Customer Feedback Management And Analytics Solutions

Forrester's merged customer feedback category went nine months without a scorecard. On 15 September 2026 it got one, and the shape of the result is unusually clean: seven vendors, three occupied bands, one Leader, and nothing at all in the fourth.

Medallia holds that seat by itself. The vendor Forrester placed beside it two years ago now sits a band lower, even though it spent the interval buying up the rest of the market.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Customer Feedback Management And Analytics Solutions, Q3 2026

The evaluation published on 15 September 2026 under report code RES200823, authored by Colleen Fazio and Boris Evelson with contributions from Rick Parrish, Angela Lozada and Shayna Neuburg. Its evaluation window ran from June to July 2026, and it scored qualifying vendors against more than one hundred criteria. Seven made the field.

Medallia took the Leader band alone. Qualtrics, Sprinklr and CallMiner were named Strong Performers. Alchemer, Cresta and Salesforce landed as Contenders. No vendor was placed in the Challengers band, which leaves a scorecard with a single name at the top and a steep drop beneath it.

That structure is the finding. When a merged market is scored for the first time, the useful question is not who won. It is whether the merger produced one market or three sitting in a shared column, and a lone Leader with a crowded middle band is one answer to that question.

Medallia holds the Leader seat alone this time

The previous edition, published 18 November 2024, made Medallia and Qualtrics co-Leaders of Customer Feedback Management Solutions. Medallia took the top overall scores in both current offering and strategy and the highest possible mark in fifteen of twenty-six criteria, covering text mining, analytics and CX measurement, journey management, governance, adoption and community. Forrester's line was that the platform suited "enterprise programs that prioritize organization-wide CX engagement."

Eighteen months earlier still, Thoma Bravo had taken Medallia private in a $6.4 billion deal. The vendor returned to the scorecard as the reference enterprise platform, and it returns again now as the only name in the top band.

What changed is not Medallia's position so much as the field around it. In 2021 the category produced five Leaders. In 2024 it produced two. In 2026 it produced one, and the criteria count went the other way: thirty-three in 2021, twenty-six in 2024, more than one hundred now. A market that scores its vendors more finely while promoting fewer of them is a market that has stopped treating breadth of capability as sufficient.

The consolidator finished a band below the vendor it did not buy

The ownership story that shaped this category over five years did not produce the Leader.

Qualtrics bought Clarabridge in 2021, absorbing one of the five Leaders from that year's edition. In May 2025 Press Ganey Forsta acquired InMoment, another of the 2021 Leaders, 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, taking in Forsta, InMoment and Press Ganey's healthcare data along with it. InMoment's own sale price was never disclosed; the $6.75 billion belongs to the second deal, not the first.

So Qualtrics arrived at this scorecard owning two of the 2021 Leaders, one bought outright and one swallowed through an intermediary, plus the largest healthcare feedback dataset in the market. Forrester placed it in Strong Performers.

That is not a verdict on the acquisitions. It is a verdict on what the scorecard measures. Qualtrics was a Leader in 2024 partly on breadth: the highest possible scores in twelve criteria, top marks in innovation and in alerts, workflows and case management, and productized connectors to more than a hundred platforms. Buying two more platforms adds more of the same. The criteria that separate a Leader from a Strong Performer in a market of one hundred criteria are rarely settled by owning more surface area.

There is a harder reading available, and Forrester's own analysts supplied the material for it. On 20 May 2026, four analysts wrote that InMoment is "unlikely to survive," that the strategy is "either to ignore InMoment or to sunset it," and that sunset within two years is the likelier path. Clients were told to begin building RFP requirements immediately. Forsta clients got a softer version: expect pressure to migrate, and do not accept like-for-like.

An acquisition that the acquiring firm's own analysts expect to retire is not an acquisition that strengthens a scorecard. It is a migration project with a maintenance backlog attached, and the band placement reflects what Forrester could score today.

Seven vendors, three bands, and nothing in the fourth

The field has contracted at every edition. Twelve providers in 2021, nine in 2024, seven now.

The names that left are as informative as the ones that stayed. SMG, Confirmit, Reputation, NICE and Verint were Strong Performers or better in 2021. Clarabridge and InMoment are inside Qualtrics. The remaining independence in this market is concentrated in a small group, and three of the seven names on the 2026 scorecard had no seat at any earlier edition of either predecessor category.

