Oracle Modern Customer Experience Day 1: Oracle Boosts AI, Adds Other Marketing Enhancements to CX Cloud Suite

CHICAGO: Oracle at its Modern Customer Experience event unveiled several marketing and sales innovations that the company says will help companies meet customer expectations, a critical factor in customer retention.

The updates to the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud Suite include a new loyalty platform and new features in the Oracle Marketing Cloud include Oracle Infinity and Oracle CX Audience.

"To build CRM innovations that will work, companies need to be thinking five years into the future," said Fortune Alexander, Oracle's senior director of CX product strategy, told the audience on the opening day of the conference. "If a company is thinking about transitioning its CRM platform today, the initial planning will take at least a year, while the actual migration will take a few years, including beta testing, final tweaks, and final rollout. So a company planning to change its CRM program today should think in terms of the year 2023 when determining the look and feel and the partner it wants to collaborate with in the changeover effort."

Collaboration is also critical when thinking about the sales culture now and in the future, Alexander said. 

The latest updates to CX Suite are designed to support the connected digital enterprise by introducing new artificial intelligence-based applications, data analytics solutions, and innovative search, voice and video capabilities.

Oracle officials contend that companies need technical assistance to avoid the decline in CX performance that Forrester Research predicts for 30 percent of firms this year. Oracle expects to help companies ward off that decline with its new loyalty platform.

The new Oracle Loyalty platform is designed to help customer experience professionals engage users with personalized loyalty programs spanning every phase of the customer lifecycle.

As customers expect and experiment more, it is increasingly hard for organizations to deliver experiences that build and maintain customer loyalty, according to Oracle. So the new platform is designed to help companies deliver relevant, unified omnichannel loyalty programs that are seamlessly integrated with existing customer experience initiatives.

And because much of the success of loyalty programs and other CRM initiatives depends on accurate analytics, Oracle launched its Infinity product, the company said. Oracle Infinity is designed to eliminate the challenges of traditional web analytics solutions by providing accurate, timely intelligence that enables marketers to optimize customer engagement across channels, including the ability to do the folllowing:

• Combine behavioral insights from all users, all of the time;
• Unify behavioral data within the marketing organization and across any digital touchpoint;
• Develop and distribute actionable insights to the broader business user community through built-in integrations and customizable APIs;
• Enhance performance of marketing automation systems; and
• Manage large and complex enterprise data sets.

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important for marketers and for others in organizations, Forrester Research analyst John Bruno told the Oracle CX seminar audience. In fact, marketing and sales tend to be the biggest users of AI today. 

Oracle is including AI throughout its CX upgrades, with Oracle CX Audience featuring:

• An open, flexible, cloud platform to enable marketers to benefit from IT without getting deeply involved with the technology itself;
• The ability to create audience segmentation data;
• Segment performance analysis, using fully integrated analytics to help marketers uncover customer sub-segments that could provide additional opportunities.

Other Oracle CX enhancements include the following

• A new virtual sales assistant to simplify access to frequent CRM commands by supporting voice or text requests. In addition, the virtual assistant supports custom/extended objects and attributes and can push notifications for event and task reminders and surface next-best action insights about sales opportunities; and
• New campaign effectiveness dashboards to help marketing teams automate lead scoring and execute regional marketing and event promotions.

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