Customer relationship management (CRM) helps enterprises manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the aim of improving customer service relationships and assisting with retaining customers and driving sales growth.
Intelligent CIO speaks to Swami Natarajan, SaaS Strategy Leader, ECEMEA, Oracle, about how enterprises can utilise CRM.
In terms of your CRM systems what are the benefits enterprises can gain from them?
The top three things that today’s CRM system should help enterprises with are: Understanding customers better than your competition; Solving problems by knowledge across all channels and devices; and delivering the best experience possible.
Today’s customer experience focuses on three important elements: Excellence, Digital Transformation and customer success.
Customer Experience (CX) faces many challenges due to siloed CRM Systems which do not provide a single source of truth – customer data is spread across multiple systems. Also CRM systems are having inflexible processes and workflow and also lack real time insights.
Tomorrow’s CX needs to move from functional excellence to shared business outcomes, from Digital Transformation to adaptive intelligence and evolve from customer success to overall shared business success.
What are the most important features a CIO should be looking for when commissioning a CRM?
A CRM system needs a new approach for products, applications, front office and back office to all work as one. A connected platform that brings data, intelligence and experience into one. Also run your CRM systems using nothing but an internet connection and a browser.
Modern CRM systems should provide the following three important elements:
- Connect Experience:This would cover major functions like marketing, commerce, sales and service including providing industry specific solutions
- Connected Intelligence: This includes the latest Artificial Intelligence capabilities, Internet of Things (IoT) analytics and behavioural analytics
- Connected Data: They provide a meaningful solution on point a & b, we need data which includes master, transactional and operational data. Also in this connected world, you need data from sensors and also behavioural and external data.
All the above should be available in state-of-the-art CRM platform solutions. This is what Oracle Customer Experience Management offers to enterprises across various industry verticals around the globe.
In terms of analytics what sort of data would your system produce that businesses can utilise?
As mentioned earlier, Oracle CX Solutions provides a connected intelligence which includes various analytics solutions for marketing, sales, commerce and service solutions. This includes AI and Machine Learning capabilities like chatbots, digital assistance etc. Also IoT analytics provides intelligence from connected devices and also from operational systems. Oracle CX Solutions also provides behavioural analytics.
What are the main verticals that use your CRM system?
Oracle CRM Solutions cover all the major verticals including telecom, banking and financial services, public sector (including higher education, healthcare and government), retail, hitech manufacturing, consumer goods, healthcare etc. For example, we even have solutions specific for the education sector called Oracle Student Cloud which offers the complete solution for the higher education industry.
How quickly can your CRM be implemented?
It depends on the requirement. We have customers going live on specific solutions like Oracle Marketing Cloud or Oracle Engagement Cloud in a matter of a few weeks. And also we have customers who have embarked on large Digital Transformation projects with Oracle CX Cloud solutions which runs in to multiple months.
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