Hitachi Consulting Oracle Practice - Inspiring your Next Success

Dears ,

Oracle Diamond Partner

Welcome you all to check this link above to know more about our Oracle Practice.

Regards
DC*

CRM caterpillar to Customer Experience CX butterfly

Dears,

I am glad to report some takeaways and message on Oracle Customer experience post my visit to Oracle Cloud World 2013 @ Mumbai. The main theme of the event is how Mobile, Social and Cloud are transforming today's organization, How IT projects can be delivered as OPEX (Operational expenditure) as against CAPEX (Capital Expenditure). The keynote “Parting the Clouds: Transforming how you do Business in the Age of Collaboration and Advocacy “was very informative and cleared some doubtful thoughts around Oracle Cloud Strategy. The key message from the event are as follows

For a company that supposedly doesn't “get” the cloud, Oracle has helped more than 10,000 customers move to cloud computing, and now supports 25 million cloud users around the world.

Those 10,000 organizations are turning to the cloud not to be technologically hip but rather to help themselves begin to strategically transform the ways in which they do business. And cloud computing, after years of being over hyped and under performing  has become here in 2013 an ideal platform for driving those transformations in ways that are effective, affordable, and sustainable:

• ·         Get better products to market faster
• ·         Deliver better and more-engaging service to customers
• ·         Optimize mobile-powered sales teams with right-time information and insights
• ·         Align talent all across the company with business priorities
• ·         Reduce risk for compliance and reporting

All of those imperatives are being driven by a set of global forces that are stressing and reshaping every kind of industry and every type of business. Taken together, these forces make cloud computing a powerful alternative for businesses scrambling to keep up with an information explosion, a stunningly fast move to mobile commerce and lifestyle, and the parallel rise of social as one of the most powerful shapers of corporate image and success today.

Consider these facts about those big drivers of change:

• ·         Globalization: in 2012—just last year—9 billion devices were connected to the Internet. In 2020, that number will soar to 50 billion.
• ·         The Data Explosion: 90% of the world’s data was created in just the past 2years; and by 2020, the volume of data we have will increase by 50X—not 50%, but 50X.
• ·         Mobility: 87% of the world’s population use mobile devices—that are about 6 billion people. And the volume of mobile data they’re creating is growing at a compound annual rate of 78%.
• ·         The Rise of Social Business: consumers today are clearly expecting and demanding better and more-fulfilling customer experiences as they’re more willing to share negative experiences on social nets, more willing to let a bad experience end a commercial relationship, and even more willing to pay significantly more for great experiences.
• ·         Modernize to Survive: Companies today are still running lots and lots of 20-year-old legacy apps, but those apps don’t stand a chance against the relentless rigors of today’s high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety business transactions. And on top of that they’re also supposed to be able to handle analytics?

In the face of all of those daunting challenges, more and more businesses and other types of large organizations are turning to cloud computing to let them handle the surging volumes of data and demanding workloads in a manner that also lets those customers begin spending less on low-value overhead and infrastructure and more on customer-facing growth initiatives.

Now just coming back to the blog title message on CX, I want to highlight what David Vap; group VP for Oracle Application got to say about Oracle CX initiatives.

As an industry we are experiencing a "bandwagon" phenomenon. The danger of this is that the entire point of CX could be lost, transmuted, and confused. But on the flipside, if CX reaches buzzword status and gets overused, yet this leads to more organizations taking action and really thinking about what they should do to improve the overall customer experience, then I say let it happen.

It's glaringly apparent that the rate of recent technological change (social, mobile, cloud) has forever altered the ways that we consumers use technology. This reality greatly impacts how businesses must serve their customers. The new transparency this technology gives consumers is forcing businesses to truly consider the customer experience.  I agree that the concept of CX has been around for quite awhile, but I don't think that companies were truly forced to deal with it in the same way as they must deal with it due to today's empowered consumer.  (For an interesting read on the new consumer, check out Greg Gianforte's new book Attack of the Customer)  As vendors, it's our job to innovate, anticipating market shifts and to develop solutions that help our customers address these rapid changes.

