For years, the CX playbook has centered on asking customers what they think through surveys, scores and dashboards. Those methods still have a role, but they capture only what customers choose to report after an experience. As more of the customer experience moves toward digital, automated and AI-driven channels, CX leaders also need evidence of what actually happened.

That's the backdrop for news we're proud to share: CallMiner has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management and Analytics Solutions, Q3 2026. For us, this affirms something we've said for years: customer conversations are one of the richest sources of intelligence an organization has about its customers, operations and business performance.

The recognition itself matters. But the bigger story, for us, is what it signals about where customer experience is headed.

Customer intelligence is becoming the foundation of modern CX

The customer feedback and analytics market is changing fast. AI has made it easier than ever to summarize interactions and identify patterns across large volumes of customer data. It has not solved the harder problem: deciding which signals matter, connecting them to an accountable owner and determining whether the resulting action improved the customer outcome.

Forrester's own evaluation opens by calling this "a market in transition." The report argues that "successful vendors will connect customer intelligence to enterprise workflows while providing the governance, interoperability, and trust that enterprises require," and frames the underlying stakes just as plainly: "the value proposition of feedback management technology has never been about collecting feedback — it has been the promise of driving business decisions."

Our own research tells a similar story. CallMiner's newly released CX Landscape Report 2026, based on a survey of 700 senior contact center and CX decision-makers across the US, UK and Ireland, France, Germany and South Africa in May and June 2026, found that 99% of organizations surveyed have introduced automation in customer interactions but only 23% describe those experiences as both highly automated and consistently optimized using customer experience insights. Meanwhile, 68% say they aren't using their CX data to its full advantage. That's a significant gap.

The problem isn't a lack of customer data anymore. Organizations are collecting information from surveys, conversations, operational systems, digital channels and automation platforms. The challenge is connecting those signals, extracting meaning and using that intelligence to drive better decisions. We believe that's exactly where customer conversations create a distinct advantage.

Why conversations matter more than ever

Every day, customers tell organizations what they're experiencing. In their own words, they explain what's frustrating, what's creating effort, where a process broke down, what they expected to happen, and what actually worked. Surveys can capture a customer's reflection on an experience, but conversations preserve the detail and context of the experience itself.

That's been central to CallMiner's vision for years: conversations across contact centers, digital channels, messaging platforms and outreach programs are direct evidence of customer needs, intent, emotion and friction. CallMiner analyzes 100% of those interactions, not a sampled slice, and that scale is what turns them into intelligence that extends well beyond the contact center.

According to Forrester's published scorecard, CallMiner received the highest possible score in the Vision criterion, along with 5/5 scores in the AI, Topic Modeling, Natural Language Understanding, Conversation Intelligence for CX, Analytics, Specialization, and Data Masking criteria, in our debut appearance in this category. Forrester described CallMiner's strategy this way: "CallMiner's AI-native vision is one of the most forward-looking in the market, combining conversational intelligence, real-time action, and enterprise-scale CX insight."

Whitepaper

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

CallMiner has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management And Analytics Solutions, Q3 2026

Forrester's take was direct: "CallMiner is well suited for organizations with high contact center volume that want to move beyond survey-based quality management and organizations looking to experiment with agentic automation." That's exactly the shift we're seeing across our own customer base.

Those capabilities matter because customer intelligence isn't just about understanding experiences anymore. It's about improving them.

Insight matters most when it drives action

Plenty of organizations are good at reporting metrics. Far fewer can explain what happened and why or connect that explanation to a repeatable way of acting on it, across customer service, CX, digital channels, automation and the rest of the enterprise.

There's a real difference between a score and an insight. A score tells you effort went up. An insight tells you why, and points toward a response. But even a good insight only goes so far if no one's clear on who should act, what the intervention should be, or whether it worked. That progression — measurement to insight to action — is one of the biggest opportunities in CX today.

