In a market saturated with lofty promises about AI and next-generation customer experience, separating marketing hype from genuine business impact can be difficult to do. At Metrigy, we cut through the noise by going directly to the people who buy and use these technologies.
For our global Customer Experience MetriCast 2026 buyer-side market research study, we gathered insights from 1,437 CX and IT leaders across 10 countries. As part of the study, we asked these leaders to provide two sets of information we use in determining which providers earn recognition in our annual CX MetriStar Award program:
- Vendor sentiment ratings across a variety of areas, such as reliability, technical features, and value
- Percent improvements across four key business success metrics: CSAT, employee efficiency, revenue, and operational costs
In this year’s CX MetriStar program, we recognized 74 distinct award winners across nine critical technology categories: agent assist, AI agents, contact center as a service (CCaaS), communications platform as a service (CPaaS), customer relationship management (CRM), interaction analytics, knowledge management, voice of the customer (VoC), and workforce engagement management (WEM).
We break down our recognitions into three honors:
- MetriStar Top Providers – The highest honor, awarded to providers that achieved both above-average customer sentiment and above-average business success improvements (43 vendors)
- Top Customer Sentiment – Recognized for earning at- or above-average ratings in areas like reliability, technical features, and value (19 vendors)
- Top Business Success – Highlighted for driving above-average improvements in revenue, employee efficiency, CSAT, and operational costs (12 vendors)
Here are Metrigy’s 2026 MetriStar Top Provider Award winners, companies that excelled in both sentiment and business success (listed alphabetically):
- Agent assist – Cresta, Forethought, IBM, NiCE, Observe.AI
- AI agents – Ada, Aisera, AWS, Cresta
- CCaaS – 8×8, Cisco, Genesys, NiCE, RingCentral, Twilio
- CPaaS – 8×8, Bandwidth, Gupshup, RouteMobile, Twilio
- CRM – Freshworks, HubSpot, Oracle, ServiceNow, Zoho
- Interaction Analytics – AWS, Cresta, Five9, Google Cloud, NiCE
- Knowledge management – NiCE, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zoho
- VoC – Alchemer, Confirmit, Cresta, Medallia, NiCE, Qualtrics
- WEM – Aspect, RingCentral, Zoho
Want to hear more about which providers are moving the needle on CSAT, employee efficiency, and cutting costs? Tune into our latest MetriSight podcast episode on our website, YouTube channel, or your favorite podcast app for a deep dive. You’ll also discover noteworthy trends we found in the MetriStar analysis!