It's also important to understand that a good customer experience is dependent upon far more than technology. Any business can implement new software, but without a cultural shift and leadership commitment inside a company, it won't create better experiences. But why? Because CX requires a holistic look at how a customer interacts with a company through the entire lifecycle, examining the people, processes, and technology that support and interact with the customer. Oracle is committed to partnering with our customers to tackle this challenge. This change requires a sense of organizational urgency and focus to understand the varied unique customer interaction journeys with the company. Only after the customer journeys are defined and a strategy is set, can technology be designed to create the desired experience.

While CX isn't just about technology, enabling great customer experiences at scale does require a wide range of software solutions. At Oracle we have been busy building a comprehensive portfolio of applications to meet this challenge. In fact, RightNow, which is one of Oracle's more recent acquisitions, has been a leading proponent of software driving excellent customer experience. Oracle is well known for leadership in the CRM category, which we view as a subset of the CX portfolio. We continue to broaden our portfolio of CX applications to meet market needs across marketing, sales, commerce, and service.

Why CX and why now?

Let's set the stage to explain why CX is in such demand right now and is taking precedent. Technology and the proliferation of devices, data growth, and high-speed networks are reaching a zenith. Social has matured into the mainstream. In 2012, Pinterest had the largest year-over-year increase in audience and time spent of any social network.[i] In the U.S, people spent 27B minutes on Facebook and 3.6B minutes on Twitter.[ii] The last five years has changed long standing behaviors forever – the way we chat, share, shop, and influence. We are always on, always sharing, and always aware.

Additionally customers' rising expectations and competition have spawned greater commodization of products and experiences from rapid copycat development, as well as new markets opening up global competition with low-cost manufacturing and distribution. On top of it all, media saturation on both traditional and social channels has everyone fighting for attention in more places.

The way businesses often respond to these changes is to apply the old approaches that worked in the past, but are now seeing marginal returns. Core go-to tactics? Get into a price war. Increase marketing spend on traditional channels. Reduce operational and support costs. These approaches lack the agility, insight and differentiation needed. At Oracle, we're working with our customers to create a different approach. We're highlighting just how critical it is to build a great customer experience. Research we conducted and shared with our customers has borne this out. We found that 26% of consumers post negative comments to social sites after a bad experience. In addition, 86% of customers stop doing business with an organization after just one bad experience.[iii] These numbers cause people to sit up and take notice.

Let's start at the very beginning

So where do we begin? We believe that understanding the complete customer lifecycle is crucial to developing an effective customer experience strategy. It's important for companies to appreciate their customers' unique journey. Organizations need to start by putting themselves into their customers' shoes. Companies must uncover the truth about what customers want, expect, and what matters most to them. At Oracle, we work closely with key leaders at many companies to rethink the customer experience from the outside in. We run full day customer journey mapping workshops where we focus on their customers, and how to create winning experiences for them. We spend an entire day bringing together both business and technology people focused solely on the experiences they want their customer to achieve. That's how it has to start.

We encourage companies to think about the customer lifecycle as a connected loop that moves through the stages outlined above. We know the model isn't perfect, but it allows people across business function silos to engage.  It's important to discover how to adapt their business to enable that journey, and then later to select and implement the best technology tools to provide the ultimate customer experience.

But we've found that one of the biggest hurdles for CX is not just the technology and the potentially complex implementations across channels and customer touchpoints. As discussed, the largest roadblock is the organization itself and the need to start embedding the customer experience at a cultural level. The "house divided against itself cannot stand" (Abraham Lincoln, June 17, 1858) rings true. For example, the VP of eCommerce cannot be in competition with the VP of Retail. There must be a new organizational harmony and a strategy in place for any CX initiative to succeed.

(Credit: Oracle)

Understand. Empower. Adapt.

Oracle's approach to CX has three core tenets: Understand, Empower, and Adapt.

First companies must UNDERSTAND their customer. But how? For some businesses it's difficult to harness the knowledge needed to understand how to better serve customers. Obviously technology can help fill the void.

At Oracle, we believe that in order to understand the customer, companies must take advantage of the data available about the customer and the business, both inside and outside of the company. This absolutely includes leveraging social data. To handle the expanding number of touchpoints, the volume and variety of customer information, organizations have to begin investigating business intelligence tools and analytics to offer more-targeted experiences.

