Introduction

Customers today have new ways to research, evaluate, compare, purchase, and provide feedback on products and services. Commerce has evolved from merely a single customer interaction point—the bricks-and-mortar storefront—to a buying environment in which the customer has many choices on where, when, and how they choose to interact with your brand. What was once a simple customer buying process has evolved to include the Web, mobile, social media, kiosks, call centers, and more.

Throughout that buying process, your customers expect each interaction to be consistent, relevant, and personalized. Oracle can bring all of this together and help your company by connecting your customer engagements across touchpoints, providing actionable insight to maximize engagements with your customers, and optimizing execution to deliver on the value.

In this executive strategy brief, we will explore the changing commerce landscape and how Oracle’s commerce solutions help organizations deliver a consistent, relevant, and personalized cross-channel buying experience across touchpoints including the Web, contact centers, mobile devices, social media, retail stores, and more.

Grow and Retain More Effectively and Efficiently

Customer experience is the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, channels, systems, or products.¹ Today, your customer has many choices, and it is critical to make their experience as seamless as possible as they move from one touchpoint to another and back again.

Let’s consider what your company does in three dimensions:

•Retention. Building lasting relationships with your customers through positive selling interactions across touchpoints and establishing a level of ongoing loyalty.

•Efficiency. Serving customers where and when they choose to interact in a consistent manner.

•Acquisition. Growing revenue, adding customers, and growing share of wallet from existing customers.

Think about the things that you and your team are working on. What are your top business pains? What areas and metrics have you identified as needing improvement? How do they relate to retention, efficiency, and acquisition?

In this executive strategy brief, you will learn more about how connecting the right environment and processes across these interrelated dimensions can help you grow your business.

The Changing Commerce Landscape

Shopping Across Multiple Touchpoints Is a Given

Consumers expect to glide seamlessly among your brand’s touchpoints. However, many organizations are stretched thin in their attempts to balance the resources required to meet back-end challenges while sprinting to deliver engaging, consistent user experiences that capture more mind share and wallet share.

According to a November 2011 study commissioned by Oracle, “Channel Commerce 2011: The Consumer View,” 54 percent of consumers in the U.S. and Canada ages 18 years and older regularly employ two or more channels before they make a purchase. Stores remain the go-to channel for consumers to get immediate and tangible access to products. The stakes are high for businesses to have the right product when customers walk in the door, with pricing and promotions that are the same or better than what shoppers found online.

One of your company’s top priorities should include the ability to exchange and use the same information about your customers, merchandise, pricing, and promotions across all customer touchpoints. Today’s customer expects it.

Mobile Is a Catalyst for Cross-Channel

Mobile commerce, or m-commerce, is changing the way consumers research and buy products. Armed with smartphones and tablets, consumers now have access to more and more product information and can compare products and prices from anywhere. According to a comScore 2012 “Mobile Future in Focus” report, 50 percent of U.S. smartphone owners used their phones to perform retail research while in a store.

The good news is that companies realize the importance of mobile commerce. Consumers are using mobile Websites and apps in tandem with other touchpoints. According to an Oracle 2011 survey of e-commerce professionals, 41 percent of respondents at online organizations cited that they plan to invest more resources on the front end of mobile user experiences and integrate mobile with their back-end technology.

Social Is Here, but Social Commerce Is Hard to Measure

It used to be that companies used market research and focus groups to get a pulse on how customers feel about a company and its products. Today social media, blogs, and product reviews have dramatically tipped the balance between the customer and a company and its products.

According to The 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in March 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive, after a poor customer experience more than a quarter of consumers (26 percent) posted a negative comment on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter for hundreds—even thousands—of their friends and followers to see. The silver lining is that of the 22 percent of consumers who did get a response to their complaint, 19 percent went on to post a positive comment about the organization.

Online organizations aim to build experiences around consumers. They know that social elements are a necessity to further engage the millions of socially active consumers and meet their expectations. 42 percent of online consumers have “followed” a retailer proactively through Facebook, Twitter, or a retailer’s blog, and the average person follows about six retailers, according to the “2011 Social Commerce Study,” a joint research project by Shop.org, comScore, and Social Shopping Labs.

The following sections will provide you with a better understanding of how Oracle can help you rise to these new commerce challenges, thrive to deliver on your brand promise, and provide the best customer experience across all the ways your customers interact with you.