Our research bears this out. Organizations with the most positive automated experiences are far more likely to optimize that automation using customer insight than those with weaker outcomes: nearly half of organizations reporting ‘Very Positive’ automated experiences take this intelligence-led approach, compared with just 8% of organizations reporting ‘Mixed or Negative’ experiences.

Understanding what customers are saying is still essential. But the value shows up when that intelligence guides employees, shapes workflows, personalizes outreach and sharpens the automation itself. Customer intelligence shouldn't stop at reporting, it should shape what happens next. That could mean guiding an employee mid-interaction, triggering proactive outreach, alerting a product team to a digital failure, or flagging a customer at risk before the next interaction happens. It could also mean helping an organization see where automation is working, where it's creating friction, and when a human should step in instead.

The real challenge isn't generating more information. It's making high-fidelity customer intelligence operational. That belief shows up in how we think about CX as a continuous, four-stage loop: capture interactions and feedback; understand them through governed AI and analytics; act through human and automated workflows; and evaluate the outcome so the next interaction can improve.

Turning customer intelligence into a shared enterprise capability

Closing the insight-to-action gap isn't just a technology problem. Customer intelligence, and the authority to act on it, is often scattered across CX, customer service, marketing, product, digital and IT.

A CX team might flag a retention risk that marketing must act on. Customer service might surface a recurring product issue that belongs to product ops. IT governs the AI and automation environment, even though business leaders are the ones accountable for the experience it creates.

What's needed isn't another departmental dashboard. It's a shared intelligence foundation, one that captures signals across every interaction and gives different teams a common understanding of what's happening, why it’s happening, and what to do about it. For CallMiner, the contact center is a critical part of that foundation, not its boundary. Conversations from service, sales, outreach and automated experiences can expose retention risks, product defects, broken journeys and unmet needs that matter across the enterprise.

AI in customer experience still needs human oversight

The rise of agentic AI and customer-facing automation has created real excitement across the industry, and real concern.

Our CX Landscape Report found that concerns about misinformation, compliance risk, brand reputation and inappropriate AI responses remain among the biggest barriers to AI adoption. More than four in ten organizations say customers prefer human agents and are reluctant to use AI or automated interactions, while a further 40% say AI and automation still struggle to handle complex, emotional or high-risk interactions effectively. At the same time, 95% of organizations say human agents continue to add more value than automation or AI in at least one interaction type. That's why we believe AI alone is never the goal.

Successful automation depends on the quality of the intelligence behind it. Automation can't compensate for low-fidelity insight — it can only operationalize it, faster and at greater scale. In a market where nearly every vendor can ship a bot, that's the differentiator that matters: not who deploys AI first, but whose AI is actually grounded in real customer intelligence.

Effective automation also requires context, governance, transparency and human accountability for defining and evaluating what a successful outcome looks like. Organizations need to know not just whether an automated interaction was contained or completed, but whether it resolved the customer's need, reduced effort and delivered the right outcome.

That takes a continuous process. Every automated or human interaction generates new evidence. Organizations have to analyze that evidence, connect outcomes to the actions that drove them, and use what they learn to improve the next experience. This intelligence-led, action-oriented, human-guided approach sits at the heart of our platform strategy, and our broader vision for the future of customer experience.

What this recognition means to CallMiner and its customers

We're honored to be included in Forrester’s evaluation and recognized as a Strong Performer. For CallMiner customers, the practical implication is clear: the value of conversation intelligence isn’t limited to contact center reporting. It grows when trusted customer evidence informs decisions across service, marketing, product, digital and IT - and when those teams can see whether the actions they take improve the next experience.

The organizations that shape the future of CX will be the ones that connect intelligence to action across teams, workflows and automated experiences, and keep evaluating and improving from what they learn.

That's the future we see. And we believe this recognition reflects the strategy CallMiner has been pursuing all along.

Want the full picture? Read a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Customer Feedback Management and Analytics Solutions, Q3 2026, in the CallMiner Learning Center.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.