journey orchestration, and journey visioning.

If you have questions, feel free to send me an email or set up an inquiry. If you want to discuss how RTIM fits into your enterprise marketing technology ecosystem, we’re here to help.