In an ideal world, brands would focus on ensuring that their customers realize value. But organizations struggle with cross-functional collaboration, conflicting team metrics, and strategies that prioritize revenue growth over total experience. And that’s just the business side — technology infrastructure can be just as problematic. Although there’s no simple solution, investments in real-time interaction management software (RTIMS) can help operationalize your customer obsession vision.
Forrester defines RTIMS as:
Enterprise marketing software that determines and orchestrates contextually relevant experiences for mutual value realization at the appropriate moment in the customer lifecycle via preferred customer touchpoints.
That definition is obviously aspirational, and few real-world organizations are leveraging RTIMS to its full potential today. Financial services organizations tend to be ahead of their nonregulated cohorts. Financial services firms are using RTIMS for AI-enabled:
Customer recognition and identity resolution.
Contextual intent merged with customer history.
Real-time customer decision-making, aligned with business logic.
Experience orchestration via integrated touchpoints.
Continuous optimization of both customer and brand strategy.
RTIMS implementations require enterprise commitment and collaboration to achieve success. Firms often invest in their RTIMS ecosystem over many years, building upon a foundational decisioning engine for next best action and next best experience. Leading RTIMS users cite sustainable profitability aligned with customer lifetime value. They also credit RTIMS with accelerating their AI readiness for both internal and customer-facing use cases.
To Help You Better Understand RTIMS, Our Latest Forrester Wave™ Evaluation Is Now Live
The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Interaction Management Software, Q4 2025, identifies seven significant RTIMS vendors — Adobe, Braze, HCLSoftware, Pegasystems, Salesforce, SAS, and Teradata — and scores them across 28 criteria. Forrester clients can use this report to identify the RTIMS capabilities that matter most when it comes to elevating their approach to invisible experiences.
If you want a broader view of the RTIMS space, our report, The Real-Time Interaction Management Software Landscape, Q2 2025, features 30 vendors.
Join Our RTIM Webinar
For a deeper dive into our evaluation, please register and join our Forrester RTIMS webinar on December 18, 2025. Our webinar will also feature insights from RTIMS users based on customer reference interviews for vendors that participated in the study. If you’d like to begin or evolve your ability to determine and orchestrate customer and business value realization with RTIMS, please get in touch to set up a guidance session.
