US enterprise software maker Oracle sees bright prospects for its CX Cloud solutions from businesses looking to deliver a consistent, personalised customer experience to their customers
By Mohd Ujaley
The famous Chinese proverb “A man without a smiling face must not open a shop” has an embedded message on the importance of customer experience and its impact on business. And, in today’s steady rise of the customer-centric environment, it has become more relevant as brands are compelled to deliver the best customer experiences across different platforms or point of sale. To support the enterprises to offer better customer experience and government departments to provide hassle free services to the citizens, the American enterprise software maker Oracle has come out with a suite of cloud based solutions—Oracle Customer Experience Cloud (Oracle CX Cloud solutions).
In India, Oracle is witnessing a strong traction for its CX solutions and has acquired several cloud customers in recent months. Companies such as Aditya Birla Online Fashion, Adidas, Hyundai, Mercedes Benz, Jabong, Reliance Commercial Finance, MakeMyTrip.com, iGate, Indiabulls, Kotak Life Insurance, PolicyBazaar.com, PVR Cinemas and Thomas Cook are some of the early adopters of its CX solutions.
According to Oracle officials, major demand for its CX Solutions is coming from e-commerce, automobile, BFSI and retail industries. The company also sees huge potential in telecom and government sectors. “The proliferation of mobile devices has come to a point where companies have the ability to address each and every individual customer at a time with the help of technology and this is leading to massive adoption of CX solutions across different verticals” Joe Fuster, Global Head of CX Cloud, Oracle told FE.
Basically any customer experience management (CEM) solution helps an organisation in tracking, overseeing and organising every interaction that it has with its customers. This plays a differentiating role for a big enterprise as well as to a brick-and-mortar store because it allows them to optimise the interaction and build strong loyalty by offering customised services and products. “There is a strong relation between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and both are key for any company’s long term growth. In today’s time when everybody has a mobile phone and e-commerce is booming, you cannot rely on siloed channel to leapfrog,” said Joe.
Oracle is very optimistic about the government’s Digital India and Smart Cities projects and sees huge potential for its cloud and social engagement platform. It is of the view that both government and businesses need to engage with the people. Therefore, CX Solutions could help them in providing better citizen centric or customer centric services. On the opportunity for CX Solutions in telcos, Joe said that telcos have spent huge money for buying spectrum and hence there is pressure on them but as they move to renovate their network, it is important for them to provide smooth customer experience by offering tailored made products and services which can easily be mapped with use of CX solutions.
The good news is that the overall cloud business is on steady rise for the Oracle. According to the Q3FY2015 results, Oracle’s cloud revenues totalled more than $1 billion in half a year, with a run rate of more than $2 billion per year in the same quarter. It’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business grew by 30% to $375 million while infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenue was $155 million, up by 32%.
Interestingly, the company has a portfolio of more than 600 cloud applications and it supports 62 million users and 23 billion transactions each day. It also claims to run on 30,000 devices and 400 petabytes of storage in 19 datacentres around the world.
When asked about what is the mantra of delivering memorable customer experience, Joe said that enterprises must use data analytics to understand the customers and accordingly offer them what they need. “The key differentiater for me lies in the answers of how good do I understand the end customer. Do I talk to them uniquely? And where are the ones that I haven’t started to pick up?” he added, saying that Oracle solutions provide answers to these questions with the touch of a finger.