Customer Experience is your Sustainable Competitive Advantage: Your CxM Journey begins today

You Need Your Customers More Than They Need You

Every customer interaction offers the opportunity to improve the customer relationship, or invite a customer to shop their next purchase elsewhere. Customer Experience Management is a return to the focus on serving and retaining customers—while better integrating that mission with culture, processes and technology. The CX technology movement is in rapid transition and may provide the conduit between strategy and delivery. While obvious, it bears repeating that implementing technology without accompanying strategy is a recipe for a troubled implementation (at best) or an implementation failure. But with that caveat, several CRM software vendors are stepping up to deliver the missing link—that ability to make customer data actionable and deliver it at the time and location of customer interaction with the goal of meeting customer expectations and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. But sometimes it's helpful to take a step back and be reminded of the reason for business. And in the simple but powerful words of Peter F. Drucker, "the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." Everything else is secondary (at best), and designed to support mission #1.And it's this mission to acquire and retain customers that is putting new found focus on the business strategy of Customer Experience Management (CXM).

To better accommodate the multiple challenges that make business complex, CXM is evolving to make serving customers less of a standalone objective and more of a mission tightly integrated with corporate culture, business processes and supporting technology.

The Business Problem Is Accelerating

Products are becoming more quickly copied making product superiority a diminishing advantage. Technology innovation is depreciating at a faster pace. Brand recognition and value may be suddenly compromised by a single angry customer whose voice is dramatically magnified online. New and constantly expanding social channels give start-ups and small competitors messaging and marketing reach previously only available to large companies.

Further, customers are more informed, connected and demanding. Customers now have on-demand access to a supplier's customers and can quickly interpret how those customers view their supplier's support and services. This information becomes part of a new prospect's purchase criterion, determining which supplier to purchase from and even whether to pay a premium for exceptional support.

Delivering superior products and services remains paramount, but businesses must recognize that this objective will be increasingly challenged and therefore the importance of retaining existing customers will grow ever more important. Consistently meeting or exceeding customer expectations may be the last sustainable competitive advantage not easily and quickly replicated by competitors.

A Shift toward CX Technology

At a time when business is becoming considerably more complex and competitive, existing customer acquisition and retention strategies supported by current systems are too often not working.

CRM software systems have responded well to capturing customer profile data (such as company demographics and individual contacts) and transaction history. New social CRM tools are complimenting CRM systems to include unstructured and social data that reside in externally managed sources.

There remains an open challenge though in interpreting and staging the data so that it may be immediately actionable and injected at the point of customer interaction. Delivering customer intelligence and content at the exact point in time of customer engagement in order to benefit the customer experience is a difficult process that remains elusive for most businesses.

Think about the business scenarios. While the list of customer interaction points is unbounded, here are some common Point of Customer (PoC) engagement examples:

·         For the customer looking to make a purchase on an e-commerce site, does the website apply purchase history and known customer preferences to make a smart suggestion, next-best-offer, or cross-sell or up-sell promotion that is both relevant and personalized?

·         For the customer placing an order on the telephone, is the agent or order entry clerk able to answer product questions or otherwise respond within seconds with the right information to result in a transaction?

·         For the customer seeking help on a social network—perhaps even the vendors own Facebook page—does the supplier hear the request and do they retrieve, route, respond and resolve the customer's request in a reasonable timeframe?

·         For the customer who incurs a product defect, is the call center agent able to immediately validate the product purchase, determine if the product is under warranty, issue a Return Merchandize Authorization (RMA) and initiate a replacement order – in less than a few minutes and without multiple transfers?

·         For a customer support incident not immediately resolved, is the customer permitted to continue the dialogue with cross-channel support options? Not to be confused with multi-channel support. For reference, multi-channel delivers a consistent experience on each channel, where cross-channel support permits customers to begin their engagement on one channel and then use different channels to continue or conclude their issue.

·         For the mobile customer seeking sales or support access, does the supplier's online system support their mobile device form factor, permit the customer to use video from their smartphone and allow the customer to schedule a call back time?

·         Does the self-service portal dynamically deliver content that is most relevant to the customer's business and support problem, and permit the customer to instantly switch from self-service to chat or a live agent call?

·         For the customer receiving a marketing promotion from his supplier, is that offer highly targeted to his company's explicit (demographics) profile and implicit (behaviours) history with the supplier?

·         For the customer engaged in a sales cycle with a supplier, is the information given by the customer regarding his situation, buy criteria and purchase process shared among the supplier side sales team and does that sales team apply the buyer's objectives and buy cycle process to their sales side process (or do they ignore the buyer's purchase process and simply inject their traditional sales pattern)?

