Employee Experience Management Platforms

Forrester's current map of this market covers twenty nine vendors. Among them are a survey tool, a staff recognition and rewards company, a corporate intranet, a people analytics platform, a performance management application, an HCM suite, and an experience management platform originally built for customer research.

Those are seven different products. A company shopping for one of them is not shopping for the others, and in most organisations they are bought by different people with different budgets.

That heterogeneity is the defining feature of this category, and it is worth understanding before reading any tier placement, because employee experience management is not a product category. It is an outcome that seven product categories claim to deliver.

What the category is supposed to be

The premise is that employee experience can be measured, managed, and improved in the same disciplined way customer experience is.

That means continuous listening rather than an annual engagement survey. Analysis that identifies what actually drives outcomes rather than reporting scores. Recommended actions delivered to the managers who can act on them. And a connection between employee sentiment and business results, so the programme survives budget scrutiny.

Forrester's assessment of Qualtrics captures the mature version of the listening argument, describing a strategy built on continuous listening throughout employment, capturing feedback at critical moments to improve engagement and retention.

The moments framing matters. An annual survey asks people how they feel in March, whatever happened in March. A moments-based approach asks after onboarding, after a promotion, after a reorganisation, after a manager change, which produces data attached to a cause.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Employee Experience Management Platforms, Q2 2025

The evaluation scored twelve providers against twenty three criteria grouped into current offering and strategy, with customer feedback also assessed.

Qualtrics placed as a Leader, credited for a rich set of surveying capabilities with extensive targeting, deployment, and triggering options, and for analytics deep enough for data scientists while remaining usable by business users through customisable dashboards. Forrester also noted its use of AI to analyse comments and identify trends including attrition risk, with recommendations attached.

Medallia placed as a Leader with the highest possible score in eleven criteria, including customer experience analysis and correlation, democratisation of insights and data, and innovation. Forrester distinguished it by the fusion of customer and employee experience capability with AI and machine learning, integrating structured and unstructured data across text, video, and speech to produce predictive insight.

Perceptyx also placed as a Leader, and describes itself as the only Leader focused exclusively on employee experience in a field otherwise made up of diversified players.

Quantum Workplace placed as a Strong Performer, positioned by Forrester for organisations improving employee experience through surveys and recommended actions while also strengthening performance management and gathering employee ideas, and for those seeking to raise their profile as an employer of choice.

The criterion that reveals the theory

One item in Medallia's list of maximum scores deserves isolating: customer experience analysis and correlation.

That is a customer experience criterion appearing in an employee experience evaluation, and its presence encodes the entire commercial argument for this category.

The theory is that employee experience causes customer experience. Engaged employees serve customers better, disengaged ones do not, and the relationship is strong enough that improving the first improves the second measurably. It is the reason experience management vendors built EX products at all, and the reason a CX platform can credibly compete here.

The theory is well supported in service businesses where employees interact with customers directly. It is weaker in contexts where the connection is indirect, and it is weakest where it gets used most enthusiastically, which is in justifying programme budget to a finance function.

The practical consequence is that a vendor able to hold both datasets and analyse them together is offering something a pure EX vendor cannot, provided your business has the direct employee-to-customer link that makes the correlation meaningful. If it does not, that capability is expensive and inert.

Depth against breadth

Perceptyx's positioning is the clearest statement of the category's central tension.

The diversified players arrive from somewhere else. Qualtrics and Medallia from experience management, Workday and Microsoft from the systems of record, the intranet vendors from internal communications, the recognition platforms from rewards. Each brings distribution, adjacent data, and an existing relationship with the buyer.

The specialists bring depth: better instrument design, stronger benchmarking data, more sophisticated analysis of what actually drives retention, and organisational psychology expertise that a general-purpose survey engine does not encode.

Both arguments are legitimate and they suit different buyers. An organisation already running an experience management platform for customers has a strong integration case. One whose EX programme is failing on credibility rather than on tooling needs the methodological depth.

What the twenty nine vendor list makes clear is that the diversified group is winning on ground rather than on merit. There are simply more ways to arrive at employee experience from an adjacent product than there are to build a pure-play business at scale.

