2013 Trends in Customer Experience

At the edge of 2012 there is, luckily, still time to discuss the trends in Customer Experience for 2013.

Already in 2012 Customer Experience has been a major topic for every organization that is facing customers and interacting with them. Even this blog holds a couple of nice examples of  discussing the topic as well as some nice thoughtleadership on the topicby our organization.

And it is on the radar of a couple of large software vendors as well: Oracle, Salesforce.com, IBM, to name a few, are all focusing on the topic, all with their own special flavour of focus, eg. Commerce, Social & Service or Supply Chain.

So how about the trends for customer experience? Well here they are!

1. Next Generation privacyPeoples privacy is not what it was in the past. People are willing to share their information with each other as well as with (commercial) organizations, if however they can benefit from sharing this information. For organizations this means that they can get to know their customers in far more detail and can be much more relevant in the interactions they have with these people. so in short: People are willing to share a lot of their personal information with organizations. What they ask in return and expect is simple: Security of the information shared, value add and true sensibility

2. The year of the CeXOAs many organizations are starting to take the Customer Experience topic serious, many organizations are (planning) to appoint a person responsible for setting up and maintaining Customer Experience for their organization: the Chief customer eXperience Officer. Although there are some slight differences in maturity in countries around the globe, in 2013 we will definitely see a tremendous growth of the number of CeXO’s. This will give the adoption of Customer Experience a great boost, since it will bring the focus and attention to the topic, it deserves. 2013 is the year of the CeXO, let’s see who’s on the cover of TIME next year…

3. The store of the future is here – In-store Digital ExperienceStores are incorporating all kind of electronics to enhance your shopping experience: Near Field Communication (NFC) for payments and recognition, linkage of Mobile platforms with in-store kiosks, etc. 2013 will mean an uplift of the In-store Digital Experience, but probably more important to link it and combine it with other channels of interactions you are already used to now. Why? Just to make your life as a customer more convenient and easier, just shop till you drop!

4. Personalized GuidanceLot’s of improvement in the overall Customer Experience can be found in the guidance of customers in all the information that is available. Examples are IPS, Indoor Positioning System for guidance towards the right spot within a store, Next Generation Search Engine Optimization and Online Search and Navigation Guidance on your Website or Webshop. Personalized Guidance will give customers the feeling they get easier access to the information of their relevance and give organizations the possibility to sell more and more accurate. Guide your customer to more revenue!

5. The end of websites as we know themAs new platforms are rising and maturing, traditional websites are passing. At least the interactive functions available on websites are moving towards other platforms: think of examples of webshops on facebook, banking functions on mobile apps and customer service through twitter. This will not mean that we will not see websites anymore, but they will have a place among other (digital and social) channels that are equally important and need their attention too. 2013 will mean more focus on these aspects of websites lifecycles. The web will be a different place a year from now.

6. Federated Customer Service
A lot has been written and said about 360 customer views and interconnected service experience, but until now this has always seemed a bridge to far for a lot of organizations. Well luckily ;-), a good customer experience cannot do without federated or interconnected customer service: an organization must know who I am, what I bought, which complaints I have how loyal I am, etc., etc. And it should not matter which means of interaction I choose: Telephone, Chat, Social, etc. The essence is the customer needs to experience the same service throughout all interactions, only then he or she will experience a good customer service. The good news: IT solutions have matured a lot in this area (Customer Master Data management, CRM Service) and is now offered in your data center as well as in the cloud, not only by Salesforce, but also by vendors like Oracle and Microsoft.

If these trends got you thinking about how your business can benefit from Customer Experience Management, feel free to reach out and discuss in more detail. Make sure you get started before your competition does!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

The Essence of Customer Experience

In Dutch we have a saying that goes like this: “small children (and drunk people) always tell the truth” So why is that relevant when talking about Customer Experience would you say? Well let me explain…

Last week I was in the car with my eldest daughter, she is 6 years old. We got a call from my wife whether we could stop by the supermarket to get some late groceries. Now in the small place we live we actually have two stores from the same grocery chain, I’ll refrain from mentioning their name. My daughter said to me: “so daddy can we go to the one in the middle of the centre of our town and not to the other one?” I replied: “Sure, no problem, but why?” Well, she responded in explaining that the Supermarket manager that walks around in the store she didn’t want to go to, really doesn’t look like the manager she is used to in the TV comercials of the grocery chain. The commercials are all around the supermarket manager wo is a very cheerful guy, that is always doing nice things with and to his customers and very interactive. The manager in the store she didn’t wanted to go isn’t really like that. At all…

To my opinion this is the essence of consistent and relevant customer experience: you expect the same experience through every channel you interact with an organization as a customer. And I was amazed she came up with the topic in that way!

As the example shows, enabling a true multichannel customer experience is not achievable by applying technology only. It should start with what you would like to achieve from a customer experience perspective, how to be relevant to your customers and where to focus on. Be it on positioning and presentation of your products, or how they are priced. How your customers can access your stores or website and how you provide service to them around the goods or service you sell to them. Or probably most important the experience you would like to set for them.
And as the example of my daugthers experience shows, also how to make sure that all the people throughout your organisation are living the way you would like to build the experience. So the organisational transformation that needs to go along with it.

If you take care of the above AND implement a technology solution that really enables a true All-Channel Experience for your customers, based upon Oracle’s Customer Experience product suite, which is best-of-breed in that, for instance, you will enable yourselve a real All-Channel Customer Experience in your interactions with your customer. Either business or individual customers.

