The Voice of Customer (VoC) market continues to evolve, often driven by technological advancements as well as M&As. Medallia, Qualtrics, and InMoment are the three major VoC players in the enterprise segment globally and locally across ANZ.
Until recently, InMoment was the smaller contender among the three, but that changed with their acquisition by PG Forsta in May 2025. The move marks a significant shift that will alter the competitive dynamics globally and in the region.
By combining PG Forsta’s strengths in market research, structured feedback, and regulated industries with InMoment’s expertise in AI, unstructured data analysis, and its strong presence in ANZ, the newly formed entity is poised to challenge the dominance of larger rivals.
The Key Players
Medallia
Medallia is a mature player in the VoC market, with a focus on larger, more complex and ideally global programs. With ANZ, and particularly New Zealand dominated by SMB’s, the vendor is not quite as prominent locally as they are at a global level.
Medallia underwent a major executive shakeup earlier this year, bringing in a wave of leadership talent from Qualtrics, and former Clarabridge. This leadership reset brings not only strategic focus but also a significant transfer of domain expertise and IP, positioning Medallia to compete more aggressively, especially against Qualtrics.
The changes include Mark Bishof as Chairman and CEO (formerly Chief Business Officer at Qualtrics and CEO of Clarabridge), Sid Banerjee as Chief Strategy Officer (Founder of Clarabridge), and several other senior leaders.
While the vendor has been relatively quiet in the ANZ market in recent years, with renewed leadership and an internal reset, Medallia re-focuses its efforts on local customer engagement across ANZ and aims to be more active and visible in the market. For ANZ enterprises, this could bring more choice, and a potentially stronger Medallia presence in upcoming VoC initiatives.
Qualtrics
Qualtrics, another major player in the VoC market, is known for its product strength, platform developments and AI capabilities. They are the most active in terms of platform development and shared several major AI announcements earlier this year, including agentic AI capabilities.
Qualtrics also formally introduced the term Experience Management (XM) as a discipline and new software category in 2017 with the launch of the Qualtrics XM Platform and continues to dominate the conversation on XM.
Qualtrics and InMoment have dominated the local ANZ market, in the SMB to enterprise sector. Qualtrics enjoyed winning customer deals that included market research and panel requirements, since InMoment lacked that capability in-house. And that’s where PG Forsta comes in to change the dynamic.
InMoment
InMoment is a VoC technology provider known for their Experience Improvement (XI) competencies. Their strengths include conversational intelligence, reputation management, and predictive analytics. InMoment has grown by acquisition, most notably the acquisition of MaritzCX, Lexalytics, and ReviewTracker, adding online reviews and deep analytics for unstructured data to their platform.
While smaller in size than their main competitors, InMoment has a strong local presence in ANZ and thrives on their strong customer relationships.
PG Forsta Acquires InMoment: A Strategic Move
The VoC landscape, especially in ANZ, is bound to shift significantly following PG Forsta’s acquisition of InMoment. While mergers and acquisitions are common in tech, this move signals a deliberate attempt by PG Forsta and InMoment to expand their market footprint and compete more aggressively with established VoC rivals.
While PG Forsta and InMoment were both established players in the VoC market, their merger is notable not just for its scale, but for its strategic intent: to combine complementary strengths in research, analytics, and AI innovation to provide a more robust, cross-industry VoC platform.
PG Forsta, formed through Press Ganey’s 2022 acquisition of Forsta (itself a merger of Confirmit and FocusVision), offers a Human Experience (HX) platform that integrates customer, employee, and market feedback, with a strong foundation in healthcare. PG Forsta brings deep expertise in structured feedback, large-scale analytics, and regulated industries such as healthcare. InMoment, meanwhile, offers advanced capabilities in AI, machine learning, and unstructured data analysis. By combining these distinct strengths, the merged entity creates a more versatile and comprehensive solution. PG Forsta enhances their AI and omnichannel offering, while InMoment gains access to a broader, compliance-focused client base and robust market research capabilities.
