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  • Oracle Customer Hub - Directions, Roadmap and Customer Success

    - by Mala Narasimharajan
     By Gurinder Bahl With less than a week from OOW 2012, I would like to introduce you all to the core Oracle Customer MDM Strategy sessions. Fragmentation of customer data across disparate systems prohibits companies from achieving a complete and accurate view of their customers. Oracle Customer Hub provide a comprehensive set of services, utilities and applications to create and maintain a trusted master customer system of record across the enterprise. Customer Hub centralizes customer data from disparate systems across your enterprise into a master repository. Existing systems are integrated in real-time or via batch with the Hub, allowing you to leverage legacy platform investments while capitalizing on the benefits of a single customer identity. Don’t miss out on two sessions geared towards Oracle Customer Hub:   1) Attend session CON9747 - Turn Customer Data into an Enterprise Asset with Oracle Fusion Customer Hub Applications at Oracle Open World 2012 on Monday, Oct 1st, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM @ Moscone West – 2008. Manouj Tahiliani, Sr. Director MDM Product Management will provide insight into the vision of Oracle Fusion Customer Hub solutions, and review the roadmap. You will discover how Fusion Customer MDM can help your enterprise improve data quality, create accurate and complete customer information,  manage governance and help create great customer experiences. You will also understand how to leverage data quality capabilities and create a sophisticated customer foundation within Oracle Fusion Applications. You will also hear Danette Patterson, Group Lead, Church Pension Group talk about how Oracle Fusion Customer Hub applications provide a modern, next-generation, multi-domain foundation for managing customer information in a private cloud. 2)  Don't miss session  CON9692 - Customer MDM is key to Strategic Business Success and Customer Experience Management at Oracle Open World 2012 on Wednesday, October 3rd 2012 from 3:30-4:30pm @ Westin San Francisco Metropolitan 1. JP Hurtado, Director, Customer Systems, will provide insight on how RCCL overcame challenges of data quality, guest recognition & centralized customer view to provide consolidated customer view to multiple reservation, CRM, marketing, service, sales, data warehouse and loyalty systems. You will learn how Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL), which has over 30 million customer and maintain multiple brands, leveraged Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) as backbone to customer data management strategy for past 5 years. Gurinder Bahl from MDM Product Management will provide an update on Oracle Customer Hub strategy, what we have achieved since last Open World and our future plans for the Oracle Customer Hub. You will learn about Customer Hub Data Quality capabilities around data analysis, cleansing, matching, address validation as well as reporting and monitoring capabilities. The MDM track at Oracle Open World covers variety of topics related to MDM. In addition to the product management team presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several Customer Panels, and Conference sessions. You can see an overview of MDM sessions here.  Looking forward to see you at Open World, the perfect opportunity to learn about cutting edge Oracle technologies. 

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  • Customer Centricity: It's Not Easy, But Worth It

    - by tony.berk
    Defining customer centricity is relatively easy: focusing on the customer and their experiences and interactions with your company. Implementing a customer centric strategy is not so easy. We've highlighted customers who have focused on their customers and experienced great success including SJ, the Swedish rail operator, and Vopak, the world's largest provider of conditioned storage facilities for bulk liquids. In this interview with Stuart Lennie, President, Volvo IT, North America and VP, Volvo's Global Sales to Order Solutions Unit, we get the opportunity to learn from another company that is not just talking about the customer, but actually implementing the significant strategic shifts required to become customer centric. Volvo has developed a vision, a strategy and a methodology to keep existing customers by understanding what is important to them. To see other customer success stories, visit Siebel CRM Success. Click here, to learn more about Oracle's CRM products.

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  • Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

    - by raul.goycoolea
    Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

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  • A Complete Customer Experience Solution (3 of 3 in 'No Customer Left Behind' Series)