Companies need to harvest the insight available about their businesses from this collective knowledge, which exists across all interaction channels, to better understand the business and customer needs, to improve overall operational efficiencies, and to deliver better experiences. One Oracle customer, a US-based consumer goods manufacturer, uses Oracle solutions to track conversations about its products on social channels and to listen and collect valuable feedback across the web. This helps the company maximize every opportunity to provide an exceptional customer experience. In addition, the technology enables the manufacturer to prioritize incidents and adjust accordingly, to provide customer service where it is needed most.

Secondly, organizations must EMPOWER customers and employees with consistent, accurate information that ultimately cultivates loyal relationships. We recommend managing this challenge by making self-service experiences easy and rewarding. Another Oracle customer, a large global travel company, is a great example of a company doing just this. We all know how unpredictable, and sometimes frustrating, travel can be. To ensure a seamless customer experience, this company provides customers with up-to-the-minute information, and Oracle's contact center solution provides the means, enabling superior multi-channel support regardless of how customers communicate with the company--via phone, email, or web. The solution dynamically changes based on the actions taken by the agent and on information known about the customer and product. The workspace delivers instant access to relevant content, at the right time and place. Agents are confident that they are always providing the most accurate information to the customer, which increases agent productivity and helps drive customer satisfaction.

And of course, empowering frontline employees with real-time, valuable insight anytime, anywhere enables them to more effectively engage, recognize, and reward customers in the context of interactions.

Thirdly, companies must continuously ADAPT to this ever changing market. We believe that the cloud can help, but how? By helping organizations adapt to fluctuations in demand with built in capabilities such as elastic scalability, robust redundancy, and extensible integrations. These provide more time to innovate for the needs of the business.

For one company, a US based tax preparation firm, the flexibility that a cloud-based customer experience solution provides, enables them to scale up operations during the critical and extremely busy tax season. As one might expect, getting workers up to speed quickly can be tricky, but is essential. This is especially true when a large portion of the support team is seasonal. Regardless, this information flow must happen seamlessly, so that the customer experience doesn't suffer. With the ability to scale its operations appropriately, this firm was able to increase productivity while simultaneously providing a best-in-class experience for its customers.

Certainly with increasing demand and more channel choices, businesses are now required to streamline cross-channel interactions and easily transition between transactions, conversations, knowledge, and people. A tall order indeed. Not to mention that increasing choices means increased competition and customer expectations. This requires that companies deliver highly personalized experiences based on deep customer insight, including the customer's own preferences and style. And to also continuously optimize and adapt these experiences in real-time based on insight gained from their intent, context, and behaviors.

Challenge Met

As discussed, customer experience is more than just CRM, but does encompass CRM. A good customer experience strategy creates the consistent, connected, personalized experiences that customers want, by transforming existing operational systems and infrastructure into a differentiated experience across the customer lifecycle.

It's important to recognize that a comprehensive CX strategy needs to support a broad set of technology:

• Marketing. To manage the entire marketing cycle from planning and budgeting to execution and analysis; create personalized and contextually relevant experiences across Web, mobile, and social channels; and manage and integrate multichannel loyalty programs
• Commerce. To providepersonalized customer engagement across touchpoints, connecting buyers with relevant products and services, providing consistent buying experiences
• Sales. Tocreate and optimize sales plans, territories, incentives, and quotas; centralize customer information; notify sales users of any activity impacting their customers and deals; allow sales users to collaborate online; integrate key competitor and reference information; and manage lead scoring and distribution
• Service and support. To unify service interactions across touch points and channels; get an accurate, current record of customers; reduce the time it takes to resolve customer issues; personalize responses to customer inquiries; and enable service both in the call center and in the field
• Social. To listen and engage with customers across social media platforms; monitor, understand, and respond to consumers' social conversations; create, publish, moderate, and measure social marketing campaigns and engagement; integrate social interactions with customer service; and collaborate and build engaging applications and enriched social experiences across Facebook, social sites, and mobile phones and tablets
• Data Management. To leverage customer data to deliver great customer experiences; create a single source of customer information; scale relevant content, search results, and merchandising across customer paths; and use rules and predictive analytics to make better decisions faster.