The Customer Journey Has Become More Complex

Customers Expect a Seamless Experience

Much needs to be done to connect the customer experience across all touchpoints. Companies struggle to deliver the same content, product inventory, features, and overall experience optimized appropriately for their growing assortment of touchpoints.

35 percent of consumers in the U.S. and Canada ages 18 years and older expect to be able to redeem the same coupons and promotional offers both online and in stores. 22 percent said they expect to be able to access their online shopping cart, past purchases, wish list, loyalty points, and order status no matter where they shop, based on the results of an Oracle 2011 study, “Cross-Channel Commerce 2011: The Consumer View.” A February 2012 Oracle study, “E-Commerce Trends for 2012,” found that only 8 percent of retailers believe  their consumers receive an excellent, consistent experience across all touchpoints.

And siloed touchpoints have a direct impact on the customer experience. The following table below shows a few common roadblocks to success.

Analytics Drives Better Experiences

Investment in Web analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools are critical for understanding the customer and driving a greater customer experience. However, only 26 percent of the survey respondents said that there is still very limited visibility into what’s working and what’s not according to Oracle’s research study, “E-Commerce Trends for 2012.”. Limited knowledge may be partly due to lack of cross-organization communication, but a gaping hole exists in making real-time insight and actionable analytics available to members of IT and business teams. To handle the expanding number of touchpoints, the volume and variety of customer information, and the use of analytics, organizations need agile merchandising analytics and BI tools to offer more-targeted experiences and a more efficient business.

Oracle Commerce Solutions

Empowering People. Empowering Brands.

Oracle’s commerce solutions enable  you to create a consistent, relevant, and personalized customer experience that delivers on your brand promise. Oracle’s commerce solutions enable you to:

•Connect every customer interaction across all touchpoints

•Personalize the products and content to specific customer interests and device types

•Engage customers at the point of need

•Increase retention, incent referrals, and maximize lifetime revenue

•Optimize operations across all back-end systems and beyond the initial sale

Oracle Commerce solutions include:

•Oracle ATG Commerce

•Oracle Endeca

•Oracle Live Help On Demand

•Oracle Recommendations On Demand

•Oracle’s Siebel Quote and Order Capture

•Oracle Fusion Sales

Personalize Customer Engagement Across Touchpoints

Consistency is key. And today’s customers expect it across all touchpoints. Oracle’s commerce solutions enable you to provide a seamless, personalized, and consistent customer journey no matter where or how customers choose to engage with you—store, Web, mobile, social networks, kiosk, or call center.

Connect Buyers with Most Relevant Products

Oracle allows you to present products and offerings tailored to specific customers based on what you know about them. It enables you to dynamically manage sites across all touchpoints, including mobile and social, to quickly respond to market needs. Business user tools ensure that you are relying on the proper review/approval processes, and easily allow merchandisers and business owners to manage product catalogs, search, promotions, pricing, coupons, and offers.

Influence Experiences to Maximize Conversion

Getting shoppers to your site is only half the battle. Leading companies are successful because they can quickly convert shoppers into customers through effective merchandising. Oracle’s commerce solutions allow you to use all content and data from across the commerce ecosystem to drive personalization, merchandising, and relevant search results. The result: higher conversions and order values and decreased shopping-cart abandonment. Oracle helps you guide and influence customers in each step of their journey by delivering the most relevant content consistently across whatever device they choose to use.

Tie Individualized Sites to Customer Profiles

Oracle allows you to present relevant content in support of marketing campaigns, Adwords, and Google Search by leveraging customer profile and behavior information. You can establish rules-driven recommendations and promotions that enable you to present the most relevant and intelligent offers. Automated recommendations drive cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to maximize your margins and gain more revenue throughout the lifetime of your customers.

Optimize Execution to Deliver Value

For an ideal customer experience, you need to ensure your customers can easily find the products and services they are looking for, and assist them when they need help—either before, during, or after the sale. That may include live help or access to a knowledgebase to easily find the answers to their pressing questions. And you need to deliver products to them where and when they want them. Oracle can help you deliver on your brand promise.

