At an Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2018 event today, Oracle announced updates to the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud Suite spanning everything from artificial intelligence (AI) based applications and data analytics to new search, voice and video capabilities.
Oracle is also adding Oracle Infinity and Oracle CX Audience applications to the Oracle Marketing Cloud to bring customer data analytics and market segmentation capabilities to the cloud service.
Finally, Oracle also unfurled Oracle Loyalty, a dedicated cloud application for managing customer loyalty programs that can be integrated with the rest of the Oracle CX portfolio via REST application programming interfaces (APIs).
AI-based capabilities that have been injected into Oracle CX applications include models to increase open rates, conversions, and customer lifetime value by automatically identifying the best performing mix of omni-channel messaging for individual customers, optimizing sales forecasting by mining historical data such as win/loss behaviors to surface next best action recommendations, and pricing optimization tools. Oracle has also added virtual assistants capable of processing routine natural language search requests.
Des Cahill, vice president and head CX evangelist for Oracle, says that as organizations increasingly focus on the total customer experience versus individual applications, the internal IT team is starting to exercise greater influence. Rather than having to stitch together multiple disparate cloud applications, it’s in the vested interested of the IT organization to push every departments toward one set of integrated cloud applications.
“IT is now in the middle of pulling those experiences for the customer together,” says Cahill.
At the same time, Cahill notes that the need to apply advanced analytics and AI models to massive amounts of data is also pushing more organizations to the cloud because it’s a lot less expensive to store large amounts of data in the cloud. Armed with that data, organizations can then optimize a customer experience in real time even before the transaction is complete, says Cahill.
In fact, Cahill says that as part of digital business transformation initiatives, most organizations are now starting to move beyond relying on static customer relationship management (CRM) applications to manage customer interactions.
Naturally, it may be a while before digital business transformation initiatives fully transform the customer experience. But as Cahill notes, as a larger percentage of the overall population continues to be made up of digital natives, the less tolerance there is for disjointed business processes based on legacy on-premises applications.
