Imagine having a butler who anticipates and serves your needs. In Gotham City, Alfred ensures that Batman’s utility belt is always stocked. Just as Alfred faithfully supports Batman, your personal assistant earns your trust through silent understanding. Now think of this relationship in terms of your experiences with brands. Do those experiences feel invisible and immersive? In the real world, real-time interaction management (RTIM) equips brands with the tools needed to anticipate customer needs and personalize invisible experiences seamlessly across touchpoints. Alfred’s emotional support is invisible armor. RTIM allows brands to offer quiet reassurance in chaotic situations, ensuring that customers feel understood and supported throughout their journey.
Invisible experiences involve understanding customers deeply, anticipating their needs, and offering solutions before they ask. Real-time interaction management is a core competency for enabling invisible experiences.
Forrester defines RTIM as:
Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually relevant experiences, value, and utility at the appropriate moment in the customer lifecycle via preferred customer touchpoints.
RTIM capabilities evolve over time to deliver:
- Peace of mind. Brands provide sought-after information, soothing worries without customers lifting a finger, thanks to RTIM’s ability to deliver value and utility at the appropriate moment.
- Trust and empowerment. As trust grows, customers allow brands to take actions on their behalf. RTIM ensures that these actions are contextually relevant, further strengthening the bond between brand and customer.
- Invisibility. Brands reach the pinnacle when experiences become invisible. Customers navigate effortlessly, guided by RTIM-powered next-best-experience decision-making and intuitive responses tailored to their preferences and needs.
But RTIM is complex. It’s an enterprisewide solution involving significant investments in both technology and people.
To help you better understand RTIM, our latest Forrester Wave™ evaluation is now live.
The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management, Q1 2024, identifies 13 significant RTIM vendors — Adobe, Dynamic Yield, Engage Hub, Genesys, HCLSoftware, Medallia, Microsoft, MoEngage, Monetate, NGDATA, Pegasystems, Salesforce, and SAS — and scores them across 30 criteria. Use this report to identify the RTIM capabilities that matter most when it comes to elevating your approach to invisible experiences.
If you want a broader view of the RTIM space, our report, The Real-Time Interaction Management Landscape, Q4 2023, features 42 vendors.
Join Our RTIM Webinar
For a deeper dive into our evaluation, please register and join our Forrester RTIM webinar on April 4. Our webinar will also feature insights from RTIM users — real-world customer references for vendors participating in the study.
More About Invisible Experiences
Forrester can help you assess your ability to design, build, and deliver invisible experiences at scale through guidance sessions, research, and tools. We rely on qualitative interviews and a new executive survey dedicated to consumer digital experiences. Start your process with the following:
- Future Digital Experiences: Invisible And Immersive. This document will help you understand the role of invisible experiences.
- Anticipating Customers’ Needs Is A Shared Aspiration, Not A Reality, In 2023. This report reviews the state of anticipatory or invisible experiences.
- Anticipatory Experiences Require New Competency Superpowers. This report outlines how each competency will help you deliver invisible experiences.
- Invisible Experience Competencies Toolkit. This report offers links to 25 competency map templates.
- Invisible Experience Competency: Real-Time Interaction Management. This tool helps you assess your maturity level with RTIM and the value of elevating your abilities.
If you’d like to begin or evolve your ability to design, build, and deliver invisible experiences with RTIM, please get in touch to set up a guidance session.
