Day 3 of Oracle OpenWorld provided further food for thought around two key questions often overlooked in the rush to digital transformation of the customer experience:
How can you get a 360-degree view of the customer without addressing data quality?
How can you deliver a great customer experience when you have taken a point solution approach to CX?
The answer to both, of course, is that you cannot. Every firm needs a strategy to deal with these two elephants in the room, and Oracle has some solid answers.
Transforming the customer experience will not be successful without explicit strategies to address these questions.
Many organisations have multiple instances of CRM scattered across the enterprise. For the most part, these were often purchased for tactical departmental reasons.
The problem with this approach, and a major reason why CRM had such a high disappointment rate, was that customer data was fragmented, and as a result firms knew little about their customers.
Even if firms had a single instance of CRM, other transactional data was often fragmented across multiple ERP systems. This is frequently true where there has been recent M&A activity or country-based deployments.
This means that high-value global customers were often not recognised as important in those countries where the revenue contribution was small.
Oracle has a practical answer to this challenge: Oracle Customer Hub. This provides the means to integrate customer data from disparate systems and create that 360-degree view that has been talked about for decades.
Oracle CX Cloud
For three years or more, Oracle has acquired, developed, and finally integrated a host of CX applications to support the digital and offline, connected customer experience.
While few customers have bought the entire suite of offerings in one go, many have been reassured that by starting with one or more of the Oracle CX suite, they are buying into a pre-integrated platform for faster deployment and speed to value.
Speed matters, and integrating best of breed is a lengthy and expensive process.
Fear of lock-in concerns many organisations, but the biggest threat to a firm’s existence is losing customers by being too slow to adapt to their changing needs, behaviours, and increased expectations.
Firms must become customer-adaptive or they will fall behind and see their customer base erode rapidly.
By Jeremy Cox - Research Analyst, Ovum