    - by Kathryn Perry
    A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development In my previous post, I talked about taking three concrete steps to improve your customers' overall experiences: 1) understand your customer, 2) empower your ecosystem, and 3) adapt your business. To do these effectively and efficiently, it's important to find the right technology that can bridge the gaps across your channels, interactions, departments, and repositories. Oracle has spent the past three years and more than six billion dollars acquiring and developing some of the world's best-of-breed applications. The result is the most comprehensive customer experience (CX) portfolio offering in the World - bar none: ATG Best in Class Selling Experiences Fatwire Best in Class Marketing Experiences Inquira Best in Class Support Experiences Endecca Best in Class Search Experiences RightNow Best in Class Service Experiences Vitrue & Involver Best in Class Social Marketing Collective Intellect Best In Class Social Listening We don't expect organizations to eat the CX elephant in one bite, nor should they try to. There are key strategic initiatives within each of the four main pillars of our customer experience offering for which we deliver solutions: 1. Customer Experience for Marketing Social Listening and Engagement Social Marketing Marketing Websites Demand Generation and Lead Management Marketing and Loyalty Management 2. Customer Experience for Commerce Search, Navigation & Content Delivery Cross-Channel Commerce Targeting & Product Recommendations Social Commerce Order Management & Fulfillment Retail Store Operations 3. Customer Experience for Sales Sales Force Automation Social Selling Territory & Quota Management Revenue Forecasting Partner Relationship Management Quote to Cash Incentive Compensation 4. Customer Experience for Service Cross-Channel Customer Service Knowledge Management Social Customer Service Eligibility Management Contracts, Assets, and Entitlements Industry-Specific Solutions eBilling Oracle's customer experience portfolio is socially infused at each layer of our pillars rather than simply bolted on as a side process. This combines with the power of the Cloud to run the parts of the solution that need the access, efficiency, and agility from a managed infrastructure. You can get the compliance control from on-premise backbone infrastructure systems that run your business and don't change that often. Please take advantage of our teams of Oracle customer experience professionals and our key agency and technology partner ecosystem. They can help you develop strategic solution roadmaps that build and deliver customer experience and that are tailored to your business needs and objectives. No one has built a better customer service portfolio to manage the entire customer journey than Oracle. It is backed by CX thought leadership programs, a commitment from our executives, and a worldview that your technology decisions must be driven by your customer experiences to succeed. If you’d like to follow up on this conversation, please leave a comment or contact me at [email protected]. You can get more information on Oracle’s complete customer experience solution here.

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  • Itautec Accelerates Profitable High Tech Customer Service

    - by charles.knapp
    Itautec is a Brazilian-based global high technology products and services firm with strong performance in the global market of banking and commercial automation, with more than 2,300 global clients. It recently deployed Siebel CRM for sales, customer support, and field service. In the first year of use, Siebel CRM enabled a 30% growth in services revenue. Siebel CRM also reduced support costs. "Oracle's Siebel CRM has minimized costs and made our customer service more agile," said Adriano Rodrigues da Silva, IT Manager. "Before deployment, 95% of our customer service contacts were made by phone. Siebel CRM made it possible to expand' choices, so that now 55% of our customers contact our helpdesk through the newer communications channels." Read more here about Itautec's success, and learn more here about how Siebel CRM can help your firm to grow customer service revenues, improve service levels, and reduce costs.

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  • Simple tips to design a Customer Journey Map

    - by Isabel F. Peñuelas
    “A model can abstract to a level that is comprehensible to humans, without getting lost in details.” -The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Inception using Post-it, StoryBoards, Lego or Mindmaping Techniques The first step in a Customer Experience project is to describe customer interactions creating a customer journey map. Modeling is never easy, so to succeed on this effort, it is very convenient that your CX´s team have some “abstract thinking” skills. Besides is very helpful to consult a Business Service Design offered by an Interactive Agency to lead your inception process. Initially, you may start by a free discussion using post-it cards; storyboards; even lego or any other brainstorming technique you like. This will help you to get your mind into the path followed by the customer to purchase your product or to consume any business service you actually offer to your customers, or plan to offer in the near future. (from www.servicedesigntools.org) Colorful Mind Maps are very useful to document and share meeting ideas. Some Mind Maps software providers as ThinkBuzzan provide trial versions, and you will find more mindmapping options on this post by Mashable. Finally to produce a quick one, I do recommend Wise, an entirely online mindmaping service. On my view the best results in terms of communication will always come for an artistic hand-made drawing. Customer Experience Mind Map Example Making your first Customer Journey Map To add some more formalization to your thoughts, there is a wide offering for designing Customer Journey Maps. A Customer Map can be represented as an oriented graph in which another follows each step. The one below is the most simple Customer Journey you can draw. Nothing more than a couple of pictures, numbers and lines to design the customer steps sequence in the purchase process. Very simple Customer Journey for Social Mobile Shopping There are a lot of Customer Journey templates much more sophisticated available  in the Web using a variety of styles, as per example this one with a focus on underlining emotional experience, or this other worksheet template. Representing different interaction devices on the vertical axis, and touchpoints / requirements and existing gaps horizontally  is today´s most common format for Customer Journeys. From Customer Journey Maps to CX Technology Adoption Plans Once you have your map ready, you can start to identify the IT infrastructure requirements for your CXProject. By analyzing customer problems and improvement opportunities with maps, you will then identify the technology gaps and the new investment requirements in your IT infrastructure. Deeping step by step from the more abstract to the more concrete is the best guarantee to take the right IT investment decisions.  ¡Remember to keep your initial customer journey safe on your pocket in every one of your CX´s project meetings- that´s you map to success!