The new entity will serve clients globally with a team of more than 3,000 employees. Unlike its main competitors, InMoment maintains a dedicated presence in New Zealand, bringing deep local market expertise and strong relationships. InMoment’s established footprint in ANZ further enhances PG Forsta’s local presence, providing valuable on-the-ground support that is increasingly important to organizations.
Both companies cite cultural alignment as a key factor in building a stronger, united organization, a critical foundation for any successful acquisition.
AI: The Battlefront for the Future of CX
A crucial aspect of this acquisition is its emphasis on AI. VoC platforms are evolving beyond traditional feedback collection, with growing pressure to gather data from both solicited and unsolicited sources and deliver actionable insights and recommendations. As AI capabilities become more embedded in operations, platforms are increasingly judged by their ability to go beyond static dashboards, to unify data, analyse unstructured data, and generate richer insights and proactive recommendations.
InMoment, along with some competitors, has invested in leveraging contact centre data to extract insights from unsolicited and unstructured sources through conversation intelligence. While initially used for customer insights, this technology is now expanding to serve contact centre teams and broader, organisation-wide intelligence use cases, breaking out of departmental silos.
As the market continues to prioritise outcome-driven CX, AI will be a central differentiator among leading platforms, and InMoment brings those capabilities into the PG Forsta deal.
Looking Ahead
While it’s too early to call the long-term outcome, this acquisition marks a significant shift in the VoC landscape, particularly in ANZ.
With a bold goal “to be THE VoC company in the market”, the bar is set high to deliver. The success of this acquisition will depend on execution. Seamless integration across systems, cultures, and product lines won’t happen overnight. But if they get it right, this merger could reshape the competitive landscape, raising the stakes for Medallia, Qualtrics, and others.
For CX leaders across ANZ, this brings more choice, more innovation, and better capabilities to drive deeper customer insights and business impact.
Qualtrics, a leading global Voice of Customer (VoC) provider, held its annual X4 conference in May, at the ICC in Sydney. The event included an exclusive media lunch and focused on Qualtrics’ latest announcements and product enhancements, many of which were first unveiled at its US event in March.
The conference combined insights into the company’s technology roadmap with real-world customer success stories, featuring organisations such as KFC, ServiceNow, David Jones, Hilton, and others.
In a world dominated by AI agents, the opportunity lies in building real human connections. The challenge, however, is to do this at scale. Empowering people with AI agents, rather than replacing them, can improve efficiency while also creating space for more empathetic, human-centred interactions, the vendor argues. The theme of building connections and making every connection count came through loud and clear and was weaved through the product announcements.
Here are my key takeaways from attending the conference.
Culture is Key
It was refreshing to see culture take centre stage at a vendor briefing – a critical pillar for CX success that’s too often overlooked in technology conversations.
While technology is critical to enable a successful CX practice and continuously improve customer experience, building a culture of customer centricity must be the foundation for technology to be successful.
It’s critical to break down internal silos to unify data across the organisation and democratise insights. With customer feedback now coming into the organisation through various channels (surveys, calls, emails, social media, etc.), GenAI enables organisations to create a holistic understanding of experiences across all channels and touchpoints. Likewise, that data needs to be shared with the right internal teams to enable continuous improvement opportunities. For that to happen, organisations need to develop a culture of customer centricity and break out of their silo-centric mindset.
Qualtrics Experience Agents
No surprise, Agentic AI has made it into the world of customer feedback with Brad Anderson, President – Products, User Experience, and Engineering, introducing Qualtrics Experience Agents.
Qualtrics has started to develop AI agents and is slowly embedding this capability into the platform. Think about closing the loop with customers, automating small tasks, and proactively identifying issues before we hear about them.