The absent Challengers band is worth pausing on. Forrester's scoring model assigns bands by score range, so an empty tier means the field clustered. Nobody scored low enough to land in the bottom band and nobody outside the seven qualified for inclusion. For a buyer, that cuts both ways: there is no obviously weak option among the seven, and there is also no cheap outsider to use as leverage.

What the seven names reveal about the merger

The roster is the best evidence available that the December 2025 merger described something real.

CallMiner is a conversation intelligence vendor. It was scored inside a customer feedback evaluation because Forrester folded conversation analytics into the new definition, and it landed in the second band. That is the merger working as designed: the analytics layer that used to sit in a separate report now competes directly with the platforms that collect the feedback.

The rest of the field maps the same way. Sprinklr arrived from the social and unified-CXM side. Alchemer, a survey platform, bought Chatmeter to reach further into reputation and local feedback. Cresta came from the contact center, where the conversation already happens. Salesforce is the platform incumbent, present as a Contender rather than a Leader, which is roughly what an embedded offering looks like when it is scored against specialists.

Three consequences follow for anyone buying in this market. Vendors no longer compete on whether they can mine text, because that capability is assumed. They compete on what they do with it, and the merger means the answer is now compared across a field that used to be three. And the category name itself is doing work: feedback management and analytics are joined by an "and," which means a vendor strong in one half and thin in the other has nowhere to hide.

Where InMoment went

Forrester's guidance to InMoment clients in May 2026 was to start writing requirements. The 2026 scorecard gives that guidance a second confirmation: InMoment is not among the seven.

The healthcare data explains why the chain happened at all. Press Ganey serves 41,000 facilities, and Forrester's reading was that providers still running Press Ganey alongside 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, and the deals that looked like consolidation were really about who holds it. That is a sound reason to buy a vendor. It is not the same thing as scoring well, and the gap between the two is exactly what this scorecard measured.

The bottleneck was never the software

The most useful finding in this market is two years old and has not been overtaken.

Nearly half the customer references Fazio spoke with for the Q4 2024 edition cited internal reasons for not using features they had already bought. Internal policies blocked bringing data into the platform. Teams preferred exporting it to analyze elsewhere. Buyers under-budgeted services, and the need for those services did not shrink as programs matured. On generative AI, expectations still ran ahead of what the tools delivered, and the pragmatic advice was to pursue employee-facing use cases before customer-facing ones.

The Landscape, Q1 2026, reached the same place from a different direction. Its hardest finding was that the biggest barrier to value is organizational readiness, not technology.

Set that against a scorecard that now runs to more than one hundred criteria, and the tension is plain. The evaluations keep getting more detailed while the constraint stays in the buyer's own building. A vendor cannot fix the data policy that keeps the data out, the skills gap that leaves the analytics untouched, or the services line procurement cut. Buying a Leader does not transfer any of that.

Two of the seven are priced and sold as part of larger stacks, which sharpens the point. Medallia sits on healthcare and experience data at enterprise scale. Qualtrics sits on the largest feedback corpus in the market. Neither asset helps a buyer whose teams will not share their survey data with each other.

Three questions for the first scorecard of the merged market

Does your shortlist match the bands, or the relationships? With one Leader and no Challengers, the scorecard offers less differentiation than its one hundred criteria suggest. Ask each finalist which of the three merged disciplines (feedback collection, analytics, or conversation intelligence) it actually leads, and get the answer in writing. The vendor that leads one and resells the other two is a different risk than the vendor that leads all three.

What did the merger do to your roadmap? If your vendor was acquired during the last five years, you are owed a written answer about product direction, not a reassurance from an account team. Qualtrics now owns two of the 2021 Leaders and has not said publicly what happens to both. Forsta and InMoment customers have Forrester's answer already: build requirements now, expect migration pressure, and do not accept a like-for-like transfer.

Are you buying software or a program? The evidence in this market has pointed the same way for a decade. Reference calls should be with the services team that would run your account, not the sales engineer who built the demo. Budget the services line before procurement finds it.

For European buyers, one standing clause applies regardless of the scorecard: employee feedback is personal data, and every change of ownership is a fresh occasion for a works council to reopen the data processing agreement.

What the scorecard settles, and what it does not

The merged category now has a baseline. The next edition will be scored against it, and the interesting movement will not be at the top. With one Leader holding a band alone and a seven-vendor field clustering into three tight tiers, the second band is where the market is actually contested, and it contains the vendor with the most acquisitions and the most to prove.

The page that stood here until now said the scorecard did not exist and advised buyers to wait for it. It exists. What has not changed is the part the evaluations keep rediscovering: the software was never the constraint, and no band placement moves that.

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