Oracle Announces CX Cloud Updates at Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle today launched several updates to the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud at its Oracle OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco.

The latest updates include digital assistants for sales, customer service, and marketing; data-enriched B2B sales capabilities; and industry-specific solutions for telecom and media, financial services, and the public sector. 

"At Oracle, we believe the only way brands can make every customer interaction matter is to take a data-first approach to managing the customer experience," said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president of Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud, in a statement. "The latest updates to Oracle CX Cloud are fueled by data and machine learning to help our customers take advantage of powerful data insights to get ahead of customer needs and ensure a positive, unforgettable customer experience."

The latest additions to CX Cloud include the following:

• The Oracle Digital Assistant, which allows sales, customer service, and marketing professionals to use voice commands to drive outcomes and actions. Sales teams can leverage the technology to create configured quotes using voice commands. Service teams can leverage it to get answers to questions stored in knowledge repositories or deliver rich data-connected self-service on chat channels. Marketers can use it to get help and support when using Oracle Responsys to create promotional campaigns. In addition, companies can enable customers who receive promotions via Oracle Responsys to speak with the Oracle Digital Assistant to redeem or gather additional information.
• Data-enriched B2B sales capabilities through an integration with Oracle DataFox, delivering artificial intelligence-sourced company data and signals that bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams. This capability will enhance campaign orchestration by helping ensure leads are connected to accounts; account enrichment to help sales teams profile and classify customers, leverage data for campaign segmentation, and define territories; account prioritization, helping sales teams rank accounts and focus on high-value prospects and key targets; and Smart Talking Points providing real-time alerts on market changes at target accounts so sales reps can include contextual talking points in targeted emails and phone calls.
• The Enterprise Product Catalog for telecom and media, enabling new products and offers to be rapidly defined and published across sales, procurement, fulfillment and billing catalogs.
• AI recommendations for financial services firms.
• Chatbot capabilities to help local government entities personalize the citizen experience and simplify incident reporting, field visits by case workers, payouts, and more. 

Oracle also used the conference to launch several updates to its Oracle CX Unity customer data management (CDP) platform, which is pre-integrated with the Oracle CX Cloud. By bringing together customer data from marketing and advertising systems, the latest updates to Oracle CX Unity enable organizations to provide personalized and contextual experiences across all customer interactions, from website visits and online ads to customer service calls and in-store transactions.

Oracle CX Unity provides a complete customer intelligence platform for managing customer data. It brings together online, offline, and third-party customer data sources and then applies built-in machine learning to prescribe the optimal experience within existing business processes. 

Oracle CX Unity connects with Oracle’s Data Management Platform (DMP) and ID Graph solutionshelp companies bring together traditional marketing and advertising data, including online, offline, and third-party customer data sources. By delivering known and unknown insights from disparate systems in milliseconds, the new integrations enable companies to orchestrate personalized, in-the-moment experiences whenever and however customers choose to interact.

"Unifying customer data from different marketing and advertising systems is the only way brands will be able to eliminate blind spots and make every customer interaction matter," Tarkoff said. "At Oracle, we are uniquely positioned to bring those worlds together, and that enables us to provide brands with the most trusted, proven, and complete customer intelligence capabilities available today." 

"CX Unity takes traditional marketing aspects and blends it with real-world information about customers," explained Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications product development. "And Oracle Software-as-a-Service keeps all of that data in one location."

Machine learning, Miranda added, allows Oracle to turn traditional data input and database applications into recommendation engines with digital assistants and bots as the interface.

Oracle executives also touted the company's cloud capabilities, trying to position the Oracle Cloud as a better alternative to Amazon Web Services andMicrosoft Azure, and the artificial intelligence capabilities that are being incorporated across its product portfolio.

Larry Ellison, chairman, founder, and chief technology officer at Oracle, in his opening keynote last night, noted that the company's second-generation cloud is highlighted by autonomous systems enabled by machine learning. These systems, he said, will be able to eliminate human labor, thereby eliminating human error.

Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, in her opening keynote today, maintained that Oracle is working to integrate all of its products on one cloud-based infrastructure.

Oracle, Miranda added, "has built a comprehensive suite of cloud applications, including CRM, on one cloud, made possible by blockchain."