The Experience Agents can respond to customers during the survey process or can be embedded into the digital experience to address problems in real time. Closing the loop with customers, across surveys and other service requests, can be a timely and resource intense undertaking. Qualtrics’ autonomous agents can close the loop with 100% of customers, automatically responding in real time, building empathy and making your customers feel heard.
It’s still early days for Qualtrics’ Experience Agents and I look forward to seeing tangible outcomes of customer implementations. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this over the coming months!
Surveys Just Got Smarter
Qualtrics introduced “agentified” surveys, a new way to respond to verbatim survey feedback, adjust follow up questions accordingly, and turn surveys into conversations.
This is an evolution of what’s referred to as verbatim probing. They represent a new way of getting actionable feedback from customers through AI enabled and adaptive questioning during a survey.
The new technology enhances the insight quality and aims to build empathy with customers. Verbatim responses become richer in value and Qualtrics reports a slight increase in survey completion rates. The aim is to turn surveys into conversations, leaving customers feeling heard and building stronger connections.
Despite the adoption of unsolicited feedback as a source of customer insights, surveys still represent the foundation for any VoC program, and they’re not going to go away any time soon. Enhancing survey capabilities while adding operational and unsolicited feedback to the mix will be key to establishing a deeper understating of customer experience and identifying improvement opportunities.
Show Me the Money
Qualtrics highlights the importance of linking CX initiatives to business outcomes and results to demonstrate ROI and gain buy-in and continued support from key stakeholders.
When VoC programs were first introduced, the main challenge for most organisations was gathering customer feedback. Once that hurdle was overcome – thanks to technology – the next challenge became converting raw data into meaningful insights, especially with the addition of unstructured data sources.
The focus then shifted from insights to identifying and driving action. Mature organisations are now at the stage of tangibly linking CX results to business outcomes and showcasing ROI. Quantifying business impact is an essential step in enabling CX success, yet it is often neglected.
Most organisations are still working on building robust Insights-to-Action frameworks and translating insights into tangible action; efforts often hindered by limited collaboration and a lack of customer-centric culture. For more mature organisations, the challenge now lies in clearly demonstrating the business outcomes and ROI of their CX programs.
Other Announcements
Qualtrics Assist. Alongside other technology giants, Qualtrics’ ‘Assist’ solution is an easy way to query the data in a natural language style, i.e. asking data questions to find insights. This is particularly important for larger data sets that comprise survey and unsolicited feedback, as it significantly speeds up the insight generation process. Analysis that used to take days or weeks, can now be completed in minutes or seconds.
Qualtrics Edge. Qualtrics has started to introduce synthetic data to its Research product suit. It’s a niche market at this stage but certainly growing in popularity as utilising synthetic data, panels and personas not only significantly speeds up the research process but also reduces cost. I’m interested to see market uptake for this. While it’s not new per se, organisations still need to overcome the “trust” hurdle to fully embrace synthetic data and research.
Customer Service and VoC: Boundaries Blur Further
While AI agents have dominated contact centre conversations in recent months, Qualtrics is one of the few VoC vendors now introducing Agentic AI with its Experience Agents.
This is particularly relevant for the digital experience space, where a variety of vendors are offering solutions. Qualtrics’ Experience Agents can detect signs of frustration and rage clicking during digital sessions and proactively engage to close the loop in real time.
It will be interesting to see how the growing number of agents from different vendors ultimately work together in a coordinated way to enhance experiences, rather than introduce new points of friction.
The contact centre has long been a goldmine for customer experience data and insights. Today, tapping into conversational data has become an open field for vendors across VoC, contact centre, and conversational intelligence categories. While this brings innovation, it also complicates decision-making for technology buyers. With vendors from different backgrounds offering overlapping capabilities, often to different internal stakeholders, organisations risk ending up with complex, costly tech stacks.
That said, it’s encouraging to see Qualtrics continue to develop and embed GenAI and Agentic AI into its platform. As a leader in the CX space, it’s setting a high bar for the rest of the market.