(Credit: Oracle)

Truth be told, Oracle is the only customer experience vendor that can claim it has every capability mentioned above available within a comprehensive customer experience portfolio offering. We believe that these tools address the customer experience challenge that companies live every day, by actually providing solutions to meet the imperative. More than just lip service, but actual working solutions. More than just branding or messaging, but real technology capabilities in use today.

Oracle is meeting the customer experience challenge every day, by giving our customers the knowledge, resources, and tools to identify their unique customer experience challenges and by helping to develop strategies to address those pain points. The real challenge for us is, and will remain, in helping our customers to achieve success with theirs.

Enhancing your Siebel CRM Self-Study Environment to 8.1.1.10

Dears,

Many of my dear readers have followed this popular article in order to install a Siebel 8.1.x self-study environment on their laptops or workstations. A self-study environment consists of the following:

• Siebel Developer (or 'Mobile') Web Client
• Siebel Tools
• Siebel Sample Database

It provides a lot of benefits for the ambitious Siebel professional. Having all "vanilla" applications along with plenty of sample data (iHelp, anyone?) at your fingertips makes learning, evaluating and prototyping so much easier.

Now the winds of change are in full force with Siebel 8.1.1.10 just having been released last week.

Today I would like to point out the major steps to "upgrade" your self-study environment to the latest release.

These are the steps:

1. Download and extract the installation archives
2. Create the installation image
3. Install the patch
4. Copy the new sample database and SRF files (optional)
5. Test

1. Download and extract the installation archives

Log on to Oracle's Software Delivery Cloud (aka E-Delivery) and accept the export restrictions. In the Search form, choose Siebel CRM as the Product Pack and Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) as the Platform. Then hit the Go button.

In the result list, locate the entry named "Siebel Business Applications (with Translations) Media Pack 8.1.1.10/8.1.1 for Microsoft Windows" and click on it.

Scroll down to the second list (below the language pack list) and download the following files:

• Siebel Industry Applications Version 8.1.1.10 Maintenance Release Guide
• Siebel Industry Applications Version 8.1.1.10 Siebel Client
• Siebel Industry Applications Version 8.1.1.10 Siebel Tools 
• Siebel Business Applications Version 8.1.1.10 Sample Database Files 
• Siebel Business Applications Version 8.1.1.10 Siebel Repository Files 
• Siebel Business Applications Version 8.1.1.10 ImageCreator Files 

Files to be downloaded from Oracle's Software Delivery Cloud for patching a Siebel CRM self-study environment to 8.1.1.10 are highlighted in red.

Extract the contents of the Client, Tools and ImageCreator archives into a single folder as usual. Keep the other archives for later use.

While on E-Delivery, you might want to download the Base and Thirdparty archives and any language pack you need for server installations as well but for the self-study environment you won't need them.

2. Create the installation image

If you haven't been involved in the last patches for Siebel CRM, you might be searching for the Siebel Network Image Creator executable a while. Since 8.1.1.8, we use the snic.batfile to invoke it.

Before you run the snic.bat file, ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable points to a valid Java SDK.

Proceed through the dialogues as usual, choosing the following options:

• Create a new image
• Create only a patch image
• Location: Choose a target directory
• Platform: Windows
• Products: Siebel Web Client and Siebel Tools
• Languages: ENU and any other you might need

When the wizard completes, you will find the Siebel installation image files in the target directory.

3. Install the patch

Befaure launching the patch installer, ensure that you have exited all instances of Siebel Developer/Mobile Web Client and Siebel Tools. Just to be on the safe side, close all instances of Internet Explorer too.

To install the patches, navigate to the installation image folder for the respective product and open the Disk1/install subdirectory. Launch the setup.bat file.

This will bring up Oracle Universal Installer. The only thing you need to watch out for is to select the proper Oracle Home and Oracle Location. If you have only one instance of Siebel 8.1.x client and tools on your machine, it'll be probably alright with the defaults.

The installer will back up the existing installation and then applies the patch. Wait for the installer to display a completion message.

4. Copy the new sample database and SRF files (optional)

A big difference to earlier maintenance releases is that the good people at Oracle have decided to create a new sample database which supports all enhancements of 8.1.1.10 (that is the repository contains all 'ACRs' since 8.1.1.1 and the database schema changes are applied).

