Oracle enhances CX applications with improved sales and commerce capabilities
The long-term impact of COVID-19 on remote working and customer lifestyles is helping to inform a series of feature enhancements in Oracle‘s Fusion Customer Experience applications, chairman Larry Ellison suggested in a virtual summit the company hosted on Monday.
Eight months after cancelling the in-person Modern Business Experience conference it had planned to host in Chicago, Oracle welcomed speakers from customers such as Ricoh and Motorola alongside those leading its CX product and service strategies.
In the opening keynote session, Ellison said the pandemic has created a greater sense of urgency for organizations to go beyond paying lip service to customer centricity, particularly as many firms have to help their teams to work effectively from home.
“We are never going back…we will go back to the office, but we won’t sell or engage the way we used to ever again. The way we communicate, we need to connect where ever THEY are…securely, quickly.”
Some of the Oracle’s Fusion Customer Experience application updates play directly into this thinking. The company introduced predictive lead scoring using artificial intelligence, for instance, as well as probability scores on how likely a purchaser will close a deal.
Oracle also said it had integrated Oracle CPQ and CX Sales so is Fusion CX customers can start, search and finish quotes and proposals in one interface, which was updated. Oracle users will also be able to do sales forecasting using Oracle’s ERP actuals and CRM data.
“We will be less and less urban…more and more distributed. The good news is people will have better tools to work how they want to work. They will improve their quality of life while improving efficiency for companies,” Ellison said.
Oracle’s traditional rivals include SAP, which has prioritized its own concept of CX, which it calls “experience management,” following its acquisition of Qualtrics in 2018. Other competition includes Salesforce, which offers its own Customer 360 platform (Disclosure: I provide content marketing services to Salesforce in Canada).
Other Oracle integrations include a wearing together of its CX Commerce and Unity customer data platform (CDP). This will allow for the use of data types ranging from demographics from a marketing automation platform and data gathered through the Internet of Things (IoT), the company said.
“We have a deep understanding of what industries are working on and we collaborate between Oracle and our clients who help us design products and fully understand the needs,” Ellison said, “We have voice interfaces, camera interfaces…we are the only suite on top of true cloud infrastructure . . . the majority of Zoom meetings happen in Oracle Cloud. “We do more Zoom meetings than anyone else.”
