The News: To help organizations create dynamic and memorable experiences for their customers, Oracle today announced the latest updates to Oracle Cloud Customer Experience (CX). The latest updates to Oracle Sales, Oracle Service, and Oracle Marketing help organizations accelerate sales cycles, resolve customer service inquiries faster, and develop engaging loyalty programs that can grow customer lifetime value. Read the full news release form Oracle CX.
Analyst Take: Today’s announcement continues to stratify the company’s CX offerings with several updates that strengthen its B2B portfolio as well as improvements to its Loyalty and Marketing Capabilities to increase customer engagement, retention, and lifetime value.
B2B Selling Capabilities
The first set of updates focused on B2B Selling Capabilities. These updates included some essential improvements that caught my attention, including updates to Voice Capabilities, a Streamlined Quoting tool, and enhancements to its Next Best Action capabilities.
The incorporation of voice capabilities is valuable for accommodating the more “on the go” employee as well as helping to expedite data uploaded to systems of record. With so many sales pros remiss to log data, a sophisticated voice to text solution makes a lot of sense.
B2B Service Capabilities
I’m also encouraged by what I see with the next best action improvements. Sellers can leverage data and intelligence to figure out where to put focus. These enhancements can be in the prospecting stage or the late selling stages. Both very important for any business trying to implement and execute a sales strategy.
The next set of updates also leaned into B2B but this time focusing on Service Capabilities. These updates include changes to automate digital service and improvements to the interface to streamline usability.
In particular, I like the improvements made to the digital service automation layer. We hear a lot about the power of bots and AI, but customers’ ability to have reliable interaction with a chatbot is complex. Oracle focuses on the simplicity of deployment, but the enhancements also focus on the quality of the interaction.
Loyalty and Marketing Capabilities
The final updates were loyalty and marketing-centric, based upon updates to the company’s CrowdTwist and Oracle Unity (CDP) platform. Loyalty is complicated, and so is 360 customer management. As CDPs continue to gain momentum, the real value is in identifying the right opportunity at the right moment. Then, this must be scaled down to the individual customer level.
I was drawn to the CDP Loyalty Data Flows announcement that added bi-directional data flow between Oracle CrowdTwist and Oracle Unity. Unity is the CDP, but the success of the CDP has a lot to do with the data that feeds it. The more data you have, the more you can enrich the data, segment audiences, and personalize interactions at a granular level.
I also noted the improvements in the Zoom Integration. As virtual events persist, we need tools to deepen engagement and improve virtual events.
Overall Impressions of Oracle’s CX Announcements
Oracle continues to be dynamic and is increasing the regular cadence of innovation within its CX portfolio. This uptick in improvements should be seen as an indicator of increased adoption and is most certainly tied to the growing demand for digital solutions to handle our new normal following the pandemic.
The good news is the updates to the platform have been done in a thoughtful way that should stand the transition back to hybrid and in-person work and life models that will be required as the pandemic finally subsides.
While there are increasing competition levels in the CX space, especially as CDP gains momentum and digital commerce continue to be a robust vehicle to gain timely customer insights. Oracle is well-positioned in this space. From infrastructure to applications, I expect the broad Oracle story to continue to be more refined, leading the company to a greater position to drive revenue and bottom-line growth from its CX endeavors.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
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Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