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  • User-Defined Customer Events & their impact (FA Type Profile)

    - by Rajesh Sharma
    CC&B automatically creates field activities when a specific Customer Event takes place. This depends on the way you have setup your Field Activity Type Profiles, the templates within, and associated SP Condition(s) on the template. CC&B uses the service point type, its state and referenced customer event to determine which field activity type to generate.   Customer events available in the base product include: Cut for Non-payment (CNP) Disconnect Warning (DIWA) Reconnect for Payment (REPY) Reread (RERD) Stop Service (STOP) Start Service (STRT) Start/Stop (STSP)   Note the Field values/codes defined for each event.   CC&B comes with a flexibility to define new set of customer events. These can be defined in the Look Up - CUST_EVT_FLG. Values from the Look Up are used on the Field Activity Type Profile Template page.     So what's the use of having user-defined Customer Events? And how will the system detect such events in order to create field activity(s)?   Well, system can only detect such events when you reference a user-defined customer event on a Severance Event Type for an event type Create Field Activities.     This way you can create additional field activities of a specific field activity type for user-defined customer events.   One of our customers adopted this feature and created a user-defined customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment for Water Services. This event was then linked on a Field Activity Type Profile and referenced on a Severance Event - CUT FOR NON PAY-W. The associated Severance Process was configured to trigger a reconnection process if it was cancelled (done by defining a Post Cancel Algorithm). Whenever this Severance Event was executed, a specific type of Field Activity was generated for disconnection purposes. The Field Activity type was determined by the system from the Field Activity Type Profile referenced for the SP Type, SP's state and the referenced user-defined customer event. All was working well until the time when they realized that in spite of the Severance Process getting cancelled (when a payment was made); the Post Cancel Algorithm was not executed to start a Reconnection Severance Process for the purpose of generating a reconnection field activity and reconnecting the service.   Basically, the Post Cancel algorithm (if specified on a Severance Process Template) is triggered when a Severance Process gets cancelled because a credit transaction has affected/relieved a Service Agreement's debt.   So what exactly was happening? Now we come to actual question as to what is the impact in having a user-defined customer event.   System defined/base customer events are hard-coded across the entire system. There is an impact even if you remove any customer event entry from the Look Up. User-defined customer events are not recognized by the system anywhere else except in the severance process, as described above.   There are few programs which have routines to first validate the completion of disconnection field activities, which were raised as a result of customer event CNP - Cut for Non-payment in order to perform other associated actions. One such program is the Post Cancel Algorithm, referenced on a Severance Process Template, generally used to reconnect services which were disconnected from other Severance Event, specifically CNP - Cut for Non-Payment. Post cancel algorithm provided by the product - SEV POST CAN does the following (below is the algorithm's description):   This algorithm is called after a severance process has been cancelled (typically because the debt was paid and the SA is no longer eligible to be on the severance process). It checks to see if the process has a completed 'disconnect' event and, if so, starts a reconnect process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the parameter.    Notice the underlined text. This algorithm implicitly checks for Field Activities having completed status, which were generated from Severance Events as a result of CNP - Cut for Non-payment customer event.   Now if we look back to the customer's issue, we can relate that the Post Cancel algorithm was triggered, but was not able to find any 'Completed' CNP - Cut for Non-payment related field activity. And hence was not able to start a reconnection severance process. This was because a field activity was generated and completed for a customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment of Water Services instead.   To conclude, if you introduce new customer events that extend or simulate base customer events, the ones that are included in the base product, ensure that there is no other impact either direct or indirect to other business functions that the application has to offer.  

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  • Limitations of User-Defined Customer Events (FA Type Profile)

