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5 years ago

Clouds: Connecting the dots with data

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It takes months to find a customer and only seconds to lose one. These days, however, it might take milliseconds. 

Thanks to on-demand information and services available anytime and anywhere, customers are more empowered than ever before and have sky-high expectations. If a customer is bored or impatient, confused or frustrated with the services that they are being provided for just a second, there are a myriad of other choices in the market that they can turn to.

Research and advisory leader Gartner has predicted that by 2020, poor customer experiences will destroy nearly a third of digital business projects. PwC has revealed that 73 per cent of customers have underlined 'experience' as an important factor in their purchasing decision.

In this context, providing a personalised, seamless and predictive customer experience is a core pillar of business success. The only way to achieve this becomes possible by connecting every part of the enterprise and ensuring that customers are at the centre of all decision-making.

Connection and integration can help businesses maintain a single view of their customers. The average consumer generates a huge amount of data every day, across a vast range of channels. In fact, an estimated 90 per cent of the data that now exists was created in the past two years. On social media platforms, mobile, desktop and connected TV, consumers are creating chunks of data based on their interests, purchases, location and brand sentiment. But when all that data remain isolated in business silos, the view of the customer becomes fragmented.

This is where cloud application can help as they enable a single point of view on customer data. With the help of cloud applications, businesses can tear down silos so that more customer data is collected and shared, in an open and usable way, with everyone in the organisation. The integration extends from the frontlines of the business to help marketers create more personalised engagements and goes all the way to the back-office. Finally, data can be quickly and effectively used to streamline interlocked Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes across supply chain, manufacturing, logistics and more. This data can help to inform and facilitate broader strategic initiatives.

Customer-centricity starts from the inside out. When the existing business environment is integrated and interoperable, without the perils of archived technology and thinking, continual innovation is finally possible.

To go above and beyond for their customers in a competitive landscape, many organisations are setting examples by improving customer experience at the front office and driving new innovation at the back office. They are doing this by investing in cloud systems that will connect data.

For example, with the help of Internet of Things, high-end audio equipment brand Denon & Marantz collected data on how their products were being used. They discovered something interesting: when given the option to name their Denon wireless speaker, many customers called it a "bathroom speaker". With this insight in hand, teams across the business collaborated to give customers more of what they wanted.  Engineers of Denon took it upon themselves to prioritise bathroom-proofing the speakers ahead of other product updates. The marketing team spun customer outreach campaigns based around the humidity-resistance of the speakers. By working together and sharing data, Denon was able to provide a proactive service to customers and greatly enhance their experience with the product. 

A cloud data management platform is helping to provide Australian airline Jetstar with a more robust and singular view of customers so that the business can speak to them as individuals in the right place and at the right time. Recently, the research teams of Jetstar were able to engage in an email activity using display advertising in a bid to reach a disengaged customer segment. This led to a growth in Jetstar's revenue by 70 per cent.

The example of ZALORA, the largest e-commerce fashion company in Southeast Asia, can be provided to prove how the right back-end system can drive new levels of customer loyalty. It was important for ZALORA to have a tool that helps them to listen and respond in real-time to their customers through personalised interaction. With the help of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, ZALORA moved from a batch and blast model and became an orchestrator of personalised conversations. This helped ZALORA to cut down the time needed to talk to a customer by 50 per cent leading to an increase in ZALORA's revenue.

In the end, connected information is the fuel that drives customer-centricity. When a business connects all data and dots across it, it finds itself in a position to deliver rich internal insight and provide truly excellent experiences to its customers. The next wave of customer service is already here, bringing significantly enhanced experiences to customers and redefining the companies that will come out on top.

Brian Donn is Vice President and Head of CX Cloud Applications, Oracle APAC.

[email protected]

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