Making Money On-line: Defining the Customer Intelligence Platform, and Why You Should Care

Originally published at: https://blogs.oracle.com/cx/defining-the-customer-intelligence-platform-and-why-you-should-care

Have you ever been talking with a service person and had to repeat yourself? Of course you have. We all have, and we all hate it. It still happens even in 2019 and when it happens once, that’s one time too many.

When we engage with a brand, we don’t care how its service or marketing departments are set up. We just want our issues resolved, quickly. When each and every interaction with a brand is an opportunity to please and delight that customer forcing them to provide the same information again and again creates a terrible brand experience.

The problem begins with the data! When every customer interaction operates as its own distinct conversation, each touch – marketing, sales, logistics, delivery, service, loyalty - produces more siloed data, making a single view of the customer impossible. Without a single view of the customer, delivering a great, consistent experience across the customer journey itself is impossible.

A Single Customer Profile That Meets Marketers' Expectations

CDPs have merged with a promise that they’ll enable marketers to unify their customer data across their organization, and activate audiences across the broader ecosystem to deliver consistent experiences across channels. CDPs are the latest step in the evolution of data management systems that use data from platforms such as CRM systems and data management platforms to help you get a 360-degree view of your customers, and deliver unified customer experiences.

But, CDP solutions generally fail to provide a unified customer profile to all systems across the enterprise. The key problem is they’re too narrowly focused and do not consider the entire end-to-end customer experience across marketing, sales, service, loyalty, commerce, etc. The customer information contained in a CDP is of value to everyone across the company, not just to marketing.

In its October 2018 report “For B2C Marketers, Customer Data Platforms Overpromise and Underdeliver," Forrester states that “CDPs lack crucial capabilities to solve for identity resolution, data hygiene, and cross-channel orchestration.” The analyst firm further notes that without these capabilities, CDPs “can’t meet enterprise B2C marketers’ expectations for personalized and targeted customer engagement.”

The Next Evolution Is The Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP)

CIPs incorporate anonymous, third-party data as well as first-party known data to provide a complete understanding of the customer. They have a layer of intelligence that uses machine learning for predictive models and recommendations to produce more powerful and actionable insights. CIPs share those insights with any other system to enable sales, service, marketing, commerce, field service, finance, social and others with more, better intelligence. For example, if a customer is interacting with a service agent to report an issue, it’s imperative the sales system informs the agent that this is a high value customer who just made a major purchase.

Similarly, if a customer has an open support ticket, it’s crucial that marketing system informs the marketer to not to include that customer in a marketing campaign until their issue is resolved. It’s infuriating to get a marketing email from a brand asking you to refer a friend or consider an additional purchase, when you're having service issues. This approach enables the brand to optimize customer engagement and helps to improve customer satisfaction and increases customer lifetime value.

The Oracle Customer Intelligence Platform

The customer relationship with brands is in constant motion. As marketing, sales, commerce, and service professionals, we must adapt to these shifts or they’ll take their business elsewhere.

At Oracle, we launched our customer intelligence system at OpenWorld 2018, called Oracle CX Unity. It's a behavioral, transactional system that allows you to dive into the key intelligence about your customers and use it to optimize a process, whether service, sales, marketing or commerce. Oracle CX Unity applies that data-driven intelligence to determine the next best experience by feeding those actions directly into Oracle and non-Oracle applications.

The Power of a Customer Intelligence Platform

Connected Customer Profiles

Oracle CX Unity connects and unifies all of your customer data together in context, in motion, and in real-time, regardless of source or size. This ensures that each and every customer interaction is data-driven. Across the entire customer lifecycle, we are identifying and building profiles, capturing each customer’s key event data to help better understand passions, interests, needs and attentions. With built-in ID resolution, CX Unity unifies and resolves customer identities across all disparate systems to build a single, unified customer profile for each customer. It captures events based on behavioral data, not just profile ID’s that it collects, but it analyzes what those profiles are doing behaviorally at the granular, individual level in real time.

Enriched for Personalization

While most marketers’ view of the customer may stop and end here, there is so much more about your customers that you simply just can’t glean from various sources. CX Unity has an enrichment layer that provides seamless access to the world’s largest 3rd party data market, the Oracle Data Cloud. You can learn much more about your customers such as geo-demographics, estimated net worth, family size, offline shopping behaviors, intent and much more. Augment your connected customer profiles with data enrichment that blends second and third party probabilistic data with first party deterministic data to provide a true understanding of your customers’ intent for hyper-personalization.

Intent-Curated Segmentation

A single view of the customer is great. But, that view doesn't mean much unless it’s actionable. With built-in predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms, CX Unity provides deep, granular, segmentation-of-one scale across as much data as you want, in real time. With segmentation as a core offering, it allows you to centralize audience creation and then execute those audiences across your entire CX ecosystem. AI/machine learning is natively embedded, allowing you to pick the best audiences for your campaigns.

Actionable Customer Analytics

Detailed analytics provide a deep understanding on why something performed the way it did. Often, causality is still hard to identify when you are looking at terabytes of engagement data. A detailed root cause analysis helps you optimize your campaigns by taking actions straight from the analytics.

Seamless Experiences

After you decide what experiences you want to serve your customers, you have to actually deliver them. Customers don’t think in channels. They expect an individualized experience wherever, whenever and however they interact with the brand. Great experiences should be delivered through every channel - direct mail, contact center, email, mobile, social, your website, and through advertising channels like search and display. Oracle CX Unity enables one-to-one personalization at scale. Create faster time to value with out-of-the-box integrations and a push-button ability to build and publish segments into Oracle and non-Oracle applications.

More and more, we see the most innovative companies are starting to compete on this type of holistic experience, and Oracle is the only vendor that has the pre-integrated and industry leading solutions across this entire range of CX. You don’t need to take our word for it, we were cited as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2019.

Your customers deserve a great experience whenever they interact with your brand. Oracle CX Unity enables companies to deliver contextually aware and highly personalized experiences that delight customers whenever and however they engage with them, improving customer satisfaction and increasing greater customer lifetime value.

For more information, visit https://www.oracle.com/applications/customer-experience/platform/cx-unity.html.

Collecting customer data is just the first step. It is more important what you do with it. What can you do? Deliver more engaging and relevant marketing. Find out how and what other tools you would need at: https://www.oracle.com/marketingcloud/.