    - by Rajesh Sharma
    CC&B automatically creates field activities when a specific Customer Event takes place. This depends on the way you have setup your Field Activity Type Profiles, the templates within, and associated SP Condition(s) on the template. CC&B uses the service point type, its state and referenced customer event to determine which field activity type to generate.   Customer events available in the base product include: Cut for Non-payment (CNP) Disconnect Warning (DIWA) Reconnect for Payment (REPY) Reread (RERD) Stop Service (STOP) Start Service (STRT) Start/Stop (STSP)   Note the Field values/codes defined for each event.   CC&B comes with a flexibility to define new set of customer events. These can be defined in the Look Up - CUST_EVT_FLG. Values from the Look Up are used on the Field Activity Type Profile Template page.     So what's the use of having user-defined Customer Events? And how will the system detect such events in order to create field activity(s)?   Well, system can only detect such events when you reference a user-defined customer event on a Severance Event Type for an event type Create Field Activities.     This way you can create additional field activities of a specific field activity type for user-defined customer events.   One of our customers adopted this feature and created a user-defined customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment for Water Services. This event was then linked on a Field Activity Type Profile and referenced on a Severance Event - CUT FOR NON PAY-W. The associated Severance Process was configured to trigger a reconnection process if it was cancelled (done by defining a Post Cancel Algorithm). Whenever this Severance Event was executed, a specific type of Field Activity was generated for disconnection purposes. The Field Activity type was determined by the system from the Field Activity Type Profile referenced for the SP Type, SP's state and the referenced user-defined customer event. All was working well until the time when they realized that in spite of the Severance Process getting cancelled (when a payment was made); the Post Cancel Algorithm was not executed to start a Reconnection Severance Process for the purpose of generating a reconnection field activity and reconnecting the service.   Basically, the Post Cancel algorithm (if specified on a Severance Process Template) is triggered when a Severance Process gets cancelled because a credit transaction has affected/relieved a Service Agreement's debt.   So what exactly was happening? Now we come to actual question as to what are limitations in having user-defined customer event.   System defined/base customer events are hard-coded across the entire system. There is an impact even if you remove any customer event entry from the Look Up. User-defined customer events are not recognized by the system anywhere else except in the severance process, as described above.   There are few programs which have routines to first validate the completion of disconnection field activities, which were raised as a result of customer event CNP - Cut for Non-payment in order to perform other associated actions. One such program is the Post Cancel Algorithm, referenced on a Severance Process Template, generally used to reconnect services which were disconnected from other Severance Event, specifically CNP - Cut for Non-Payment. Post cancel algorithm provided by the product - SEV POST CAN does the following (below is the algorithm's description):   This algorithm is called after a severance process has been cancelled (typically because the debt was paid and the SA is no longer eligible to be on the severance process). It checks to see if the process has a completed 'disconnect' event and, if so, starts a reconnect process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the parameter.    Notice the underlined text. This algorithm implicitly checks for Field Activities having completed status, which were generated from Severance Events as a result of CNP - Cut for Non-payment customer event.   Now if we look back to the customer's issue, we can relate that the Post Cancel algorithm was triggered, but was not able to find any 'Completed' CNP - Cut for Non-payment related field activity. And hence was not able to start a reconnection severance process. This was because a field activity was generated and completed for a customer event CNPW - Cut for Non-payment of Water Services instead.   To conclude, if you introduce new customer events, you should be aware that you don't extend or simulate base customer events, the ones that are included in the base product, as they are further used to provide/validate additional business functions.  

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  • Customer Experience in the Year Ahead

    - by Christina McKeon
    With 2012 coming to an end soon, we find ourselves reflecting on the year behind us and the year ahead. Now is a good time for reflection on your customer experience initiatives to see how far you have come and where you need to go. Looking back on your customer experience efforts this year, were you able to accomplish the following? Customer journey mapping Align processes across the entire customer lifecyle (buying and owning) Connect all functional areas to the same customer data Deliver consistent and personal experiences across all customer touchpoints Make it easy and rewarding to be your customer Hire and develop talent that drives better customer experiences Tie key performance indicators (KPIs) to each of your customer experience objectives This is by no means a complete checklist for your customer experience strategy, but it does help you determine if you have moved in the right direction for delivering great customer experiences. If you are just getting started with customer experience planning or were not able to get to everything on your list this year, consider focusing on customer journey mapping in 2013. This exercise really helps your organization put your customer in the center and understand how everything you do affects that customer. At Oracle, we see organizations in various stages of customer experience maturity all learn a lot when they go through journey mapping. Companies just starting out with customer experience get a complete understanding of what it is like to be a customer and how everything they do affects that customer. And, organizations that are further along with customer experience often find journey mapping helps provide perspective when re-visiting their customer experience strategy. Happy holidays and best wishes for delivering great customer journeys in 2013!

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  • Watch Customer Concepts TV and Find Out How Leading Organizations Are Creating Engaging Customer Journeys

    - by Jeri Kelley
    The customer journey has changed dramatically. Customers have far more knowledge and far more power. Managing the new customer experience isn’t just about increasing profitability. For many organizations it’s about survival.  To survive, organizations must deliver relevant, personalized experiences that engage customers at each step in their journey, but where do organizations start? ??To learn more, I’m looking forward to tomorrow's Customer Concepts Web TV show.   On October 23rd, experts from Oracle and various successful businesses such as Euroffice will discuss how the customer journey has fundamentally changed and will share best practices for adapting your organization so you can truly engage customers. These Customer Concepts Web TV programs are an excellent way of keeping up with the very latest thinking in the field of customer experience.  Register for tomorrow’s event now at: http://bit.ly/RqPSL3

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  • Improved Customer Experience, but at what Cost?

