A Best-of-Breed CX Stack Is Within Your Reach

You don't need to rip out your CX suite. But you do need to stop assuming all of it is equally good. That assumption is what's producing results that aren’t good enough. And, the risk is that your team will be kept busy without getting better outcomes.

Some of your suite is best-in-class. Most of it isn’t.

CX suites are sold as complete solutions. And the pitch is compelling. With one vendor, one contract, one place to go. The problem is that "complete" doesn't mean "equally good at everything."

The survey engines are genuinely excellent. Qualtrics CoreXM and Medallia MEC are the only two that operate at true enterprise scale. They’re reliable and widely deployed for good reason. Medallia MXO for journey orchestration is another standout. These tools were built for their purpose and they show it.

Text feedback analytics is a different story. In one case, it arrived through acquisition — a specialist vendor absorbed into a platform that was built for something else. It gets packaged into the contract, demoed alongside everything else, and treated as equivalent. It isn't. And the gap between what it promises and what it delivers is where a lot of CX insight quietly disappears.

Look around. You've already got most of the stack.

Here's what I see in almost every enterprise CX conversation: Snowflake as the data warehouse. PowerBI is already licensed across the business. Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce own the customer record. Tools that are best-in-class at what they do, already deployed, already used by the team.

Most enterprise CX organisations are sitting on the core infrastructure of a best-of-breed stack without realizing it. The issue isn't that you need to build something new. It's that you're running two versions of the same thing, and paying for suite components that duplicate tools already doing the job better elsewhere in your environment. That redundancy has a cost, in budget, in complexity, and in the internal effort required to keep it all running.

According to a 2025 BCG survey of 300 C-level leaders, cost-efficiency of a suite is a myth and integration headaches don’t disappear.

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The one genuine gap

If you've got Snowflake, PowerBI, and a CRM, you have a data foundation, visualisation, and a customer record. What most teams are missing is a text feedback analytics layer. Something purpose-built to make sense of unstructured customer feedback at scale, across every source in your environment.

This is where suites consistently fall short, and it's not a mystery why. Unstructured feedback analysis is a hard, specialized problem. Acquired modules weren't designed for it from the ground up. They're slow to integrate with data sources outside the suite, take months to configure, and because of that setup cost, rarely get the ongoing attention they need. The taxonomy gets built once and left alone. Quarters pass. Your customers change, your products change, the industry changes. And the feedback is categorized against a reality that no longer exists. The insight doesn't break dramatically. It just quietly stops delivering a true and accurate Voice of the Customer.  

One decision away

After twenty years in CX, the pattern is consistent. The teams getting the most from their customer data aren't running the biggest platforms. They're running the right ones — keeping what's genuinely strong and being deliberate about where they need something better.

Keep CoreXM or MEC for surveys. Leverage Draw from Snowflake as your data foundation and PowerBI or Tableau for dashboards. Visualize digital behaviour across the user journey with tools like Quantum Metric. ‍

Add Thematic as the unstructured feedback analytics layer that connects to all the other tools and handles the one job your suite was never built to do well.

A best-of-breed CX stack isn't a future state or a rip-and-replace project. For most enterprise teams, it's one deliberate decision away.

Gary Batroff has spent 20 years in CX and leads enterprise sales and partnerships at Thematic. 

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