In addition, you can also download a set of SRF files which match the content of the new vanilla repository with all cumulative enhancements.

So the good news is we can simply extract the Repository Files and Sample Database Files archives to a location of our choice and copy the SRF files (there's one for each language pack) to the respective /OBJECTS folder (don't forget to copy it to the Siebel Tools folder as well) and copy the new sse_samp.dbf file to the SAMPLE\UTF8 folder of the client installation directory.

In case you have done some prototyping in your "old" sample database, you might want to rename your previous versions of SRF and DBF files so you can still access them using a copy of your existing .cfg files.

As you might be aware, the new Incremental Repository Merge feature provides for a secure way to apply the innovation pack features into an existing customized repository but is for server databases only.

I tend to archive my prototypes as .sif files on a regular basis and so I can inject them into the new vanilla repository if need be.

5. Test

Launch your Siebel shortcuts to ensure that everything is in place. If you want to evaluateOpen UI or the new mobile applications you might need to set the parameterEnableOpenUI to TRUE in the .cfg file and use the /b switch in your shortcuts to open the Siebel Web Client in a browser of your choice.

Siebel 8.1.1.10 sample database on Open UI in full glory, complete with reports panel.

Reference :

 http://siebel-essentials.blogspot.in/2013/03/upgrading-your-siebel-crm-self-study.html?spref=bl

Best Regards 

DC*

Deciphering Oracle Fusion Applications Architecture

Dears,

Before we start this fusion series ,My many thanks to Alex for enlightening us with his simple but powerful thoughts around Fusion Apps.I have taken the privilege to share this in my blog post.

The unique and highly anticipated product offering that Oracle has in its portfolio - namely Oracle Fusion Applications - is a complete enterprise application suite ranging from CRM over Financials, SCM and HCM, just to name a few of the modules available.

We all know the story. Fusion Applications is both old and new, having been in the making for almost 8 years and having been released not much more than a year ago as version 1. It kind of reminds me of Aesop's fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" which teaches us that slow and steady wins the race.

Many a myth ranks around the still young software which will (a truly personal opinion of mine) slowly but steady make its way into enterprises around the world over the next decade (and evolve further with that, of course). One of these myths is that the architecture of Fusion Applications is complicated or even frightening.

I'll try to bust that myth today with a diagram I derived from insight gained in a class I'll  finish today as a student.

click to enlarge

This is not the simplest diagram I could have concocted but it's a bit less frightening than this whopper. 

Source: Oracle Enterprise Repository

So let me quickly explain the pieces of the first diagram:

Oracle Identity Management

On the left of the diagram you find all the nice acronyms for the modules that make up Oracle Identity Management (OIM). Being the central instance for user authentication and authorization within the Fusion Applications architecture, it consists of:

• Oracle Internet Directory (OID)
• Oracle Virtual Directory (OVD) (optional)
• Oracle Access Manager (OAM)

OID can connect to a variety of authentication directories, which of course translates to "LDAP" or "Active Directory (AD)" most of the times.

All components of OIM are implemented as applications deployed in two separate WebLogic domains and have their own database (schema) for storing data.

Oracle HTTP Server and WebGate

Connections are routed through the web tier which is comprised of Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) with the WebGate extension.

Fusion Application Server

As you can see from the diagrams above, the Fusion Application Server is quite a beast, a true workhorse having to carry the load - albeit balanced across physical machines - of dozens and dozens of applications which are packed into WebLogic domains.

When you open the hood using Enterprise Manager, you can get a glimpse of what goes on:

The above screenshot shows the content of the Common Domain which contains the common modules such as Help, Functional Setup Manager etc. Quite impressive, isn't it?

Conclusion

As many of us will only have contact with Fusion Applications as a cloud offering, many pieces of this architecture will lay beyond reach behind firewalls. Because of the sheer amount of hardware needed to instil  (pun intended) and run a Fusion Applications environment, it is quite challenging to setup a self-study or evaluation system and stick your nose into it like we are used to from Siebel or other "ancient" systems.