    - by Tony Berk
    We can all probably agree that improving your customers' experience is a good thing. But a key question many people are asking is will it help your organization and, in particular, what are the financial benefits?That's a good question, especially when companies ARE experiencing phenomenal return on investment (ROI). Of course, there are many factors that impact ROI or other measures of success, but we'd like to share some success stories as examples of customer experience in action and delivering positive results. If you would like to learn more about the economics of customer experience, see Brian Curran's presentation at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit last month. In this series of blog posts, we'll share actual customer stories. Today's example is Dell, which uses Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) and Siebel CRM as part of their customer experience portfolio to better understand their customers' needs and wants and provide consistent interactions. Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with Siebel, but RTD may be new to many of you. RTD is a complete decision management solution that delivers real-time decisions and recommendations and automatically renders decisions within a business process to create tailored messaging for every customer interaction.What does that mean? In the video below, Dell describes how customer experience is important not just for one interaction channel, but across all "vehicles." RTD is helping Dell understand customer behavior and communicate with the customer in a more relevant manner, across all communication  or interaction channels including sales and service call centers, email marketing and online. Dell continues to expand use of RTD because the benefits are showing up in sales, service and marketing results including 19% increase in close rates, faster issue resolution and 40% improvement in revenue per click in email marketing. Click here, to learn more about Oracle Customer Experience and stay tuned for more customer spotlights.

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  • CRM Evolution 2014: Mediocrity is the New Horrible in Customer Service

    - by Tuula Fai
    "Mediocrity is the new horrible in customer service," Blair McHaney, Gold's Gym Almost everyone knows that customers' expectations have risen. But, after listening to two days of presentations at CRM Evolution, I think it’s more accurate to say that customers' expectations have skyrocketed. Fortunately, most companies have gotten the message and are taking their customer service to a higher level. For those who've been hesitant to 'boldly go where their customer service organization has not gone before,' take heart. I’ve got some statistics that will encourage you to take those first few steps. Why should I change? By engaging customers online, ancestry.com achieved a 99.5% customer satisfaction score (CSAT) while improving retention and saving millions on greater efficiency, including a 38%-50% drop in inbound calls and emails.1 By empowering employees to delight customers, Gold’s Gym achieved a 77.5% Net Promoter Score (NPS) and 22% customer churn rate. No small feat when you consider the industry averages are 40% NPS and 45% churn.2 By adapting quickly to social media, brands like Verizon have benefited from social community members spending 2.5x-10x more than average customers.3 ‘The fierce urgency of now’ is upon us in customer service. You can take your customer service to a higher level! To find out more, click here CRM Evolution Customer Service Experience Footnotes: 1. Arvindh Balakrishnan, Is Your Customer Service Modern?2. Blair McHaney, Wire Your Organization with Customer Feedback3. Becky Carroll, The Power of Communities for Improving the Service Experience and Building Advocates

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  • Customer Experience Online Forum

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Missed Oracle’s Customer Experience Online Forum?  Don’t worry. You can still catch the sessions at your convenience. Watch the Customer Experience Online Forum on demand to hear from Bruce Tempkin, a leading expert in customer experience, as well as other thought leaders and they delve into topics such as the ROI of customer experience and strategies for winning over customers.  Simply register to gain access to these sessions and more: The Customer Experience RevolutionCustomer experience has become the most important and defensible differentiator for your business. The customer experience is a journey that transcends all customer touchpoints and stages of the customer lifecycle. Discover where you are in the journey, identify how to begin optimizing the experience you deliver your customers, and join the Revolution.The ROI of Customer ExperienceBruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner, Temkin GroupResearch of US and UK customers demonstrates a high correlation between a positive customer experience and loyalty. A successful customer interaction increases the willingness to buy more and to recommend your company. US companies can gain $380 million over three years by providing an optimized customer experience. This session will help companies determine the business impact that customer experience has on their specific business. Integrating Marketing and Loyalty to Deliver Great Customer ExperiencesNew devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. Learn how leading brands are using Oracle's marketing solutions to harness big data and better understand their customers, extend their marketing reach into social channels, and retain their high value customers through more rewarding customer experience.Where to Start Your Organization's RevolutionThe process of crafting a great customer experience starts with understanding customers and their goals. This session helps you to begin mapping a sound customer experience strategy, describing the intended experience and kinds of processes that create differentiation. The ROI of Customer Experience: A Tempkin Group Insight Report Did you know that customer experience leaders have more than a 16 percentage point advantage over customer experience laggards in consumers’ willingness to buy more, their reluctance to switch business away, and their likelihood to recommend? Did you know that even a modest increase in customer experience can translate into millions of dollars gained? Learn more about the ROI of customer experience in this free report.

