Don't choose between best and complete

In my last blog, I challenged the CX technology buying trend of the last decade that the cool thing to do was to buy more and?more?and?more?(…) ‘best-of-breed’ products and string them together. Rather our leading customers have discovered ‘best-of-breed’ isn’t always ‘best’ when distributed customer experience tech puts every application on an island, disconnected natively from other parts of the application ecosystem; when every CX application has its own unique view and shape of CX data flowing between systems with multiple, fractured view of product, price, customer, and order; when vendors leave businesses to figure out best flows between these systems; when employees are left to swivel chair between application to try and serve the customer.

At Oracle, we have a different view: that?best?and?complete?are not contradictory and that it’s not bad to have features in your product. Our customers operate in increasingly heterogeneous industry specific business environments full of diverging paths and unexpected nuance. Our CX customers are expected to respond to their?own?customers as individuals with hyper-specific requirements not as numbers or transactions. And they are expected to bring forth the full capacity of their business in support of the customer journey.

To do so, we believe the CX professional requires an enterprise wide CX strategy bolstered by a cohesive and streamlined set of applications purpose-built to respond to the customer experience of the future without forfeiting the operating success of the present. And while we believe firmly that our CX customers want a suite, we are?not a walled garden. We offer our customers as much as possible out of the box while ensuring they can extend when needed.

Let’s take a closer look at where we are investing and leveraging the One Oracle vision to give our CX customers enormous competitive advantage.

First, we provide our customers with one voice across the enterprise. This means that we do all the work to give you one view of what matters most to the customer experience – one view of first party data in your systems: one view of customer, price, product, order – from campaign to service through to supply chain and billing. We ensure first party data is seen commonly by all applications from customer / contacts / suppliers to product inventory master and ledger concepts like currency conversions and financial calendar, all the way down to the concept of an employee (organizational hierarchy, compensation plans, etc.). From initial marketing campaign to customer engagement through deal close, service delivery, and accounting, everyone in your business has access to the exact same customer record, the same contract history, the same view of billing, and the same view of assets owned. Everyone has the same data. Everyone gets the answer they need to serve the customer best. Everyone can serve the customer in the right way, at every moment in the relationship.

In terms of giving CX one voice across the enterprise, we don’t just stop at bringing the most important CX data together. We take a common approach to UX across Oracle –?the Redwood Design System?– that re-imagines the employee experience of that data to better do their jobs. We do the hard work to reconcile common data across applications, create guided workflows, and bring cross-departmental UX together. A cohesive approach to UX across our enterprise applications gives our customers’ employees a system that pays attention to them – their context, their role. It helps them do their jobs better by learning patterns, and preferences, and correlations, and uses that context to continuously hone and tailor its recommendations to the person using the system and the context in which they’re operating. We believe that with machine learning combined with the rich data that we can uniquely understand, we can give users an experience that improves with every single use.

Next, we make sure all our applications and end-to-end business and industry flows are connected at a functional and operational level. What does this mean for your business in a turbulent economy?

A completely vertically integrated stack – from hardware up through applications – translates into reduced costs spent on managing ongoing integrations, maintenance and upgrades, and ongoing data management. You can take those funds and reinvest them in experience differentiation and to speed time-to-market.

Oracle has spent billions in R&D over the last decade-and-a-half on grounding breaking innovations that mean hassle-free maintenance monitoring and upgrades, built-in encryption and identity management, co-deployment of upgrades, global database infrastructure.?

We?ensure your CX applications leverage common API standards to ensure ease of deployment and speed time-to-value.?We?ensure you can leverage all the latest tech innovations – all our applications come with embedded with emerging technology such AI, ML, IoT, blockchain, digital assistants – at no extra cost.

We can help you take your business to a global scale on one Oracle Cloud instance that connects gets your business available in all Oracle data centers globally. We help you ensure customer trust by doing the hard work of managing identity, security, and encryption across all your applications.

Finally, we recognize many industries have specialized needs in terms of business flows and often regulations and governance. Oracle can uniquely bring the full power of a connected front-and-back-office by extending Oracle’s industry-specific global business units (Healthcare, Financial Services, Communications, Energy & Water), applications, and deep domain experience with the Oracle CX portfolio. By adapting the data models, APIs, user experience, and intelligent process flows in a hybrid architecture, Oracle is composing the next generation of industry-specific solutions with industry-expertise baked-in to lead the CX market and capitalize on this unique opportunity.

Today’s modern Oracle Fusion Cloud Suite allows us to deliver contextual customer experiences seamlessly across evolving digital and human-assisted channels to acquire and retain digitally-driven end customers. The ‘One Oracle’ foundation enables end customer intelligence that connects front and back-office data, provides guided employee experiences for optimal outcomes, and supports new recurring revenue business models. Connected applications and infrastructure mitigate risk, accelerate enterprise transformation in heterogenous environments, enabling end customer experience fulfillment across the entire customer journey.

Thank you for reading this blog series on the Future of CX. I hope that I have piqued your curiosity on what the Oracle CX can do for your business. The Oracle Fusion Cloud Application Suite is the industry’s most comprehensive suite of composable CX enablers. By fusing the power of marketing, sales, service, and commerce data together with native automation and engagement engines, businesses can run on a single vision, single infrastructure and towards a single growth goal.

We are here to help you succeed in 2023 and beyond.

https://blogs.oracle.com/cx/post/the-future-of-cx-part-4-complete