Digital Customer Interaction Solutions

This category exists because omnichannel did not work.

Not the idea of it. The implementation. For roughly a decade, omnichannel meant back-end integration: connect the systems, put the customer record in one place, and let every channel read from it. The theory was that a customer could move between chat, email, phone, and social without repeating themselves.

The theory was right and the experience was still bad, because integrating the back end says nothing about how each channel should actually behave. Forrester's framing when it launched this category is precise on the point. Omnichannel solutions concentrated on the plumbing. Digital customer interaction solutions are the vendors rethinking contact centre operations around what digital channels are genuinely good at and genuinely bad at, and around how customers actually use them.

The distinction that makes the category

A phone call is synchronous and ephemeral. Both parties are present, the interaction has a beginning and an end, and when it ends the thing is over.

A messaging thread is asynchronous and persistent. The customer replies in four minutes or four hours. The conversation has no natural end. Six weeks later they scroll up and read what was agreed.

Treating the second as though it were the first is the specific mistake that made a lot of omnichannel deployments feel wrong. Agents get measured on handle time in a channel where handle time is meaningless. Conversations get force-closed so they can be counted. A customer returns to a thread they consider ongoing and finds it archived, then starts again from scratch, which is exactly the repetition omnichannel was supposed to eliminate.

Digital customer interaction solutions orchestrate customer interactions across digital channels through a mix of automated and human-assisted experiences. The operative word is orchestrate. The category assumes conversations move between bot and human, and between channels, mid-thread, and that the handover is the hard part rather than an edge case.

Eleven vendors, eleven starting points

The first evaluation covered [24]7.ai, ASAPP, eGain, Gladly, iAdvize, Intercom, Khoros, LivePerson, Sprinklr, Unblu, and Verint.

Look at where each one came from and the list stops being alphabetical and starts being informative. Sprinklr arrived from social media management. ASAPP from AI research. Intercom from SaaS product support. Khoros from online communities. Verint from workforce optimisation. eGain from knowledge management. iAdvize from conversational commerce. Unblu from banking. [24]7.ai from outsourced service operations.

No two of these products were designed to solve the same original problem, and origin still shows in the architecture. A vendor built for social listening handles brand-facing public conversation natively and had to add case management later. A vendor built for knowledge management has deep content structure and had to add channels. A vendor built for banking has security and identity assumptions the others do not.

For a buyer this matters more than tier placement, because the thing a vendor built first is usually still the thing it does best.

What The Forrester Wave: Digital Customer Interaction Solutions, Q2 2024 found

Published in June 2024 as the first evaluation of this market, it scored those eleven vendors against thirty four criteria across current offering, strategy, and market presence.

Sprinklr placed as a Leader, described by Forrester as "the most feature-complete solution, bar none", with top marks in nineteen criteria including digital interaction orchestration, agent workspace, voice, and partner ecosystem. Its unified platform argument, carrying data, AI, channels, and functions in one place, is the most expansive claim in the category.

ASAPP also placed as a Leader, positioned by the report as the clear front-runner on AI-led innovation, with top scores in sixteen criteria including innovation, adoption, and pricing transparency. Notably, every reference customer named ASAPP as their preferred vendor on the strength of its AI capability, which is an unusual result in a reference exercise.

Among Strong Performers, LivePerson took top marks in twelve criteria spanning messaging engine, quality evaluation, accessibility, security and compliance, scalability, and commercial factors, positioned for established enterprises wanting a dependable partner for digital transformation rather than a reinvention. iAdvize was positioned for e-commerce and digital business teams willing to rethink engagement, on the strength of its conversational commerce approach.

The scoring dimensions place this Wave in the older methodology, with market presence as the third axis. Forrester has since replaced that with customer feedback in newer evaluations, so a vendor's size counted here in a way it would not today.

The metric problem underneath

There is an unresolved tension in this category that no vendor solves for you.

Digital channels entered most contact centres as a cost play. The logic was deflection: push contacts out of the phone queue into chat or self-service, where the unit cost is lower. Deflection rate became a headline metric, and the whole apparatus got measured on how many people were successfully prevented from calling.

The premise of digital customer interaction solutions is different. It treats digital as the primary venue for the relationship rather than the cheap overflow from the expensive one. Those two framings produce opposite decisions. Under deflection you make the phone number harder to find. Under the DCIS framing you make the digital experience good enough that nobody wants the phone number.

If your organisation still reports on deflection, buying a platform built on the second premise will produce friction that looks like a product problem and is not. Sort out which metric governs before you sort out which vendor wins.

Two years is a long time in this market

Worth being straight about the age of this research. The Q2 2024 Wave was the first evaluation of the category, and it published as generative AI agents were arriving in contact centres rather than after they had settled.

What has moved since is the automation boundary. In 2024 the practical question was how much a bot could handle before escalating. That boundary has shifted considerably, and the interesting question is now less about deflection percentages and more about whether an autonomous agent can take an action, what it is permitted to do without approval, and what the audit trail looks like when it gets something wrong.

The vendor list remains a fair map of who is serious in this market, and the criteria are still a reasonable checklist. The relative positions are two years old in a market that has not stood still.

What to test

Run an asynchronous conversation across a weekend. Start it Friday afternoon on one channel, reply Monday morning from a different device, and see whether the thread, the context, and the agent assignment survive. This is the core promise of the category and it is where products most often disappoint.

Ask what happens at the automated to human handover in detail. Does the agent receive a summary or a raw transcript? Does the customer have to restate anything? Can the agent see what the bot promised?

Test the agent workspace with an agent, not a manager. The person handling six concurrent threads has a different opinion about the interface than the person watching the dashboard.

And check the vendor's origin story against your primary use case. If most of your volume is public social conversation, a vendor with community heritage starts ahead. If it is authenticated account servicing, one with security heritage does. The category label flattens a set of products that are still meaningfully different underneath.

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