Customer Experience Platform Archives

Beyond the Call Center: Unifying CX, One Definition at a Time (Finally!)

by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 3, 2025 | Blog |

Beginning of September 2025, the CRM Magazine published its 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards on Destination CRM. This year, the awards nominate five outstanding companies across eleven categories. As in recent years, CRM Magazine asked some renowned analysts to chose Industry Leaders for 2025 using a simple question: “If you had to recommend a CRM solution—whether an enterprise suite, contact center infrastructure, or a customer data platform—to a client, what would they choose, and why?” And, of course, the analysts – being analysts – gave their answers. And good answers they are. But this is not the topic of this post. What is it then? Glad you asked … It is about the term “unified customer experience platform” and the corresponding award category. Looking at the winners and their corresponding descriptions, it turns out that there seems to be a clear dominance of customer service and contact center solutions in this area – with the exception of the honorary mention of Sprinklr, which has its origins in the social media sphere. This dominance suggests that customer experience is somehow made equivalent to customer service. This shows quite some success of the narratives that CCaaS and customer service vendors are telling. This is especially true if very renowned analysts, who are in part thought leaders as well, follow it. Which somewhat irks me. And it reminds me of how the term CRM got more and more appropriated by vendors of sales force automation, SFA, solutions, until CRM almost became synonymous to SFA, which it isn’t. And never was. Again, this is not about the winners. They are great and very...