Each of these customer interaction points can benefit from technology. In fact, for organizations of even mild scale technology is a requirement. However, to satisfy this need most customers are turning to specialized, often best of breed technologies positioned between their customer systems of record (generally CRM software) and point of customer engagement. It's a workable scenario, but comes with the complexities of managing even more systems and further contributes to disparate data silos.

A new technology approach is now on the horizon. Forward looking CRM software vendors such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Pega are introducing or expanding CRM systems to achieve CXM objectives. Oracle is clearly leading the CX technology push with its Oracle CX software and other vendors are advancing their core applications beyond data capture and information reporting to actually deliver knowledge and content at the point of customer interaction and in a way that meets customer expectations. CXM is positioned to be the next break-out sector in the CRM industry.

What Makes Oracle CX Different?

While several CRM software vendors are praising the virtues of Customer Experience and by association suggesting that their CRM software products are delivering CX value for their customers, the reality is that most are riding a new wave with an unchanged product. Oracle's play is different. Since January 2011, the company has been developing and acquiring a suite of focused applications that collectively deliver something new to directly impact the customer experience at various touch points.

Consider the origins and results of the newly formed Oracle CX software portfolio:

·         The January 2011 acquisition of ATG now serves as Oracle's e-commerce-selling based experiences, to deliver interaction such as predictive offers.

·         The June 2011 acquisition of Fatwire Software (now WebCenter Sites) compliments e-commerce experiences but more so stands as Oracle's tool for delivering dynamic website content and marketing-based experiences.

·         The December 2011 acquisition of Endeca provides Oracle the other half of its complete commerce solution. And by bundling ATG's product catalog functionality with Endecas search capabilities, merchandisers have more tools to make products more accessible more easily.

·         The July 2011 acquisition of the InQuira contact center and knowledge management solution provides Oracle with a strong knowledge management suite, integrated with natural language processing, self-service support, online customer forums and agent-assisted CRM, to deliver content and knowledge at customer interactions through various channels.

·         The January 2012 acquisition of RightNow Technologies delivers Oracle's service based experiences. The RightNow acquisition was key in acquiring strong functionality to collaborate with customers, with tools such as the Cloud Monitor and online communities (Support Community and Innovation Community). In fact, RightNow Technologies was the first large CRM software vendor to eschew the virtues of CXM—years before competitors and their acquisition by Oracle.

·         The announcement to acquire Vitrue in May 2012 followed by the announcement to acquire Collective Intellect two weeks later, collectively delivers Oracle's social based experiences.

·         The latest Acquisition of Eloqua, The marketing campaign excellence tool is another milestone of Oracle CXM commitment.

These best of breed acquisitions, along with organic development to Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle Fusion CRM, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Knowledge Management and the Oracle Social Network have resulted in a portfolio that empowers new opportunities and is unmatched in the competitive landscape. This is clearly not a case where oracle is wrapping a new banner on an old or existing solution.

Oracle CX Product Positioning

What we hear from Anthony Lye, Senior VP Oracle CXM  he advised that customers were buying apps and putting them between their CRM software and their customer interactions—in effect using these apps to extract and deliver CRM data at the exact time and location where it can be used to influence a customer interaction.Anthony noted that companies are struggling with making CRM data actionable at the many customer experience touch points and thinking beyond CRM in order to achieve the last mile of customer interaction delivery. And rather than continue to use a collection of 3rd party products and bespoke development, Oracle aims to offer a portfolio of integrated, best of breed solutions to help customers achieve what may be the only sustainable differentiation they have left.

Oracle CX is less about being the successor to CRM and more about addressing a business opportunity using technology that supplements CRM. In fact where CRM ends and CXM starts is that intersection between company and customer—that point of engagement where suppliers actually leverage the data from their CRM system to personalize interactions, reward customers for their loyalty and advocacy, and deliver a customer experience that delights customers.The CX software tools will compliment and extend existing IT investments (in both Oracle and non-Oracle environments) with best of breed products that provide incremental automation and value. Oracle CX looks to be the banner for a collection of tools that may be acquired individually or in small suites.

·         Oracle Cloud CxM video briefing

                                                                                                        Oracle  Fusion Tap Mobility Solution

Next Steps for Oracle CX

Oracle is leading the market in this category. While the upside of leading a burgeoning market is obvious, the downside is that many other CRM and enterprise software vendors will clearly harness the CXM spotlight to create self-serving CX definitions that align perfectly to their existing CRM software suites.

Competitors who hijack the CX messaging and redefine this customer strategy (that has yet to cross the chasm) along their parochial interests will challenge Oracle and frustrate technology buyers—to the point where it is incumbent upon Oracle to clearly articulate their solution, its alignment with business strategy and its measurable value. There is a great opportunity for Oracle to lead this race with the Cloud/Hybrid based CxM solution.

Wishing everyone a great and harmonious Year Ahead, Happy New Year 2013

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