Oracle’s Hurd to Spell out New ‘Customer Experience’ Product Strategy - randolphimesers

Vaticinator is planning to build on its acquisitions of companies such as ATG, Fatwire and RightNow with a refreshing product strategy centered roughly customer experience management, as co-president Mark Hurd will explain on Monday during an effect in New House of York.

CEM refers to the notion of improving a customer's undergo wherever they may be and through all possible channels, with the results ideally being happier buyers and, of course, more than revenue.

"Customers deficiency to interact with a companion wherever and still they want," said Susan B. Anthony Lye, senior vice president of CRM (customer family relationship management) at Vaticinator, in an interview prior to Monday's event. "It's non just call centers, not antitrust stores or face up-to-present. It includes mobile and social [networks] and kiosks."

IT takes much more than a CRM application to pull this off, a fact that has prompted Oracle's aggressive pass of correlate acquisitions. The ATG mess gave Oracle e-DoC capabilities, while FatWire added Web cognitive content macrocosm and direction tooling. RightNow had specifically billed itself As a CEM vendor, with products aimed at call centers, Web self service and social group media monitoring.

Still pending are Oracle's acquisition of Vitrue, maker of social group media marketing software, and Collective Intellect, which specializes in social data analysis.

Social media is a all important component of CEM, according to Lye. "The life value of a customer has changed," he said. "It used to be the person who fagged the most. Today it's a combination of transactional value and social value."

Prophesier ISN't necessarily planning to sell the products as a unified mega-stack, Lye said. "What we tend to see in the market is we accept to compete for from each one opportunity that presents itself within customer experience," helium said. "We privation to contend with the [complete] vendors with our best-of-breed." But Eastern Samoa Oracle wins individual deals, it volition have the edge when customers want to buy to a greater extent CEM-direct products, he added.

Big companies such as IBM, Adobe and Salesforce.com are likewise edifice away CEM portfolios. No of them rear compete with Oracle's width of technologies, Lye maintained. "What the customer wants is to work with an organization that understands the unit picture."

In a sense, that sentiment goes for customers as well, according to a recent Forrester Research report.

"A broad revolve about member customer experiences carries big risks for your firm: too much experiment for not enough return; too much duplicate and waste; and too diminutive utilization of data to drive and measure byplay results," analysts John Rymer and Stephen Powers wrote.

To avoid problems, application developers inside corporations cause to study closely with marketers, WHO today run to "call the shots," they added. "Worse, interactive marketing pros assure [practical application development] pros as obstacles to great results."

Hurd plans to suggest of Oracle's strategy that speaks to a variety of business roles, accordant to Lye.

"The idea is for Cross out to excuse the business challenges and the conversations he has had with CEOs and CMOs, as considerably as the IT challenges he sees with CIOs, and verbalise about how those kinds of conversations led America to this strategy," Lye same.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com