Accelerating Business Value
Continued
Frank Zucco, MassMutual's CRM project manager, recalls a time when the company faced challenges getting its integrations connected and running, and Blanchard put him in direct contact with the Oracle developers who created the technology. "We had engineers on the phone, so here are the guys who basically wrote the code, helping us resolve some of the issues we were having," says Zucco. "I thought that was pretty powerful." The way the issues were resolved was an ideal example of how a partnership with Oracle Advanced Customer Services yields more than just access to expertise; when MassMutual has a problem, Oracle will marshal whatever resources are necessary to solve it as quickly as possible.
Powering Business Intelligence
Once the integrations were in place, Reed and his team were able to demonstrate to executives the power of the resulting solution. For example, when MassMutual Retirement Services recently named Elaine Sarsynski as the organization's executive vice president, one of the first things Sarsynski asked for was a demo of the Siebel dashboard. She hoped it would provide the information she needed to monitor the business and make swift decisions—and it did. During the demo, Sarsynski was immediately able to access sales portfolios for the reps that she was planning to meet with the following day. The fact that she could instantly tap the capabilities of the tools at her disposal was a powerful validation of the work done by Reed's staff.
This is just one example of the capabilities that have led Reed to conclude that the value of Oracle software is inherently connected to the support that Oracle Advanced Customer Services and the technical account manager provide. He believes that when you're making a substantial investment in software, you want to move quickly, and you want access to the right answers. For that reason, he credits the contribution of Oracle's Advanced Customer Services team for helping MassMutual realize benefits it otherwise might not have seen for years. The kinds of integrations the company sought—in which Siebel CRM and Oracle Business Intelligence are linked to a variety of legacy systems, enabling MassMutual to convert previously disparate pools of data into a foundation for decisive action—could have been achieved in a timely fashion only with the help of the Advanced Customer Services team's experience. That has translated into MassMutual being able to target its customer outreach in ways the company's competition can't match.
The robust capabilities MassMutual has been enjoying are expected to become even more compelling once the company completes its upgrade to the latest versions of Siebel CRM and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition. Those upgrades, expected to be finished by midyear, will only broaden the analytical powers of MassMutual's CRM environment, raising the bar on the kinds of data decision-makers will have at their fingertips.
"What we're able to offer is a true analytical capability, so that you can understand what the data's telling you and turn it into action plans," says Reed. "That's something that enables our service professionals to transform the level of service that we're providing. We've made a real change in our business—we've gone from providing something that's transactional to providing something that is far more consultative and deeper in value."
For More Information
Oracle's Siebel CRM
Oracle Business Intelligence
Oracle Advanced Customer Services
Tony Kontzer is a business/technology writer based in Silicon Valley who has written for
Investor's Business Daily, CIO Insight, Network World, and
Wired.
