New AI capabilities can automate processes, improve insights, and enhance sales, marketing and servicing productivity.
New artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities – such as those announced at Oracle CloudWorld 2023 for Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) – may just be able to help marketers, sellers, and service agents grow revenue and deliver exceptional customer experience.
Whether great or appalling, we take for granted that businesses offer some sort of customer service. The reason is simple: customer service is a critical driver of CX. These days, businesses compete on experiences. Customers expect a harmonized experience at real-time speed, in every and any context.
It’s what differentiates a business from its competitors, and long-term survival depends on being able to stand out from the crowd. But differentiation is hard to achieve, especially in a way that’s both sustainable and affordable. Customer service technologies are becoming commodities — almost any business can support customers over social media and messaging channels, offer a self-service customer portal, integrate its phone channel with the agent desktop, and implement a chatbot.
The challenge for marketers, sellers, and service agents is to leverage the new velocity and vast quantity of data, with the help of AI, to unlock powerful insights that benefit customers and help grow business.
Such AI capabilities liberate marketers, sellers, and service agents from time-consuming and manual tasks by unlocking relevant content, recommendations, and insights with automation and conversational interfaces.
Taking AI by the horns
“Many organizations today are seeking ways to automate disconnected manual processes and drive efficiencies as they realize new customer and revenue opportunities are being left on the table,” said Paul Greenberg, managing principal of The 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light. “The latest AI updates to Oracle Cloud CX, are thoughtful and intelligent additions to the already strong portfolio. They are geared to automating age-old processes that take too much time and human energy. This will more than likely positively impact employee experiences, customer outcomes, and the bottom line.”
“Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) are changing the way we interact with people, content, and critical knowledge in our enterprises. We can now unlock insights and communicate with clarity like never before,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager, Oracle Cloud CX. “With a unique combination of traditional and generative AI, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and embedded in application flows, Oracle Cloud CX enables customer experience professionals to do their jobs with more accuracy and efficiency to ultimately drive more revenue.
New Oracle Cloud CX capabilities announced at the September 2023 event in Las Vegas include:
-
Generative AI for Service: Generates content and streamlines processes automatically to help organizations resolve customer service issues faster. Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Service, the new generative AI capabilities include assisted agent responses, knowledge articles, and administrator guidance as well as search augmentation, customer engagement summaries, and field service recommendations.
“Many organizations struggle to fill traditional customer service roles and are adding more automation, digital assistants, and self-service channels to keep up with customer expectations,” said Aly Pinder, research vice president, IDC. “With the latest updates to Oracle Cloud CX, organizations can take advantage of generative AI to rapidly solve issues and enhance the customer experience by increasing service agent, field technician, and customer self-service efficiency.”
-
Guided Campaigns: Enables marketing and sales teams to accelerate revenue by eliminating time-consuming coordination and delivering conversation-ready opportunities directly to sellers. Built on Oracle Fusion Cloud Marketing, Guided Campaigns walks marketers through a step-by-step process to launch personalized, brand-approved campaigns that automatically qualify leads and deliver them directly to sellers as conversion-ready opportunities.
According to Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Survey, 55% of interactions within a buying cycle are self-guided. “As buyers move their research to digital channels, sellers lose visibility into these previously personal moments — but improvements in digital capture tools have increased marketing’s interaction visibility. A lack of technology integration between departments means that sellers haven’t had access to much of this data yet,” said Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst, Forrester in “Leverage Visibility Into Sales Interactions To Generate Sales Insights.”
-
AI-Powered Account Linking: Gives sellers full visibility into accounts to reduce renewal time, expand upsell opportunities, and accelerate deal close. Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Sales, the new capabilities automatically detect and connect relevant account records in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to provide sellers with actionable insights. For example, sellers can be alerted when subscription services are nearing threshold limits to enable effective up-sell and re-sell conversations.
-
B2B Customer Data Platform (CDP) Enhancements: Scores and identifies sales opportunities based on past engagement to uncover the next best contact for hyper-personalization among sophisticated enterprise buying groups. The Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform segmentation canvas now supports the targeting of complex buying groups within an account hierarchy, while streamlined access to data enrichment and intent signals improves targeting and accelerates marketing and sales campaigns.
-
Intelligent Sales Orchestration: Helps sellers to be more focused, efficient, and effective by automating processes and providing AI-generated insights and recommendations. Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Sales, the new capabilities provide step-by-step guidance for complex sales scenarios and automatically logs activity with clean and enriched data so that the seller can stay focused on the buyer.
-
Advanced Field Asset Monitoring: Increases field service productivity by improving access to relevant information of all managed assets. Oracle Field Service, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Service, provides field service technicians with new mobile capabilities to improve field access to critical service and repair information, including asset details, work-order history, asset notes, warranties, and subscriptions, on any device.