I hope this post helps a bit to lift the veils which shade the truth about the Oracle Fusion Applications architecture. When you look at it from the stratosphere it doesn't look so frightening at all, ain't it? ;-)

Thank P&C

DC*

Latest Innovations for Oracle’s Siebel CRM - Interesting Post

 Oracle's Aaron Shidler on Latest Innovations for Oracle’s Siebel CRM

Oracle’s Siebel CRM continues to deliver innovative new solutions to customers—including six major releases and a newly published product roadmap highlighting planned annual innovation packs through 2015.

We asked Oracle's Aaron Shidler, vice president of CRM product strategy and management, to provide insight into Oracle's ongoing commitment to Oracle's Siebel CRM solutions—including the latest round of product innovations.

Q. Please give us a big-picture look into Oracle's commitment to its Siebel solutions.
A. The track record speaks for itself. Since the acquisition, Oracle's Siebel team has delivered six major releases, containing 39 new products and more than 525 enhancements across 21 industry-specific solutions. Such a commitment makes sense when you have thousands of customers and millions of users—including many very large companies relying on Oracle’s Siebel products for their CRM needs.

Q. What does Oracle's Siebel team have planned for 2013 and beyond? 
A. We've made a clear commitment to Oracle's Siebel customers via our product roadmap and statement of direction to deliver new and innovative solutions on a regular basis. We are currently planning to introduce these solutions in our annual innovation packs and fix packs. And we expect these innovations to be shaped by our regular customer advisory board meetings, where customers are partnering with Oracle to deliver mobile, social, and customer experience solutions that are easy for their customers, partners, and employees to use.

Q. Everyone is talking about customer experience (CX) these days. How is Oracle's Siebel team addressing the CX imperative?
A. Oracle's Siebel is innovating in several areas to drive excellent customer experiences: usability, cross-channel enablement, and mobile.

The main driver for creating a great customer experience is usability—enabling simplicity and productivity for all types of users. To support this in a modern way, we needed to deliver a solution that could be accessed by any browser, via any device, and that leveraged the latest, greatest UI controls. With our latest release, Siebel delivers on all this with a user interface that is

• Contemporary. Siebel runs in all browsers and all browser-capable devices using the latest Web technology standards, such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML 5, while providing a native application user experience.
• Productive. Siebel is designed for a user experience that reduces clutter and user keystrokes.
• User-sensitive. The user experience enables Siebel to adapt to the needs of users—their preferences, their devices, and their desire to complete processes efficiently and effectively.

In terms of cross-channel enablement, Siebel supports a complete set of buy-and-own processes that span multiple channels and leverage multiple Oracle assets. Siebel has lowered the total cost of ownership for customers by providing more than a dozen integrations, including

• Oracle Commerce Solution (formerly ATG) for cross-channel Web commerce
• Oracle Knowledge Management (formerly InQuira) for integrated contextual knowledge used for contact center and self-service capabilities
• Oracle’s Social Relationship Marketing tools for social campaigns and lead generation

Finally, Siebel’s open UI delivers support for mobile platforms across a full range of browsers and devices, including support for device integration, location services, and phone, URL, and contact integration. The same solution customers enjoy in a variety of channels today can be delivered on mobile devices by leveraging out-of-the-box templates or creating your own look and feel. We plan to add disconnected mobile operations in 2013.

Q. Oracle recently acquired several social relationship management (SRM) solutions, including Vitrue and Collective Intellect. How can these acquisitions benefit Oracle's Siebel customers? 
A. We have several plans to leverage our new social capabilities in 2013.

First, we are in the process of delivering an extended schema to support the collection of social attributes that augment customer profiles. This will enable customers to not only know and segment their customers by their transactions, but also create new segments of customers based on social attributes.

In addition to social listening, we are enabling the creation of service requests and leads from our social listening solutions. This will enable our customers to respond to unhappy customers using the power of Siebel Service to resolve the issue and notify the customer directly or through the origin of the complaint. Additionally, companies can listen for customer issues with their competitors’ solutions and create a lead to track to gain market share.

Finally, integration of Oracle's Siebel marketing solutions with Oracle social relationship management solutions will enable marketers to combine traditional and social channels to maximize reach, relevance, and revenue—plus deliver a rich cross-channel customer experience.