What happened to the 2020 field

Forrester's first evaluation of this market was a New Wave in Q1 2020, covering twelve vendors against ten criteria: Confirmit, CultureIQ, Glint, InMoment, Limeade, MaritzCX, Medallia, Peakon, Qualtrics, Quantum Workplace, QuestionPro, and Ultimate Software.

Compare that against the twenty nine vendors in the current Landscape and the attrition is severe. Glint sits inside Microsoft's Viva product line. Peakon was acquired by Workday. Confirmit's lineage runs through a series of mergers into what now trades as PG Forsta. MaritzCX went to InMoment. Limeade was acquired. Ultimate Software merged and became part of UKG. CultureIQ no longer appears.

Of the twelve, four names survive independently into the current market map: Medallia, Qualtrics, Quantum Workplace, and QuestionPro.

That is a two-thirds replacement in five years, and the acquirers tell the story. The buyers were HCM suites, customer experience platforms, and productivity vendors, each absorbing employee listening into a larger product where it becomes a feature rather than a purchase.

Which is the structural pressure on this category. Employee experience data is valuable to whoever already owns the employee relationship, and the companies that own that relationship have been buying rather than building.

What surveys cannot see

The category's method is asking people, and that method has a boundary worth naming.

A survey measures what employees report about how they feel. It does not measure what actually happens to them. Those diverge in specific and predictable ways.

People underreport problems they believe are unfixable, because filling in a survey about something that will not change is effort without return. They underreport anything they suspect is attributable, regardless of anonymity assurances, particularly in small teams. And they report most strongly on what is salient rather than on what is costly, so a memorable irritation outranks a persistent inefficiency that has become invisible through familiarity.

This is why the technology-focused side of employee experience developed separately. Platforms that instrument devices and applications measure boot times, application crashes, and network performance directly, and they routinely surface problems that never appeared in a survey because nobody thought to complain about a laptop taking four minutes to start.

Forrester evaluates that tooling in a different category, and the two are complementary rather than competitive. Telemetry establishes that something is broken. Sentiment establishes whether anyone cares. Neither alone tells you where to spend.

An EX programme running on surveys alone has a systematic blind spot for chronic, low-grade friction, which is frequently where the recoverable productivity actually sits.

The action gap

The recurring failure in this category is not measurement. It is what happens afterwards.

Organisations run the survey, produce the dashboard, distribute results to managers, and observe that scores do not move. The next year they run it again. Employees notice that nothing changed and response rates decline, which is interpreted as a communication problem rather than as an accurate signal.

Every vendor now positions around recommended actions for this reason, and Forrester's assessments reflect it: Quantum Workplace credited for surveys and recommended actions, Qualtrics for AI-generated recommendations attached to trend analysis.

The honest limitation is that recommendations only help where the manager has authority to act. A large share of what drives employee experience sits above the line manager: compensation structure, workload driven by understaffing, reorganisations, and the technology estate. A recommendation delivered to someone who cannot change the cause produces a manager who feels accountable for something outside their control, which is itself a driver of the disengagement being measured.

That is the uncomfortable version of the action gap. It is not that organisations lack recommendations. It is that the recommendations frequently point at decisions made several levels up, and no platform resolves that.

Where this is going

The current Landscape, authored by David Brodeur-Johnson with James McQuivey and Faith Born, describes vendors varying by size, offering type, geography, and use case, and advises leaders to investigate based on size and market focus rather than against a single ranking. That is the standard Landscape caution, and it applies here more than in most categories given the seven-way product spread.

The direction of travel is toward continuous, passive, and inferred signals rather than periodic asking. Communication patterns, meeting load, collaboration data, and system telemetry all describe employee experience without a survey, and vendors are moving that way because response rates on active listening keep falling.

That direction runs directly into the governance problem. Passive measurement of employee behaviour is monitoring, and in several European jurisdictions including the Netherlands and Germany it brings works councils into the decision with formal consultation rights. An organisation that can deploy passive listening in one market may be unable to in another, which fragments exactly the enterprise-wide picture the platform was bought to produce.

The vendors will keep building it. Whether an organisation can use it is a question answered outside the procurement process, and increasingly the answer differs by country within the same company.

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