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  • CRM@Oracle Series: Complete Customer Intelligence

    - by tony.berk
    How do you to get sales folks to use a CRM system? Ah, the age-old question (well, at least the one that has been around for the past 10-15 years). Of course, some combination of "Carrot and Stick" always come up as possible answers. You hear talk about, "WIFM" or "What's in it For Me?" Oracle's internal implementation of Customer 360 consolidates all customer information in one place in Siebel CRM and enables the sales rep to present one-face to the customer. Additionally, Customer 360 provides customer intelligence and prospecting tools making it a darn nice "Carrot" for our sales teams to chew on. Check out today's slidecast for an overview. CRM@Oracle - Customer 360 Click here to learn more about Siebel CRM and other Oracle CRM products and here to learn about customers using Oracle CRM. Are you enjoying the CRM@Oracle Series? If you have a particular CRM area or function which you'd like to hear how Oracle implemented it internally, let us know and we'll get it on our list.

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  • Reaching the Pinnacle of Customer Experience : Customer Concepts WebTV #2

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    The challenge has never been greater – globalization increases consumer choice and quickly converts products into mere commodities. Leading companies understand that delivering exceptional customer experiences and building brand equity are vital for success. Please join us for an exclusive Web TV broadcast to hear how companies are enriching interactions differently with their customers to drive measurable business value. Our panel of experts including customers, industry thought leaders and Oracle executives will discuss how to refine the customer experience and build a digital experience to win new clients and maximise customer retention. Register now for this pan-European interactive Web TV show on Friday, July 6 at 10 a.m. BST / 11 a.m. CET. Watch and share the teaser video  REPLAY Fusion CRM Sales - Performance Management on demand: Watch and share the teaser video and replay.

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  • Catch Oracle Today and Tomorrow at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2012 East

    - by Christie Flanagan
    Continuing our coverage of the customer experience revolution this week, don’t miss a chance to catch up with Oracle at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2012 East today and tomorrow in New York City. The theme for this year’s Forum is “Outside In: The Power Of Putting Customers At The Center Of Your Business” and will take a look at important questions surrounding how to transform your company in order to take best advantage of the customer experience revolution: Why is customer experience the greatest untapped source of cost savings and increased revenue today? What is the key to understanding and taking control of your customer experience ecosystem? What are the six essential customer experience disciplines? Which companies have adopted best-in-class customer experience practices? How do customer experience strategies drive differentiating activities and processes at top companies? Which organizations appoint a chief customer officer to lead their customer experience efforts? What is the future of customer experience? How can you design an enterprise wide customer experience? How can you measure the results of your customer experience efforts? As a gold sponsor of the event, there will be a numbers of ways to interact with Oracle while you’re attending the Forum.  Here are some of the highlights:Oracle Speaking SessionTuesday, June 26, 2:10pm – 2:40pmThe Customer And YOU — Today’s Winners Are Defined By Customer ExperienceAnthony Lye, Senior Vice President of Customer Relationship Management, OracleCome hear Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President of Customer Relationship Management at Oracle, explain how leading companies are investing in customer experience solutions to enrich all interactions between a customer and their company. He will discuss Oracle's vision for transforming your customer engagement, insight, and execution into a connected, personalized, and rewarding experience across all touchpoints and interactions. He will demonstrate how great customer experiences generate real business results by attracting more customers, retaining more customers, and generating more sales while improving operational efficiency.Solution ShowcaseTuesday, June 26th9:45am - 10:30am - Morning Networking Break in the Solutions Showcase11:45am – 1:15pm - Networking Lunch an Dessert in the Solutions Showcase2:40pm – 3:25pm - Afternoon Break in the Solutions Showcase5:30pm – 7:00pm - Networking Reception in the Solutions ShowcaseWednesday, June 27th9:45am - 10:30am - Morning Networking Break in the Solutions Showcase12:20pm -1:20pm - Networking Lunch and Dessert in the Solutions ShowcaseWe hope to see you there! Webcast: Learn How Ancestry.com Delivers Exceptional Online Customer Experience with Oracle WebCenterDate: Thursday, June 28, 2012Time: 10:00 AM PDT/ 1:00 PM EDT Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online family history resource, providing an engaging customer experience to more than 1.7 million members. With a wealth of learning resources and a worldwide community of family history enthusiasts, Ancestry.com helps people discover their roots and tell their family stories. Key to Ancestry.com’s success has been the delivery of an online customer experience that converts site visitors into paying subscribers and keeps them coming back. Register now to learn how Ancestry.com delivers an exception customer experience using Oracle WebCenter Sites. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • BigData and Customer Experience: Happy Together