Q. Besides CX and SRM, what other strategic areas is the Oracle Siebel team focused on?
A. The Oracle Siebel team is also delivering value for customers in industry innovations and improved total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, key innovations in our December 2012 release include the following.

Industry Innovations

• Next-generation connected mobile solutions for consumer goods and life sciences will enable key industry processes such as retail merchandising and rep sample drops with a fresh and intuitive user interface that leverages the capabilities of modern mobility to simplify and enhance the day of the sales representative.
• For the public sector, we continue to enhance support for complex citizen self-service. We are streamlining the user experience and accessibility for employees, as well as updating eligibility determination for multiple benefit plans and the latest version of Oracle Policy Automation.
• Order-to-bill customer and product integration for utilities companies will enable a productized and supported software integration approach, facilitating a robust integration between Siebel CRM and Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing.

TCO Innovations

• Standardization on high-performance Oracle technology for Web services deployment, business analytics reports, and secure enterprise search, including Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata servers.
• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality enables organizations to measure, improve, and manage the quality of data from any domain, including customer data. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality is now integrated with Siebel CRM and Oracle Customer Hub to provide reliable customer data within CRM or across the enterprise. New abilities include matching customer information based on any attribute or child entity, address validation, and standardization, along with better performance.
• Optimized marketing campaign performance created by generating and assigning source code—wave IDs—in dynamic batches greatly reduces time to launch for large multiwave outbound campaigns, and helps organizations improve marketing effectiveness.

Find out more about Oracle's Siebel CRM.

This content is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

Moments of Truth in Personal Life

Love is a Decision and Not just a momentary Feeling

During a seminar, a woman asked Life Coach ," How do I know if I am with the right person?"

The author then noticed that there was a large man sitting next to her so he said, "It depends. Is that your partner?" In all seriousness, she answered "How do you know?" Let me answer this question because the chances are good that it's weighing on your mind replied the author.

Here's the answer.

Every relationship has a cycle… In the beginning; you fall in love with your partner. You anticipate their calls, want their touch, and like their idiosyncrasies. Falling in love wasn't hard. In fact, it was a completely natural and spontaneous experience. You didn't have to DO anything. That's why it's called "falling" in love.

People in love sometimes say, "I was swept of my feet."Picture the expression. It implies that you were just standing there; doing nothing, and then something happened TO YOU.

Falling in love is a passive and spontaneous experience. But after a few months or years of being together, the euphoria of love fades. It's a natural cycle of EVERY relationship.

Slowly but surely, phone calls become a bother (if they come at all), touch is not always welcome (when it happens), and your spouse's idiosyncrasies, instead of being cute, drive you nuts. The symptoms of this stage vary with every relationship; you will notice a dramatic difference between the initial stage when you were in love and a much duller or even angry subsequent stage.

At this point, you and/or your partner might start asking, "Am I with the right person?" And as you reflect on the euphoria of the love you once had, you may begin to desire that experience with someone else. This is when relationships breakdown.

The key to succeeding in a relationship is not finding the right person; it's learning to love the person you found.

People blame their partners for their unhappiness and look outside for fulfillment. Extramarital fulfillment comes in all shapes and sizes.

Infidelity is the most common. But sometimes people turn to work, a hobby, friendship, excessive TV, or abusive substances. But the answer to this dilemma does NOT lie outside your relationship. It lies within it.

I'm not saying that you couldn't fall in love with someone else. You could. And TEMPORARILY you'd feel better. But you'd be in the same situation a few years later.

Because (listen carefully to this):

The key to succeeding in a Relationship is not finding the right person; it's learning to love the Person you found.

SUSTAINING love is not a passive or spontaneous experience. You have to work on it day in and day out. It takes time, effort, and energy. And most importantly, it demands WISDOM. You have to know WHAT TO DO to make it work. Make no mistake about it.

Love is NOT a mystery. There are specific things you can do (with or without your partner), Just as there are physical laws Of the universe (such as gravity), there are also laws for relationships. If you know how to apply these laws, the results are predictable.

Love is therefore a "decision". Not just a feeling.
*************************************

Remember this always: God determines who walks into your life. It is up to you to decide who you let walk away, who you let stay, and who you refuse to let GO..

