ENGLISH

Oracle talks customer experience at Modern CX 2019

182

Merging technology, data, and the customer experience
Preston So, director of research and innovation at Acquia, talks with Tonya Hall about the process of merging technology, data, and the customer experience and the benefits that come with that information.

We go through this process whether buying toothpaste at the grocery store, sunglasses online at Amazon, or issuing a million-dollar services contract to implement a new computer system.

The end goal of customer experience is creating happy buyers who feel positive toward the product and brand, thereby driving loyalty and repeat purchases.

Also: A customer experience story: After a year of Comcast, my verdict

In the modern digital world, data helps sellers understand the buyer and what they care about at each stage of the customer journey. Therefore, data is crucial for companies to understand their customers’ behavior and thus improve their customer experience.

Data offers an indirect means for brands to gain an empathetic understanding of consumers. With the right data, brands can infer what the buyer cares about and what they want to do. In other words, data is key to unlocking our understanding of the buyer’s intent. When done right, personalization based on data feels natural and not creepy to buyers.

This explanation is short and over-simplified but gives you a sense of why customer experience is complex and hard to solve.

Oracle’s customer experience strategy

Given this foundation on the basics of customer experience, Oracle’s strategy for customer experience rests on three pillars:

Aggregate and manage

Build accurate and highly detailed

Use their software platform

Oracle summarizes this broad strategy in the following diagram, showing that real-time personalized customer experience requires data, content used to personalize messages, AI to predict which content is most appropriate for every consumer at each point in their buying journey, and specialized software applications to deliver personalized content such as “next best offers” and product recommendations.

1-oracle-cx-cloud.jpg

The following graphic shows the building blocks needed for what Oracle calls the “Experience Economy”:

1a-oracle-experience-economy.jpg

Oracle brings these pieces together in their CX Unity data platform. The next two slides present the elements of this platform and a high-level view of how data flows through it:

2-oracle-cx-unity.jpg

3-oracle-cx-unity-data-flow.jpg

As you can see, the CX Unity platform brings together data from multiple sources, operates on that data to make it useful, and then provides the results to other applications in the Oracle suite.

Also: Customer experience: Lessons from the real world

Given the importance and depth of data when creating personalized interactions that support customer experience, it’s worthwhile taking an additional look at Oracle’s DataFox product. This slide sheds more light on the kinds of data Oracle aggregates and how it operates on that data:

4-oracle-datafox.jpg

Eventually, all this data lets seller create personalized experiences for each buyer as they move through the buying lifecycle:

5-oracle-hyper-personalization.jpg

Final thoughts

It should be obvious that achieving the right customer experience involves many parts. I asked Steve Miranda, Oracle’s executive vice president of Application Development to comment on this: “It’s amazing the number of pieces and data to deliver activities that customers just think are simple. There is so much complexity behind the scenes.”

Also: CIO case study: Customer experience and digital transformation

A similar theme emerged during a meeting with Oracle’s executive vice president for CX Cloud, Rob Tarkoff, and the company’s chief marketing officer for CX, Des Cahill. They described integration across departmental silos as a key challenge that customers face when implementing a program of customer experience.

During a presentation, Manoj Goyal, group vice president for CX Unity, summarized the challenge of customer experience: “The customer sees a conversation. However, the brand sees a series of discrete micro-engagements.” He explained that data is the link between isolated customer interactions and building a system with sufficient context to suggest the next best action to customers.

Also: Oracle introduces new enterprise digital assistant

These points are consistent with themes that have emerged during my many CxOTalk discussions with the world’s top innovators and operating executives.

Redefining how we interact with customers requires organizational transformation and that means culture change. As with most aspects of business, customer experience is a people thing.

Disclosure: Oracle paid most of my travel expenses and is a CxOTalk partner.

Cloud

Cloud computing: Why Microsoft’s open source data plan is a big step forward

Why security is the top barrier in enterprise cloud adoption

Streamlio, an open-core streaming data fabric for the cloud era

Trapped in the cloud: When providers increase their prices

Best live TV streaming services for cord-cutters (CNET)

10 Frequently Asked Questions about multi cloud (TechRepublic)