    - by Isabel F. Peñuelas
    The two big buzzes of the year may lay closer than it appears. Both concepts intersect at various points: BigData and Return of Investment of Marketing Campaigns On a recent post Big Data Is The Future Of Marketing Jeff Dachis explains very clearly how “Big data analytics finally allows marketers to identify, measure, and manage what is positively impacting their Brand”. Regression analysis applied to big data volumes coming from social media will substitute the failed attempts to justify marketing investments on social media in terms of followers and likes, he continues, “the measurement models applied by marketers on TV Campaigns don´t work on social”, we need to study the data with fresh eyes and maybe then we will start understanding and measuring brand engagemet. Social CRM and BigData The real value of Social CRM start by analyzing mass of big data from social media in order of applying social intelligence techniques that allow us to classify new customer niches and communities and define appropriated strategies to contact potential customers. Gartner Says that the Market for Social CRM is on pace to surpass $1 Billion in Revenue by Year-End 2012 but in words of Zach Hofer-Shall, Analyst at Forrester Research “Social customer relationship management is hard” (The Social CRM Arms Race Heats ). To succeed brands need three things: Investing in new social tools, investing in consultancy and investing in infrastructure for massive data storage and analysis. Neither CeX or BigData are easy and cheap wins. But what are the customer benefits of such investments? Big Data and Brand Engagement Time is the most valuable asset of todays consumers: tired of information overload, exhausted by the terabytes of offering, anxious because of not having the same fast multichannel experience with their services’ marketers or preferred goods providers than the one they found on their social media. Yes, I know you have read this before- me too. But is real. The motto of the Customer Experience philosophy of providing a consistent experience through multiple touchpoints that makes the relationship customer/brand easier and valuable finds it basis on understanding customer/s preferences and context for which BigData analysis is another imperative. In summary, I believe that using BigData Analysis in combination with appropriated CeX strategies and technologies is a promising direction for achieving: efficiency and marketing cost-savings; growing the customer base; and increasing customer conversion and retention. In a world: The Direction of Future Marketing.

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  • How to justify technology choice to customer?

    - by suslik
    When freelancing / contracting a customer will typically specify functional requirements, acceptance criteria, etc, and the implementation details are in the developer's hands. As a developer your technology choice is a balancing act between what you are most familiar with, technologically what the right tool appears to be, ease of finding coders with this skill and their expense, and a few other factors. I'm in a situation where I have evaluated my options and selected a somewhat obscure open source technology that I believe will get me there faster, easier, and be more maintanable in the long term. It's different, but I think that that is what the requirements call for. The customer has inquired about what I'm going to use to build the solution, and now they are concerned because they've never heard of it before. The reasons for my choice are mostly technical, whereas the customer isn't (but they know some buzzwords!). Explaining these technical reasons will not be easy, and I am not sure if that is the right way to approach this situation anyway. And that's my question: what is the right way to approach this situation so as to cause the least amount of headache for everyone involved?

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  • Communications: BNSL Unifies The Customer Experience

    - by Michael Seback
    Hear how BNSL achieved a unified customer experience across channels.  BNSL is India's number one telecommunications operator with 70M mobile customers and 20M wired customers. They consolidated 330 different districts and customer experiences into a single customer experience across the contact center, web, email and SMS.  Click here to listen to their journey.  Read more about Oracle Communications.  

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  • Aggregating customer service emails from multiple ecommerce sites for easy handling

    - by nitbuntu
    For one of my main customer help email addresses I use Mozilla Thunderbird with a combination of tags and saved searches. As the number of my e-commerce sites grows from 1 to more, customer service handling gets more tricky. Is there any simple and efficient way of handling emails from the different sites? Perhaps what I'm looking for is a way of aggregating customer service emails from different sites, into one place? Perhaps there's a way of already doing this within Thunderbird or Gmail?

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  • Aggregating customer service emails from multiple ecommerce sites for easy handling

    - by nitbuntu
    For one of my main customer help email addresses I use Mozilla Thunderbird with a combination of tags and saved searches. As the number of my e-commerce sites grows from 1 to more, customer service handling gets more tricky. Is there any simple and efficient way of handling emails from the different sites? Perhaps what I'm looking for is a way of aggregating customer service emails from different sites, into one place? Perhaps there's a way of already doing this within Thunderbird or Gmail?

