Customer Feedback Management And Analytics Solutions

Forrester killed two categories in December 2025 and buried them under one new name: Customer Feedback Management And Analytics Solutions.

The firm retired its separate coverage of customer feedback management (The Forrester Wave: Customer Feedback Management Platforms, Q2 2021, and The Forrester Wave: Customer Feedback Management Solutions, Q4 2024) along with its text mining and analytics evaluations, and merged them with conversation intelligence into a single market. What exists under the new name today is The Customer Feedback Management And Analytics Solutions Landscape, Q1 2026, mapping thirty-one vendors. No Wave for the new category has been published as of August 2026.

Put yourself on an InMoment seat. In May 2025 your vendor was acquired by Press Ganey Forsta. In May 2026 the acquirer was acquired by Qualtrics for $6.75 billion. Then Forrester's own analysts published the sentence every software buyer dreads: InMoment is unlikely to survive. Start the RFP now, they advised, not later.

That chain is not background noise. It is the reason the category needed a new name.

The last Wave of the old category: Customer Feedback Management Solutions, Q4 2024

Published 18 November 2024 and authored by principal analyst Colleen Fazio, the final CFM Wave scored nine providers against twenty six criteria grouped into current offering and strategy.

Medallia led the field, with the highest overall scores in both categories and the highest possible score in fifteen of twenty six criteria: text mining, analytics and CX measurement, customer journey management, governance, adoption, and community among them. Forrester's verdict: "particularly suited for enterprise programs that prioritize organization-wide CX engagement." The vendor that had gone private in Thoma Bravo's $6.4 billion deal three years earlier came back to the scorecard as the reference enterprise platform.

Qualtrics joined it as a Leader, with the highest possible scores in twelve criteria and the top marks in innovation and in alerts, workflows, and case management. Forrester credited "broad, global market penetration at and below the enterprise level," with productized connectors to more than one hundred platforms, and positioned it as the technology-focused partner with DIY program controls.

The two Leaders are the only tier placements publicly confirmed for this edition, and they happen to be the only two vendors that still matter to the story. This is the last scorecard the old category will ever produce.

The 2021 baseline and what happened to its Leaders

The prior edition, published in May 2021, evaluated twelve providers against thirty three criteria and named five Leaders: Clarabridge, Medallia, SMG, InMoment, and Qualtrics, with Concentrix, Confirmit, Reputation, NICE, Verint, and Cisco Webex XM among the Strong Performers.

Forrester's line from that edition deserves to outlive it: text analytics is table stakes, but not all text analytics capabilities are equal. The market proved the second half within months. Qualtrics bought Clarabridge. NICE bought Satmetrix, the Net Promoter co-creator. InMoment had already absorbed Lexalytics. The category's differentiation engine (the text analytics layer) began consolidating before the report's ink was dry.

InMoment's own citation from 2021 is the one to remember: highest possible scores in fifteen criteria, and Forrester's description as "a good fit for organizations looking for a ROI-focused technology and services partner." The emphasis on services, not tools, was the tell.

Five years on, two of those five Leaders belong to Qualtrics: Clarabridge bought outright, InMoment swallowed indirectly. Medallia remains private under Thoma Bravo. Qualtrics itself was taken private by Silver Lake in 2023. And the Platforms name became Solutions in the 2024 edition. A small rename that admitted the purchase was never the platform.

One buyer, two Leaders, $6.75 billion

The consolidation has an owner now.

In May 2025 Press Ganey Forsta acquired InMoment, pairing two vendors that Gartner had also named Leaders in voice of the customer. In May 2026 Qualtrics acquired Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 billion. Forsta, InMoment, and Press Ganey's healthcare data included.

Forrester's response, from four analysts on 20 May 2026, was blunt. InMoment, they wrote, is "unlikely to survive." The strategy, as Forrester read it, is "either to ignore InMoment or to sunset it," and sunset within two years is the likelier path. Their advice to InMoment clients: begin building RFP requirements now. Forsta clients get a softer but still pointed warning: expect pressure to migrate, and do not accept like-for-like.

The healthcare angle shows what the deal is really about. Press Ganey serves 41,000 facilities, and Forrester says providers still running Press Ganey with a non-Qualtrics feedback tool "will soon have to justify why they haven't converted." Qualtrics, for its part, claims the world's largest AI dataset for human experiential context. Feedback data is no longer a by-product of listening programs. It is the training set.

The smaller deals point the same direction: Amplitude absorbing Kraftful, Contentsquare planning Loris AI, Netigate adding Mopinion and Lumoa, Alchemer buying Chatmeter. At every size, the market is arranging itself around data and AI ownership.

What the new name is actually for

The introduction blog from 4 December 2025, by Colleen Fazio and Boris Evelson, explains the restructure: the boundaries between text mining and analytics platforms, customer feedback management, and conversation intelligence have blurred as CX leaders push for omnichannel text mining.

Forrester's working definition of the new category: software that aggregates qualitative and quantitative feedback, applies advanced text mining and machine learning techniques, and delivers actionable analytics to improve understanding of customers and inform strategic decisions.

Three forces, per the blog. AI disruption: vendors lean on similar large language models, which makes differentiation hard, and buyers are weighing building against buying. Consolidation: the deal list above. Commoditization: surveys, dashboards, and even generative summaries no longer differentiate; buyers want real-time insights, reasoning engines, and autonomous action.

The Landscape, Q1 2026 (the category's only current evaluation) maps thirty-one vendors across geography, industry, deployment model, and use-case differentiation, and it is client-access only. Confirmed inclusions span the old world and the new: Relative Insight for conversation intelligence and CX analytics, Almawave for multilingual feedback aggregation from channels including social media.

And the Landscape's hardest finding: the biggest barrier to value is organizational readiness, not technology.

The "It's not you, it's me" finding

That last sentence is not new. Fazio's blog on the Q4 2024 Wave carried the same message under a better title.

Nearly half of the customer references she spoke with cited internal reasons for not using some of the features they had bought. Most underuse the analytics: internal policies block bringing data into the platform, or teams prefer exporting it to analyze elsewhere. Buyers under-budget services, and the need for them does not shrink with maturity. On generative AI, expectations still exceed reality. The pragmatic guidance was to pursue employee-facing use cases before customer-facing ones.

The uncomfortable conclusion from a decade of CFM evaluations: the software was never the bottleneck. The organization was. The vendor could not fix the data policy that kept the data out, the skills gap that left the analytics untouched, the services line that procurement cut.

And now the market has drawn the logical next step. If the surveys are commoditized and the dashboards are commoditized and even the AI summaries are commoditized, the value sits in the data, the services, and the reasoning layer. The three things consolidating fastest.

Three questions for a market with two owners

Who owns your vendor, and who owns the buyer? If the answer changed twice in thirteen months, Forrester's own guidance applies: start the RFP now, whatever your contract says.

Are you budgeting for software or for a program? The Q4 2024 references leaned on vendor services for predictive and what-if analysis, not just setup. Ask for reference calls with the services team that would run your account, not the sales engineer who built the demo.

What do you do while the scorecard does not exist? The Wave that would rank the new category has not been published. Until it lands, the closest proxy is to ask each vendor which of the three merged markets it actually leads (feedback, analytics, or conversation intelligence) and check the answer against its reference base. For European buyers, add the usual clause: employee feedback is personal data, and two changes of ownership in a year is two chances for a works council to reopen the data processing agreement.

The next Forrester Wave, whenever it lands, will score a market with fewer independents than any edition before it. Read the last scorecard of the old category as what it now is. A field roster that no longer stands in that formation.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.