The Customer Journey Management Market: What You Need to Know From the QKS SPARK Matrix 2025
If your job is to improve your organization’s customer experience (CX), then you know the promise, and the pressure, of deploying customer journey management. With budgets under scrutiny and customer loyalty up for grabs, it’s no longer enough to map journeys or automate touchpoints. What matters now is finding a platform that adapts in real time, breaks down silos and stands up to the scrutiny of the C-suite. But with so many platforms making similar promises, how do you separate real innovation from marketing spin?
That’s why QKS Group’s SPARK Matrix™ for Customer Journey Management (CJM) is worth a close read. The report doesn’t just assess CJM vendors. It also analyzes how the market is changing and what capabilities matter most for driving business outcomes.
In this post, we break down the report’s findings and share our perspective on what CX software buyers should focus on when evaluating CJM platforms.
How to Read the SPARK Matrix (and Why You Should)
QKS’ SPARK Matrix benchmarks vendors on two axes—Technology Excellence and Customer Impact—and then digs into criteria that matter in the day-to-day reality of journey management.
For CJM, QKS highlights capabilities such as...
Journey discovery & visualization – “Ability to map customer interactions across all touchpoints with real-time updates, behavioral and sentiment insights, and dynamic service blueprinting to identify friction and simulate improvements.”
Data integration – “Ability to unify data from CRMs, CDPs, analytics, and transactional systems in real time, ensuring accuracy, governance, and compliance with regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.”
Product strategy and performance – “Evaluation of multiple aspects of product strategy and performance in terms of product availability, price-to-performance ratio, excellence in GTM strategy, and other product-specific parameters.”
Customer service excellence – “The ability to demonstrate vendors’ capability to provide a range of professional services from consulting, training, and support.”
... alongside many other impact criteria, like ease of deployment and use, proven record and unique value proposition.
For buyers evaluating tools, that combination is valuable. The SPARK Matrix recognizes that CJM success is equal parts what the platform can do and how consistently the organization can realize value from it.
Here’s how QKS positioned vendors on the 2025 Matrix, with CSG as the SPARK Leader in the top-right:
