A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product
Development
The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the
full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and
Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience
imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our
customers create the best possible customer experience.
This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so
many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such
public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have
multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know
what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative
situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to
enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer.
The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely
dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences
within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people
looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle
can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise.
The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of
Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the
first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to
5,000.
Alignment and Logic
Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of
acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We
include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG,
Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally
they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind
the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned.
To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging
so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going
deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one
session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this
internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our
customers and for our long-term cooperation and success.
Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation
We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker
? always provocative and popular.
The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and
me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer
experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing
these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around
the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at
each of the stops around the lifecycle.
Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that
was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved
hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better
customer experience.
John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that
customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he
created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make
improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into
groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with
experts and peers and construct some real takeaways.
From left to right: Brian Curran, John Kembel, Seth Godin, and George Kembel
The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to
set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and
partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see
all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and
mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these
ideas.
Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership
Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the
format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either
a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations
weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive.
I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of
Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping
methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of
thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to
engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder
to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on
thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps.
David VapGroup Vice PresidentOracle Applications Product
Development