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  • Spirent Communications Improves Customer Experience with Knowledge Management

    - by Tony Berk
    Spirent Communications plc is a global leader in test and measurement inspiring innovation within development labs, communication networks and IT organizations. The world’s leading communications companies rely on Spirent to help design, develop, validate, and deliver world-class network, devices, and services. Spirent’s customers require high levels of support for a diverse and complex product portfolio, and the company is committed to delivering on this requirement. Spirent needed a solution to help its customers get the information they need quickly and at their convenience through its Web site. After evaluating several solutions, Spirent selected and deployed Oracle Knowledge for Web Self Service Enterprise Edition. Oracle Knowledge Management uses natural language processing to understand the true intent of each inquiry logged via the support portal’s search function. The Spirent Knowledge Base on the company’s Customer Support Center (CSC) finds the best possible answer using search enhancement features?such as communications industry-specific libraries and federation to search external sources. Spirent has reduced contact center call volume while better serving its customers. Each time a customer uses the knowledge base, they find answers faster than by calling, and it saves Spirent an average of US$210 per call?which is significant when multiplied across the thousands of calls received monthly. Oracle Knowledge also helps support engineers find answers more quickly, enabling the company to scale without adding additional support engineers. Oracle Knowledge is integrated with Spirent's Siebel Contact Center implementation to provide an integrated desktop for CRM and agent intelligence, avoiding the need for contact center personnel to toggle between various screens to address customer inquiries, thereby accelerating customer service. Click here to learn more about Sprient's use of Siebel CRM and Oracle Knowledge Management.

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  • CRM@Oracle Series: Showcasing Innovation with Oracle Customer Hub

    - by tony.berk
    When is having too many customers a challenge? It is not something too many people would complain about. But from a data perspective, one challenge is to keep each customer's data consistent across multiple enterprise systems such as CRM, ERP, and all of your other related applications. Buckle your seat belts, we are going a bit technical today... If you have ever tried it, you know it isn't easy. If you haven't, don't go there alone! Customer data integration projects are challenging and, depending on the environment, require sharp, innovative people to succeed. Want to hear from some guys who have done it and succeeded? Here is an interview with Dan Lanir and Afzal Asif from Oracle's Applications IT CRM Systems group on implementing Oracle Customer Hub and innovation. For more interesting discussions on innovation, check out the Oracle Innovation Showcase.

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  • Customer Experience Metrics That Matter Most

    - by Charles Knapp
    When customers contact your company, they don't ask to be deflected or handled or converted. They want to be satisfied. To improve the customer experience, you need more than traditional measures such as deflection rates, handling times, and conversion rates. In this new Oracle AppCast podcast, tune in to this conversation with me about customer experience metrics that you can use to grow your business. Would you like to learn more? Please join us at the one of a kind Customer Experience Summit at the Oracle OpenWorld Conference, October 3-5 in San Francisco.

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  • Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

    - by Christie Flanagan
    This first-ever Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld kicked off yesterday, bringing together established thought leaders and practitioners in customer experience. The first day saw noted marketing and customer experience thought leader, Seth Godin, take the stage to discuss how rapidly accelerating change and adoption are driving new behaviors and higher expectations in a massively disruptive transformation in which the customer now holds the power. His presentation gave us in-depth insight into this always-connected, always-sharing experience revolution we are witnessing.If you haven’t yet made it over to the Oracle Customer Experience Summit at The Westin St. Francis and the recently made over Oracle Square (aka Union Square), there’s still time today and tomorrow to network with industry peers and hear best practices from those who have steered their ventures through the disruptive trends of customer experience and have proven, successful strategies to share for driving strategic customer-centric initiatives. If you’re interested in learning how Oracle WebCenter helps businesses meet the demands of the customer experience revolution, be sure to check out these sessions at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit later today:Using the Online Customer Experience to Drive Engagement and Marketing Success Thursday, Oct 4, 4:15 PM - 5:15 PM - St. Francis - GeorgianMariam Tariq - Senior Director Product Management, Oracle Stephen Schleifer - Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Richard Backx - Business IT Architect/Consultant, KPN NL Netco CE Channels Online The online channel is a critical means of reaching and engaging customers. Online marketing efforts today must be targeted, interactive, and consistent to provide customers with a seamless experience. These efforts must include integrated management of Web, mobile, and social channels—supported by cross-channel customer data and campaigns—and integration with commerce to drive an engaging and differentiated online customer experience. Attend this session to learn how you can use the online channel to increase customer loyalty and drive the success of your marketing initiatives.Empowering Your Frontline Employees: Sales and Service Enterprise Collaboration Thursday, Oct 4, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM - St. Francis - Elizabethan ABStephen Fioretti - VP, Product Management, Oracle Peter Doolan - Group Vice President, Sales Engineering, Oracle Andrew Kershaw - Sr Director Business Development, Oracle Marty Marcinczyk - VP Customer Experience Engineering, Comcast A focus on the employee experience is critical, because it can make or break your customers’ experiences, directly or indirectly. Engaged and empowered frontline employees become your best advocates and inspire your brand champions. This session explores proven approaches and tools, including social collaboration tools, that can help you empower and enable your frontline teams to improve customer and employee experiences.And before you go, you'll also want to explore the Innovation Tents in Oracle Square which feature leading-edge customer experience demonstrations; attend our customer journey mapping workshop; and learn at sessions focused on innovating differentiated experiences that drive cross-functional alignment.

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