Certinia Receives 2026 IDC SaaS PSA CSAT Award

Most of the customer satisfaction data in the software industry comes from vendors surveying their own accounts, on their own schedule, and publishing whatever makes them look good. I've built CSAT programs and know that even with the best intentions, you often only hear from the customers most willing to talk to you. 

That's a different signal than an analyst firm surveying thousands of organizations across an entire market, on its own terms, about every vendor in the category, not just the one paying for the research.

That distinction matters more now than it used to, because the ask keeps getting bigger. Software is evolving from something people manage into something that manages the work for them, often doing real work on a customer's behalf. Customers don't hand over that kind of trust based on a survey a vendor ran about itself.

So when IDC announced that Certinia placed in the highest scoring group for vendors serving the Professional Services Automation market, and awarded us the IDC 2026 SaaS PSA Customer Satisfaction Award, it confirmed something I already believed: our customers would tell a stranger the exact same thing they tell us. I've spent much of my career on the customer experience side of enterprise software, and having an outside firm hear what I hear every week has a huge impact on me.

Here's what I mean.

Customer Obsessed, in Practice

Being customer obsessed is one of our core values, and it shows up in many different ways. Two I can point to directly are our community and our executive advisory boards.

Many new features we ship with every release trace back to something a customer said in our community. We listen at scale, build what people are asking for, and keep the loop tight.

Another version of it happens with our most strategic customers, through our executive advisory boards. We bring them our real thinking, unfinished edges and all, and let them advise us where we’re right, and where we can improve. We treat them like our own board, people whose job is to challenge us and shape where we go next. That means being vulnerable and opening ourselves up so we can be better and continually improve. We've developed this approach across our global regions, and our executive team builds these relationships personally and on an ongoing basis. This is how seriously we value our customers’ partnership and counsel.

What the Award Confirms

IDC's SaaS & Agent Path Survey covered roughly 2,900 organizations across the SaaS market. Each customer rates their primary vendor on 32 different metrics, split between 18 satisfaction categories and 14 vendor vulnerability flags like poor implementation experience or unpredictable pricing, aggregated across more than 300 software providers. We didn't write the questions, and we didn't pick who answered them.

Certinia's own results sat above the PSA vendor average on measure after measure, most visibly on AI-driven capabilities, cloud-native architecture, ecosystem strength, and data security. The pattern holds across nearly every category IDC tracks, including the ones that don’t always make a highlight reel, like data management and renewal experience.

Across the entire PSA market, buyers said the improvements they want most are ease of integration, ease of implementation, built-in analytics, and availability of training. Those happen to be some of the same categories where our own score pulled furthest ahead of the average.

See the Full Results

If you want the full picture, IDC's CSAT Award paper digs into how we scored and where the broader PSA market is heading. And if you'd rather see why customers keep telling us this directly, we'd love to show you!

 →  Download the full paper: IDC’s SaaS CSAT Award for Professional Services Automation

→  Schedule a Certinia demo

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