Customer Service Solutions

The Forrester Wave: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2026 splits its twelve-vendor field into four Leaders, four Strong Performers, four Contenders, and zero Challengers. Three rungs, evenly stacked, and the bottom rung is empty.

The evaluation went live on 11 March 2026, and no newer edition has appeared. An empty bottom rung is a maturity signal: nobody in this field is bad anymore, which means the tier table has stopped doing the shopping for you.

The report under the current name: The Forrester Wave: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2026

The evaluation was authored by principal analyst Kate Leggett, with contributors Linda Ivy-Rosser, Rich Saunders, and Angela Lozada. Twelve providers were scored against thirty one criteria.

A naming note. Forrester's title is Customer Service Solutions, full stop. There is no separate B2B or B2C edition under this name, and this article is about the plain-name scorecard. The B2B-lens reading of the same evaluation is covered separately. The category name matters here because the market Forrester is scoring no longer divides neatly into business-to-business and business-to-consumer halves. The agentic flip erased the boundary, and the name followed.

Leggett's verdict sentence is the one every vendor quote in this market traces back to: "The role of AI and the CSR flips: AI addresses the majority of the work, while CSRs assist AI."

A tier table too even to shop

A 4-4-4-0 table is unusual in a Forrester Wave, and the evenness is the point. When the market was young, the tiers did the sorting: a Leader was safe, a Challenger was a gamble. This table has no gamble tier, and the difference between rung one and rung three is a handful of criterion scores a public reader cannot see.

The public evidence of those scores is thin but telling. Pegasystems, a Leader, holds the highest possible scores in sixteen of the thirty one criteria, including customer service desktop, case management, AI agents, process management, and answer management. Zendesk, a Strong Performer, holds the highest possible scores in thirteen Current Offering criteria, including customer service management, customer service operations, and quality management. Two vendors, thirty two combined maximum scores, on different rungs.

That is the table telling you how it works now. The tier column is an average. The criteria columns are the decision, and they are not evenly distributed across the rungs. The cautions sit on every rung, not on the bottom one. Salesforce, a Leader, carries cautions on complex pricing and slower AI-agent value realization. ServiceNow, also a Leader, is cautioned on complexity and cost. Zendesk's Strong Performer entry carries cautions on packaging and scale pricing. Even the winners come with footnotes.

The vendor that moved on publication day

On 11 March 2026, the same day the Wave went live, Zendesk announced a definitive agreement to acquire Forethought, an AI agent vendor, to expand its Resolution Platform. The scorecard froze on 11 March. The market did not.

Zendesk's own expectation for 2026: AI will manage more customer service interactions than humans. That is not a Strong Performer waiting for the next edition to improve its scores. That is a middle-rung vendor buying its way toward the flip while the scorecard that grades the flip is still warm.

The middle rung is the busiest real estate in this category. The Strong Performer band holds Oracle, fresh off its own repositioning around back-office automation, Freshworks, with maximum scores in digital channel support, marketplace, and pricing flexibility and transparency, and Creatio, the no-code entrant. Above them sit four Leaders with four different theories of the flip, and below them four Contenders that all entered this field after the 2019 edition: Intercom, SAP, Zoho, and HubSpot. The 2019 field's departed names, Verint, bpm'online, Appian, and SugarCRM, were replaced by vendors that were already flipped when they arrived.

The layer that got its own scorecard

One month after the suite Wave, Forrester published The Forrester Wave: Conversational AI Platforms For Customer Service, Q2 2026 on 16 April 2026, authored by Max Ball, Fiona Swerdlow, and Sarah Morana. Fourteen vendors, chosen from a market Forrester counts at more than 650 conversational AI vendors. Kore.ai took the Leader spot with the highest Current Offering score and maximum scores in ten criteria, including agentic framework and voice support.

The suite scorecard grades the assembled stack. The new scorecard grades the layer doing the talking. That split is the market's real structure now, and it is why the 4-4-4-0 table looks the way it does. The suite vendors all ship conversational AI. The conversational AI vendors all ship agent frameworks. The differentiation moved to the seams between the two, and the seams are where the April evaluation lives.

Buying the suite without reading the April Wave is buying last quarter's map.

The four rungs, named

Four Leaders. Salesforce on enterprise scale and its Agentforce suite. Microsoft on integration across Azure, Office, and Teams. ServiceNow on enterprise orchestration and SLA frameworks. Pegasystems, the standout, on sixteen of thirty one maximum scores and Forrester's verdict that it "offers all the building blocks for autonomous service."

Four Strong Performers. Zendesk with thirteen maximum scores and its same-day acquisition. Oracle on back-office automation and agent tooling, thinner on digital experience. Freshworks with the reference numbers the market quotes: autonomous agents resolving up to eighty percent of queries. Creatio completing the band.

Four Contenders. Intercom, SAP, Zoho, and HubSpot. No Challengers. The empty rung holds the whole category's verdict on itself.

What to ask when the scorecard is already splitting

Which scorecard should you actually be shopping? If the pain is the conversational layer, the April evaluation is the map. If the pain is the operation around it, the March one is. Name the pain before you pick the scorecard, because the two rankings do not line up.

What did the vendor buy or ship since 11 March 2026? The scorecard froze that day, and one vendor in it was already acquiring. Ask every shortlisted vendor what changed in its stack since publication, and get a date, not a direction.

Which caution is yours? Every rung carries cautions: pricing complexity, value realization speed, scale pricing. Ask each vendor to translate its own caution into your environment, with numbers. A caution you cannot price is a risk you are carrying for free.

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

The natural next comparison is Real-Time Interaction Management Software: forrester's own line about this category's Leader is unusually direct for an analyst report: it says one vendor simply dominates the market, having taken the maximum score in twenty five of twenty eight criteria.

Buyers evaluating this should also weigh Customer Service Solutions For B2B, the closest coverage already published on this site: forrester's newest evaluation states the flip plainly: AI now addresses most of the service workload, and the human customer service rep's job has become assisting the AI rather than the other way round.