With Love DC*

About Customer Experiences and the Notion of the Remembering self….

Re-Blogging this from one of my Friend's site with her Permission.All Credits to http://anokhajewellery.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/about-customer-experiences-and-the-notion-of-the-remembering-self/

A friend came back from a 3-week vacation on the Maldives. Lucky guy!

“How was your vacation?”, I asked.

“Great”, he said.” The place is just marvelous and the diving experience was phenomenal. However, the flight on the way back was horrendous, which ruined the whole vacation.”

“Really?” I raised brows. “How could possibly an 9-hour flight ruin 3 weeks of great vacation? You had this vacation, you experienced every moment of it….”

“You made the choice that the 9-hour flight is all you will remember about this vacation?”, I continued.” So, you chose a selected piece of memory to drive how you feel about this experience now.”

There is nothing wrong with what my friend said. This is where we seriously need to understand the differences between the Experiencing self and the Remembering self, as Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics, brilliantly highlights in his enlightening (at least for me) TEDtalk:

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html

The Remembering self and the Experiencing self

The reason we need to differentiate between the notion of the Experiencing self and the Remembering self  is because the Experiencing self has the present, which is a chain of moments. As Daniel Kahneman mentions, the psychological presence is set to 3 seconds long…most of the experiences we make leave no trace and are completely ignored by the Remembering self.

For the Remembering self the chains of moments are lost forever, but what stays are the memories. And memories are defined by:

- changes

- significant moments

- endings. As Daniel Kahneman mentions “…endings are very, very important.”

Why does this matter in the context of Customer Experience for businesses? Because  the Remembering self is the story-teller and the decision maker. Our memory tells us what to keep from our experiences to create a story.  This means, if you  have a business and you address your customers via multiple channels, you’d better make sure you consistently deliver positive cross-channel experience.  You need to address the Remembering self in your customers, because this is the story your customers will tell about you, the story they will publish on Facebook, will tell their friends, will tweet about. And this matters because this will either create business value for your company or negatively impact it.

The Customer Experience

The customer experience is the combination of all interactions a customer has with your company and/or your brand, all these step by step interactions from searching a products, visiting a web-site, calling an agent, checking with friends and family if someone can recommend your product or service, visiting your branch, etc.

Check out an example for getting an insurance policy.

A customer might have had a very positive interaction on your website, visiting your branch, but imagine at the last point of that interaction, checking out in an online-shop, there is an error, the customer might report that “the whole experience has been ruined”. You might argue “Wait a second, the customer has had a lot of positive experiences, only the last interaction was a bumpy one, but, hey, not a big deal…..” Oh, YES, it is a BIG DEAL, it is what the customer’s Remembering self decided to keep from the chain of interactions. Remember, endings  matter!

That’s why you need to keep in mind that consistent positive cross-channel customer experience is the only sustainable advantage you might have. In fact, this is the only key differentiator left for companies  in today’s economy. One single bad experience might ruin your reputation, affect your net promoter score and keep a customer away from you or prevent a customer from recommending your product/service- all effects detrimental to your business…

Take away thoughts

1. Experiences happen anytime, anywhere, every day, all day- some are human, some involve interaction with technology, but they all add up!

2. Pamper the Remembering self of your customers with positive interactions, surprise them, wow them, show empathy to your customers! Last week I received an e-mail fromAirbnb with proposed Christmas greetings cards for me to send to my hosts during 2012, ready-to-go, all I had to do is select the design of the greeting card and hit the send button. Was I surprised? Hell yes! Was I positively surprised? Hell yes!!! Did I remember this? Yes, I did? Did I tell this to my friends? Sure, i did…it is a minor thing, but it matters.

3. Be there when your customers don’t expect you, because changes and significant moments of the customer journey matter!

4. Design the story you will hear your customer tell about your brand and/or company.

5. Start today by mapping the customer journey and identifying all these points of interactions that could leave a “memory” in the Remembering self. Download today thecustomer experience design worksheet!

6. Don’t fail the Remembering self of your customers! What customers will expect from you largely depends on what they remember doing business with you, which is very different from what they have experienced doing business with you.

Thanks to Krassi  http://anokhajewellery.wordpress.com/about/

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