Target Experiences Across Touchpoints

A rewarding customer experience includes delivering the right content to the right customer at the right time. Oracle’s commerce solutions enable you to easily deliver consistent experiences wherever customers interact with your brand, across all touchpoints. You can offer the ideal experience on different interaction points by leveraging personalization and content targeting as well as proactively managing pricing and profit margins across products, store locations, and devices.

Engage Buyers at the Point of Need

The adage, “It’s easier to keep happy clients than find new ones,” is also true in commerce. Oracle can help your customer services team proactively identify and engage at-risk buyers by reaching out to them via chat, call, or e-mail when they need help. And in doing so, you can improve customer service levels, increase average sales, and increase conversion rates. Oracle can also help you slash your customer support costs by increasing agent productivity and first-contact resolution.

Streamline Order Capture and Delivery Execution

Oracle’s commerce solutions enable you to improve order accuracy and delivery execution across channels. Oracle Order Management solutions help you accurately capture the perfect customer order across multiple channels and streamline orchestration of order details for seamless fulfillment execution. Thus, you can communicate order status to customers and efficiently handle shipment planning and confirmation.

Insight to Maximize the Experience

Customer data is only as good as what you do with it. Oracle’s commerce solutions extend beyond the sale to help you centrally collect customer data, up-sell and cross-sell customers to related products and services, and build customer lifetime value. You can drill deep into customer data to also create more-impactful loyalty programs and more-targeted offers.

Unified Insight Across All Commerce Data

Oracle’s commerce solutions enable you to create a 360-degree customer master that spans all touchpoints. With Oracle you can build a single repository of both structured and unstructured data; cleanse, enrich, and synchronize key business data, including from external sources; and develop easy-to-use business user tools for rapid insight to make accurate, timely decisions that drive immediate results. And this is an ongoing process. As new transaction, customer, and product data arises, it’s collected and aggregated immediately, giving your business team access to the most up-to-date and accurate information and your customers more relevant, personalized, and consistent experiences.

Steer Customers to Related Products

With Oracle you can automate and personalize online shopping by steering customers to related products. You can tailor recommendations that match each shopper’s current needs with your merchandizing strategies—presenting customers with the right suggestions, at the right time, and in the right channel. You can increase average sales, drive repeat purchases, and dramatically improve conversion rates by personalizing each touchpoint with each buyer across your site—e-mail, call center, social networks, and other touchpoints.

Increase Loyalty to Maximize Lifetime Value

Loyalty programs enable you to identify, attract, and acquire consumers across channels—point of sale, Web, mobile, and social media. You can recognize them for their long-term value and deliver real-time loyalty rewards to maximize customer value and sustain a competitive edge. As brands increasingly look to adopt loyalty programs that stand out from the competition, they are faced with programs that lack personalization, resulting in lower perceived value and program failures.

Oracle’s loyalty management solution helps brands differentiate themselves by quickly launching highly innovative and personalized one-to-one loyalty programs that resonate with customers’ lifestyles across industries, including travel and transportation, retail, telecommunications, and financial services. You can now drive dynamic, differentiated loyalty strategies to captivate consumers while surpassing competitor programs through built-in best-practice capabilities, such as theme-based clubs, a graphical promotion design tool, and recurring awards.

Summary

We have now entered the age of the customer, in which customers are making decisions that often bypass your employees and interact directly with their peers and social channels, while researching on their own via mobile devices. Your customers expect a consistent, relevant, and personalized buying experience, and internal applications and systems need to support it. Customer experience solutions support every step of the customer journey by delivering interactions that are more relevant and efficient, whether for internal use or Web self-service.

Creating great customer experiences starts with knowing exactly who your customers are, their needs, and providing the best recommendations based on their history with your company, as well as what you have learned through their social presence. You need to connect and personalize their experiences as they travel across touchpoints and engage with your brand.

With a comprehensive suite of solutions and technologies for commerce, service and support, sales, insight, loyalty and marketing, and social media, Oracle can address the entire customer lifecycle. You will be able to simultaneously connect and engage customers, learn more about them, and make it easy and rewarding to do business with you. Oracle’s customer experience solutions enable you to deliver great customer experiences and profitable customer journeys.

Contact Us

To learn more about Oracle customer experience solutions, please visit the Oracle Customer Experience page or call +1.800.ORACLE1 to speak to an Oracle representative.

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1 Gartner Webinar Presentation, “Customer Experience Driving Value,” Gene Alvarez, July 5, 2012.