I hope the example shows that it is tremendously valuable from a business perspective to drive customer experiences and that you start thinking of what it could do for your company as well. And when you are in need of a business partner that is realyknowledgable on Customer Experience and is a thought leader in your industry on how to focus on specific areas of customer experience. That can help you build a vision, strategy and roadmap for transforming your business into a social and relevant interacting partner for your customers… Come to us, the pioneers on the field of Customer Experience. We will guide you all the way.

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

The truth is out there…

In the last couple of weeks Oracle announced that they will buy Vitrue, “a leading cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns”, at least that’s what the brochure says. On the web, opinions range from very positive, what else would you do when you get bought and see a sunny future ahead of you,  to very negative, questioning whether Larry Ellisons state-of-mind went to insane or not.

Three days ago Oracle announced to buy Collective Intellect, a real time text analytics company which has several cloud based products in this particular area, ranging from social media analytics to inhouse data analytics. Once again this acquisition (like the Vitrue acquisition) is one in the strategic Customer Experience line, since this will boost customer experience through usage of the social conversations (both external as well as internal) as sources of customer intelligence and take direct action on it in the interaction with customers. Hence making better targeting of the audience possible.
Taking a look at the comments now, people tend to see a more strategic line and also start seeing the way Oracle is repositioning towards Salesforce.com .
Let’s face it this acquisition together with the Vitrue one is making Salesforce’s live harder, over and over again.

The art of the possible

So would you call these acquisitions strategic? Well the truth is out there on the web. Taking a look at the reference the acquired companies have themselves and what value they can bring within the rest of the Oracle product stack they will be combined with, to my opinion the answer is most definitely: Yes!

This is most definitely all part of Oracle’s Cloud strategy (by the way did you watch this) and it’s strategy around Customer Experience. We see the great value of this strategy. What Oracle do is, they combine the products that are capable of making customer experience possible right from the start. Making sure the products they acquire adhere to there standard of open integration and fitting it in with the other products.
We as Capgemini go even a bit further. We take our in depth knowledge of customers, for instance in the Retail and Consumer products sectors and us it to combine all of the necessary Oracle components into one, fully (pre) integrated solution.
With this solution Capgemini and Oracle together make a full All Channel Experience possible for our Retail and Consumer Products customers.

So do you want to engage and interact with your customer through all channels with the best possible customer experience today,  do not hesitate and contact Capgemini, we’ll make I happen for you and show you the art of the possible!

Arjan Kramer is Oracle Solution Architect for Capgemini and thoughtleader on B2C Direct

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog

How mobile is Oracle?

Nice question if you ask me. And if you would have asked me one year ago (just after #oow10) I would have said: "Well, good question..." And like a good consultant should, adding to that: "You should look at what is already there rather than what is missing..."

This year at #oow11 it was a totally different story! Everywhere you went mobile popped up and drew attention of many people. BTW with mobile of course I mean the use of mobile platforms and devices and based on that applications that make the use of these devices fit the needs of the contemporary business user.

Another good thing to know in this context is the expectation about the usage / adoption of mobile: by 2016, there will be around 5 billion mobile users worldwide!

So let's look at a couple of examples, how Oracle is doing in the mobile area:

Padzilla

Padzilla running Fusion Tap in Action!

During Oracle OpenWorld the company Crunchy Logistics placed a so called Padzilla, a huge 70" iPad near the Exhibition grounds in the Moscone Center. It showed the Oracle Fusion Tap which is the Oracle Fusion Applications Mobile app! More on this later on in this blog post.

Oracle ADF & ADF Mobile
At #oow11 Oracle also announced the new version of Oracle ADF (Mobile)

Hottest thing here is that the framework will contain a "build once, deploy to many" feature for mobile applications. So Mobile applications will be developed from JDeveloper and at deployment time a developer can choose to which platform it needs to be deployed.

 

OBIEE goes Mobile
For OBIEE Oracle developed a brand new mobile app (currently for the iOS platform only) which enables the OBIEE dashboard on you rmobile device! As mentioned brand new so it better supports todays touchscreen gestures and also things like click through analyses, publisher reports, scorecards, alerts and catalog search.

And probably the best thing is: all BI content created within the OBIEE application is instantly available on mobile devices! No further development necesarry.

 

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c
Oracle not only thought of the business user as it comes to mobile, also the Technical Administrators of business applications now have the abillity to utilize their iPad in their work environment. Let's face it: they will have the capabilities to link their devices directly to the BO systems and overcoming the technical hurdles that brings ;-)

What Oracle did is with the 12c (BTW the c of course stands for cloud)  version of Enterprise Manager, made it Mobile app enabled.
So now an administrator can be in a meeting and solve the technical database issue with your critical business application right away from his iPad or choose to deploy a test application to the Oracle Public cloud environment in one click to free up space in the companies own datacentre from his iPhone!

Fusion Applications
As mentioned earlier in this post Oracle has been further developing Fusion applications and announced a brand new mobile app which will be added to the Fusion Applications product family: Fusion Tap
 

This will bring the productivity and collaboration of Fusion Applications right to your mobile device!

But there's more...
Besides all of the examples above Oracle has also been further developing Mobile applications that were already available out there.
Examples are Siebel Sales apps and the app for WebCenter Spaces.

Is Oracle ready for mobile?
So the conclusion from this is, that yes Oracle had some catching up to do. They definitely put a lot of effort in it and to my opinion they succeeded in catching up and overtaking!

Are you currently looking for mobile appliances within your business, either provided out-of-the-box or customly built to fit your exact needs: Oracle is more than capable of fulfilling that for you.

So if you want to move mobile with your organisation / enterprise: go for Oracle!

Arjan Kramer is Solution Architect and thoughtleader for Oracle WebCenter at Capgemini. follow him at twitter.com/arjankramer

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog