To cloud or not to cloud

I guess by now you're used to the term cloud and if you're not: hey don't worry, experts are still uncertain what exactly defines the cloud so you should be good.

What however seems to be inevitable in the IT industry is that you are moving to the cloud, again a lot of discussion about at which exact pace this will be, and probably nobody will know before it really happens, but it is inevitable. 
But do you need to care? And what is the impact? How about the (IT) business partners you work with, will the way you work with them change? Will it impact the way you do business? I guess in a sense the answer to all of the above questions is: Yes!

Obviously one of the main advantages of cloud, and than I mean enterprise software delivered through the cloud or Software-As-A-Service is that you do not have to worry about keeping your software version up-to-date, and you can always benefit from new features added in a short amount of time.

But how about your business, how can it affect the way you do business? Well there's a huge variety of possibilities there, even some that you might not be aware of yet... For instance how internet of things could play a role in your customers purchasing your products and services. Cloud will allow you to react much quicker and probably smoother to changes in digital  than any enterprise software application running in your own datacenter or server farm will ever allow you.

Implementing cloud solutions however requires a quite drastic other approach to elements like developing, maintaining and releasing. One of the buzz-words in that respect is DevOps and without dwelling into the actual definition, what DevOps brings organizations, is the correct combination of people and capabilities required to implement, develop and maintain solutions in one team. Why is this so crucial specifically with cloud? That's simple, as cloud solutions are being implemented and taken into production, the next release of the software is already available in most cases and hence this needs to be validated and put live as soon as possible as well as working on the next sprint of functionality to be taken into production. A faster time-to-market requiring everyone's contribution: administrators, developers, product owners, etc. And of course this impacts the way you work with you IT business partners.

So to summarize by more or less quoting a senior business leader I was listening to just a couple of weeks ago: "Cloud really has impact and we need to take action on it!" So what are you waiting for? Figure out how your business can benefit from the cloud and go for it!

Digital Marketing: born in the cloud or...

In my work for a global retail company recently, I came across something I believe is common to lots of multinational / large enterprises that are utilizing digital marketing to reach out to consumers and their customers.

After defining the best strategy for their marketing, including digital marketing companies decide which tools they will use for the actual execution of their marketing campaigns. If your strategy is to have a focus on digital marketing then the obvious choice for a marketing execution or marketing automation tool is a cloud based one. Simply because of a couple of factors:

it's close to where your customers are: social, mobile and always online
a wide variety of digital channels available which can easily be mixed
low or short learning curve for business people to adapt
If that is the case life is simple you would say, just swipe your creditcard and purchase  access to the cloud based tool, like Eloqua, ExactTarget or Responsys and off you go. And yes, if all you want to do is take your customer base, do lightweight segmentation based on basic customer information, like age for instance you're completely right.
However when you want to provide real personalized and targeted content to your customers, based on a breadth of data, coming from a variety of data-sources you will run short with these cloud based marketing automation tools. Why? Because they're not up to it yet:

Handling large volumes of data to and from the cloud > think for instance you're online sales transactions
Ability to integrate multiple sources of data
Ability to properly analyze, segment and prepare data for personalized targeting
So if you're looking for an end-2-end marketing automation solution, capable of handling your advanced personalization and data requirements, currently you will end up with a hybrid digital marketing solution comprised of a cloud based marketing tool supported by an on premise data analytics environment.

So moving your digital marketing to the cloud? Yes please! 
But consider how you will cater for the necessary analytics and persoanlization that modern digital marketing requires!

B2B Digital CX is the tsunami...

Although NRF’s Big Show is most about B2C cases here’s one to chew on when you are a B2B company (as well). 

If you would rank all of what has been going on around Digital Customer Experience in the B2C market space as an earthquake, then definitely Digital CX in B2B would rank as a tsunami. Of course one can argue what is worse, tsunami or earthquake, but in the core the disruption Digital CX brings to the B2B space is enormous.

Let me tell you why...
Obviously we’re all human and that doesn’t change when we drive to the office. And obviously our manager in the organization we work for can be as demanding as our manager at home… :-) Or maybe even more demanding. So the customer experience we have when interacting with the companies and organizations in our private lives, we more and more expect in our business live as well. Not only because we are used to it, but also from an efficiency point of view: it shouldn’t take any longer and be more difficult to order and receive something we order in our B2B role than it takes in our private live. The offers we get, personalized to our profile should be available both in our private situation as well as in our professional one. So why is the Digital disruption a tsunami in the B2B area, in other words why is this such a big change in B2B? Probably the answer to that is probably best described by a real-life example.

A couple of years back Desigual, a colourful fashion brand from Spain, operated with a B2B sales only strategy. This meant that as a manufacturer they were not selling their clothes themselves, but instead relied on other retailers selling their products. Realizing the strong dependency on their B2B partners, Desigual started defining a clear Digital strategy how to engage with these “customers” and basically this came down to applying some rules earlier found more or even only in the B2C space. Things like building a B2B e-commerce webshop, applying personalization of the offers in this environment, utilizing analytics of earlier purchases and applying these learning as well as personal preferences to provide offers. Also applying direct marketing as if it was a B2C situation. And guess what happened? Yes Desigual started to improve sales figures year-over-year just by applying these B2C customer interaction techniques in their B2B environment.

Does this mean that there is a one-to-one relationship between B2C and B2B then? No, there isn’t, and that’s what actually makes it a tsunami. First of all for a lot of B2B companies this means a huge shift in their strategy of how they engage with their customers. Secondly it highly influences how the business processes are aligned with this strategy and last but not least in the way they apply IT or Digital capabilities. In the Desigual case, this shift meant moving from paper orders and visiting sales reps to almost solely selling through their e-Commerce channel. So: huge impact on the way of working of the Desigual people and their customers (more efficient), a big change to their IT landscape both driven from a clear strategy and roadmap towards this new customer & sales approach. In summary it is a bigger change for B2B as these companies in general have been stuck with “old ways”, already for a longer period and the change has not been applied as gradually as in B2C.

So are you a B2B company (as well)? And are you looking for the right priorities for the new year? Go digital now, before it’s too late!

Cloud: the fundament for a strong Digital Transformation

During Oracle OpenWorld 2014, one word you could not escape from was Cloud. Obviously Cloud is a big deal for Oracle. Why? well they invested heavily in it in the last couple of years especially 2013 and 2014. Not only in software and platform but even in the underlying hardware.

So as a business person, why should you care about cloud? Well to tell you the truth… I do not know either. Of course cloud enables you to act quickly in certain situations, like allowing you to easily setup a marketing campaign or launch a nice microsite for that product launch you have coming. In the long run it has to connect to the systems and processes you already have in place in your organization.

Your cloud or mine?
So what did Oracle do that you might benefit from? Well with their investments there are three key elements that they worked on:
- Breadth of capabilities: other than any of the competitor Cloud software providers (SAAS) Oracle doesn’t focus on a single business process or silo (like Salesforce.com or Workday), but invests and implements a full range of enterprise wide capabilities: ERP, CRM, HCM. This allows business to choose from a variety of capabilities to be fulfilled in the Cloud, and even have a Cloud only strategy if desired. Not making it necessary to switch to a different vendor for yet another capability.
- Integration: The Integration Cloud as announced last week obviously is a bare necessity when several business capabilities are hosted in the cloud (either provided by Oracle or by others) and some are, still, in your own datacenter.
A hidden gem in the keynote by Thomas Kurian, was probably the annunciation of Process Cloud. A gem indeed, because it allows Oracle’s cloud solutions to be glued together and form end-to-end business processes. I’ll come back to this in one of my next blogs.
- Platform: the platform Oracle provides and actually uses themselves to provide their own Cloud services is broader and the most standard based then any other platform. Think of proprietary technologies like Salesforce’s APEX and force.com as well as SAP’s Hana, and compare that with Oracle Weblogic and Oracle Webcenter to name a few provided as PAAS.
And this platform approach is definitely key in allowing organisations to choose, between hosting of application in the public cloud or in their own “cloud”: if you apply Oracle’s platform in your own data center it will enable you to quite easily switch between one or the other.

So is it new, well to be honest, no: In the last couple of years we’ve seen Oracle present on what was first called Fusion Applications and everything EXA (-Data, - Logic , etc.) Now the buzz word is obviously Cloud with the Infrastructure, Platform and Services as specific denotation.
What is new however is that I believe that Oracle’s Cloud portfolio is getting to a degree of maturity that it becomes valuable to by far a wider audience than it had been ever before. The breadth of capabilities, the integrations between components and any backend landscape and specifically also a platform to amend the functionality.

A Fundament for Digital Transformation
As such it forms a strong fundament for what we call Digital Transformation. Obviously it is one of the elements, as our research together with MIT shows that only if you combine appliance of Digital capabilities like Oracle’s Cloud products with strong Digital Leadership you will really benefit from it.
Specifically in the space of Customer Experience, Digital is very important. Allowing customers to access your company and open up your company to your customers, differentiating as much as possible to the needs of that customer, or to put it short: take an outside-in approach.
Obviously a buzz word, but it is definitely true, start with why you are selling, serving, creating products, building the experience, or making you company and products available to customer the way you do it?

So to cut things short, yes Cloud and definitely Oracle’s cloud portfolio is a strong basis for Digital Transformation, however just like with a “traditional” IT approach you should always think of why your customers should choose you first! And how should your organisation be amended to support this.

And Larry, well Larry is Larry and doesn’t really change even not in his new role of CTO and chairman.

Originally posted on Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

Oracle Open World 2014: Are you ready for a Modern Customer Experience?

This year’s edition of Oracle Open World is going to be all about Modern. Modern Technology, Modern User Experience, Modern HCM, Internet of Things obviously, you know, the things that we like today and do want to have tomorrow! So thinking about Digital Customer Experience what does that mean do you think?

How big is your data?
Well obviously a modern Digital Customer Experience (DCX) has a basis in intelligent handling of large amounts of information, or Big Data as this is called. The way you are able to make sense of all this information and really utilize it in the interactions you have with this customer is obviously key to a modern DCX. This years Oracle Open World will, again… bring us a lot of infiniband, terabytes and peta bytes, processing power and columnar data storage., etc., etc. All to accommodate the actual handling and correct processing of these amounts of data.

Your User Experience
Secondly a modern Customer experience is obviously about the user experience your customers have. The user experience when they interact through a mobile device, a website, a kiosk inside your store or even a staff member pulling up their customer details on an iPad in the store. Or the user experience of the business user setting up the marketing content on the microsite on that new product launch. And also the user experience of the person that is finally handling the financial side of an order placed on the eCommerce site by the customer. A modern user experience in these cases means that in all these situations relevant and personalized information is available to customers and employees are empowered to provide a great customer experience. At this Oracle Open World there is a specific stream focusing on this user experience for Oracle’s (Cloud) applications and even their integration solutions and engineered systems.

Your cloud or mine?
The third piece I’d like to highlight is obviously cloud. And pay close attention, I’m not saying cloud equals modern, so that all of your IT should go into the cloud… No Modern cloud appliance is about seamless switching between public cloud and private cloud as well as any appliances you might still have in your datacenter that are less capable out-of-the-box for connecting with the cloud. Being able to freely choose based on the way an application can support you in your vision on digital customer experience where you host an application or store data that’s a modern cloud approach.

Capgemini is a Diamond level sponsor this year for Oracle Open World, expressing our strong partnership with Oracle and highlighting our believe in the fact that the strength of Oracle Applications and Technology can help you realize Digital strategies for your organization. Come and see our sessions and meet us at our booth (#911, whenever you’re in #Digital distress)
Here are just a few of our sessions to highlight our presence specifically from a Digital Customer Experience perspective:

“Why Digital Transformation Is the Future”
Simon Short, VP Digital Customer Experience, Capgemini and Arjan Kramer, Global Digital Solution Architect, Capgemini will present Capgemini’s unique Digital Customer Experience approach and the value it brings. As well as presenting some real-life customer cases and also our OCommerce, Oracle CX solution offering.
Monday, September 29, 2:45 - 3:30 pm
Moscone West – 3002

“Leading Digital Transformation Now—No Matter What Business You’re In”
Didier Bonnet, Senior Vice President & Global Practice Leader Digital Transformation, Capgemini Consulting will be keynoting in Tuesday morning keynote together with Thomas Kurian.
Tuesday 30 September, 8:30-9:00 am
Moscone North Hall D

“The Digital Explosion—Driven by the Cloud: What’s Your Enterprise Strategy?”
Pierre Hessler, Capgemini Fellow, will be presenting on how to make cloud become part of your Enterprise strategy and it can help to realize this strategy.
Wednesday, October 1, 2:00 – 2:45pm
Lam Research Theater (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)

Looking forward to meet you there!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

Great experiences require good decisions!

During the day we as humans make millions of decisions. For example when two people talk to each other we have a large amount of thoughts and make hundreds of decisions to correctly guide us through the conversation.
Some of these are small, like “I don’t like to go out now, because it’s raining” others might have more impact and require proper consideration, like “I know you lost a close relative last month, so I need and want to be easy on you”.

And obviously getting better in conversations requires practicing and learning. The decision making process is fluid: learning from the feedback of the people you are talking to, seeing reactions alters what we say and how we say it.
The same thing holds for the interactions between organizations and their customers.

In this Digital age, the interactions and decisions are not only handled by the people in your organization, but can increasingly be handled by IT systems. Imagine a customer browsing your web shop, trying to find that one particular product. Or a customer going through your knowledge base, who is trying to find the answer to her particular question.  In both examples good, real-time decisions about what is the best thing to do, say or show to a customer will make the difference between a good experience and a great experience!

In a split second, in real-time these IT solutions must be capable of learning: what are bad offers? What works well? What is a great decision or offer? Then the solution can act instantly on what it has ‘learned’.

So wouldn’t it be good to have an IT solution that learns and adapts itself to customer behavior then takes those little decisions away and saves your staff time? But how to get there?

Start small, maybe with just one area, like your webshop or just a limited set of use cases like just specific customer care processes. That’s where you’ll get the biggest benefit first.

Then, when you actually start looking for a technical solution think hard about which domain you’d like to use the decision engine in. Is it primarily online, through the web or would you like an enterprise decision engine that can be used throughout your organization, business processes and multiple channels?

So what could automated, real-time decisioning do for your organization, how much could it save you, how much could it earn?  If you want to talk it through, I’d love to hear.

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

Webrooming, the next big thing in All-Channel Retailing

Webrooming is the new showrooming, meaning customers will do their research online but ultimately buy products offline or in-store (ROPO). The ability of retailers to identify customers in their offline environment based on their behaviour and information online is crucial in order to close deals and provide a connected customer experience.

Today traditional retailers reportedly suffer from a phenomenon called showrooming. The core issue of showrooming is that retailers lack information about their potential customers and the offers their competitors have currently either on or offline. Or if they have the information, they do not have the ability to properly use it in their offerings on the spot for customers who are visiting their store.
Now a new phenomenon enters the stage: Webrooming. Obviously a reaction from customers who are fed up with some bad experiences of buying a product online, which, once delivered, did not meet the expectations or at least did not fulfil the expectations that were set online.
Webrooming is the behaviour of customers doing analysis or research online (RO) but ultimately buying or purchasing offline (PO); therefore the term used for webrooming as well is ROPO. As with showrooming, one of the required capabilities to deal with webrooming is knowing exactly what information a customer has been looking for online. It is also necessary to be able to attract your customer to come to your store and finally to make him or her an offer they cannot refuse.

Marketing, Clienteling and Mobile
Capabilities that are crucial in this respect are relevant direct marketing to this customer, having agood insight into customer information in the store and “controlling" the mobile space in your store.

First of all, as mentioned earlier, it’s key to attract customers who are researching online but do not seem to have the intention to buy online to visit your store locally to buy the product. It’s important to have individual and personalised targeted offers that will attract customers to come to your store with the intention to buy. To accomplish this, it is necessary to have a marketing capability that is able to give either real-time feedback to the customer or in a later stage is able to refer again to the customer to trigger him to come to the store.
Once the customer is in the store the staff in the store should be able to easily identify the customer and pull up all relevant information. This includes information like browsing history, wish list, buying history and,probably even most important, possible non-refusable offers! These capabilities are often referred to as clienteling applications and can run either on desktop systems available at the point of sale or on a tablet, so staff can easily walk around and interact with customers.
Customers are of course easily distracted, so it is good to pay attention to the mobile devices they might have with them once they enter your store or mall. Maybe with a technique like geo-fencing, maybe by pushing offers or information directly to customers through existing mobile apps or NFC. The main point is to always keep your customer’s attention on the offers you provide him.

So you can see that if you really want to address showrooming as well as webrooming, which are actually quite similar phenomenons, there are ways to address it. The solutions however must be interconnected and should be part of an overall Digital strategy and not one-off initiatives.

As webrooming is here to stay, you, as a true all-channel retailer, should make sure to have a solution in place that can help you address it. 

With NRF’s Retail Big Show 2014 coming up a couple of blogs will be posted around the event. Next in the series will be Fulfilling the Dream.

Originally posted on Capping IT Off

Profile As A Currency

If the product is free, then you are the product. And the more data you provide, the easier it is to market you. The 'freemium’ model is now supported by consumers providing their profile data. This data can then be used by organizations to target their consumers better or simply by selling it to other organizations. This raises the question about whom consumers trust when sharing their profile data and what is acceptable to them in terms of how that data is being used. To organizations, it is a matter of understanding whether to hold profile data themselves or get it from the best external source.

The title of this blog might fool you a bit, as it seems to be just another one in the ‘as a Service’ category. Rest assured, it’s not. It is about you as a user and consumer of social media services and how much money you are really worth.

In the last couple of years, the amount of information people share through social media has increased dramatically. And not only the amount of data, but in a lot of cases also the ‘quality’ of the data. Admittedly, there are still people who think the outside world is interested in what is going on inside their homes and what they are feeding the dog, but in general people share information about what they really care about.

The same goes for the information that people put in their online profile, accounts and avatar: It’s more accurate and usable to determine the true ‘values’ of people - valuable data once you can dig in to it and really make sense of relationships between different elements.

Of course, the best and by far the most widely applied approach is to search and scan social media for input about the organization’s products or services and being able to react to that; let’s call this proactive customer service.

What I want to describe, however, is a step beyond this: actually making money  with your personal profile and with what you share, either as an organization or as an individual.

Let’s take a LinkedIn profile. There are several ways to benefit from a LinkedIn profile:

1. For an individual, a good profile – one that really sets you apart from the others - will help you find a great new job, maybe even without doing anything for it. Recruiters might automatically be attracted to your profile and ask you to apply for a job instead of the other way around.

2. For an organization, if its employees have set up compelling, convincing external profiles - which show how skilled they are and how passionate they are about working for the company - they may create new business as the entire company is perceived as more knowledgeable, more experienced, more energetic. Furthermore, professionals in the market who are considering changing jobs may see these profiles and will become better informed about the company and the people who work for it.

The product is you!

So profiles are valuable. Some companies rely solely on this fact. Did you ever wonder what Facebook is selling, what the products or services are it offers? Many will argue it’s the platform, but it’s actually something else. Facebook’s product is you. What you put in your profile, what you share with your friends, your friend’s friends and with the world, is what Facebook has to offer. And in the slipstream of that, it makes money with placed ads. But solely the fact that you share your life is what makes advertisers pay money for Facebook.

Think about how McDonald's or Starbucks build local social communities around a particular store, city or region. They target individuals in these communities with specific, even local offers, based on what they share in the community. And what about special offers you get in your local supermarket based on, for instance, the fact that you tweet about a BBQ you are putting up for your friends or that kids' party that you announce on Facebook?

It’s a currency

Yes, profile is definitely a currency. Consumers are learning how to benefit from their social media profiles. And they’re learning fast, as they come to appreciate the real value that is contained in them. For organizations, vast opportunities exist in harvesting and analyzing profile data from their customers and their communities. But it’s all a matter of supply and demand, mutual trust and understanding about who sells to whom.

When a currency becomes scarce, the stakes become high. So better place your bets, the ball is already rolling!

Originally posted on the Capgemini CTO-blog

Business performance at 'ungodly' speed

So the Sunday night keynote brought us a notion of what great hardware there is around and actually is capable of today. Great to know that if you want to be an innovator, you should be into columns, not into rows. You Senior DBA will be able to tell you all about it. Rumours go actually that the new iPhone 5s is using this column approach as well, but it's not confirmed.

OK, so what can I do with it from a business point of view, or even why the heck should I bother?
Luckily Mark Hurd made some sense out of it and explained a bit what this technology is able to bring you in his keynote yesterday

What he explained to the audience is the enormous amount of data or information which is coming at us already today, but will grow tremendously in the next couple of years. Elements adding in like the Internet of Things, where devices push information out to the internet without any involvement of a human being, which will boost this. Another trend which pushes this is mobile, with people being more able than ever (4G, WiFi everywhere, etc.) to push information out and share seamlessly. Probably the biggest example of that of course is the information people push out on social media, not in the last part on what they think of your products and services. And guess what, still a lot of business application are already lasting for decades and they will need to cope with all of that information.

The bottom-line is: if you want to be relevant to your customers when interacting with them. Or if you will want to provide an easy and fast way for them to order your products or apply for your services. Or maybe if you want to be able to apply the intelligence about your customers and let it provide new insights to both your employees when they are handling a care request or to your customer when they are in your self-care environment and deliberate whether they should upgrade to your next level of service.
In all these cases you systems will increasingly want to rely on a good infrastructure that is capable of capturing the information and holding it, but also make it applicable to drive your business while supporting your employees and your customers.

So think of what your scenario would be, how BigData will impact your business and reach out to the people that can make applying BigData and turning it into profit real for you.

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off  

Customer Experience is about the customer, you know...

After the Sunday afternoon OOW keynote it might not feel as such, but you should not forget that Customer Experience is about the customer.
I'll tell you what I mean…

In the IT industry people tend to loose themselves in Terabytes, the number of MHz per second, that the system is now 10 times faster and those kind of things. Although these elements are very relevant, eventually Customer Experience is about the customer and making sure he or she gets the right and most relevant offer, the best customer service and is rewarded for his loyalty.

I was actually triggered by watching "the internship" on my flight to San Francisco to write this blog. Clearly it is a movie about the IT industry and how things work in there, but it's also clear that at the end of the day, technology is absolutely not the only thing that counts, not even by far!
For those that didn't see the movie it's about two guys with no technical skills at all joining in an internship program at Google, and the finally get to work at Google.

Like I said having the best performance is absolutely relevant in a lot of cases for customer experience. For instance when you want to use analytics to determine in realtime what the best possible offers are for a customer who is in you web-shop. You will want to use every single piece of customer information available within your IT landscape, but also through social media and even third parties and determine the most relevant offer in split seconds.

My point is however, it should always be absolutely clear how you want to be relevant to your customer, let's say "why a customer should choose your company, product or service" in order to create that customer experience. It will be the only way, and we studied it to really get value out of a good all-channel experience for your company. Once you determine that, you then start crafting the accompanying IT Solution as well as developing the correct organisation to support this customer experience.

If you want to know more on how we apply our methodologies for making All-Channel Experience real for our customer in specific industries?

Come and watch our experts on Utilities and Retail to see how, here at Oracle OpenWorld 2013

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

Predictions for Oracle OpenWorld 2013

With only a few days left before Oracle OpenWorld 2013 will start, it's good to spend some time on predictions of what is to come and what to look for specifically @ the event.
This year, Oracle expects over 50.000 people at it's yearly global event and these are the topics I believe that will be the top priority ones:

Customer Experience
Needless to say that Customer Experience is a hot topic for Oracle in the last couple of years. Taking a look at all the acquisitions Oracle has been conducting in the past, this year has been about converging these solutions and making components work even closer together than they already could.

This year instead of having a separate conference (like last year) there is a separate track on Customer Experience, with a couple of high value partners that sponsor the event.
Oracle and their partners will share their view on determining Business Vision on Customer Experience  building a strategy and roadmap for transforming towards a full all-channel customer experience and most important how to really get value from that.

Capgemini is supporting this event by presenting, showcasing and interacting.
We will present our view on how to implement best in class customer experience specifically in the Retail, as well as in the Utilities sector.
Over in the exhibitor grounds we will be showcasing our best practices and ready to implement solutions based on Oracle technology.
And of course lots of opportunities to interact with our Experts on the topic of All-Channel Experience, face-to-face or through social media.

Why we are stressing this topic so heavily is obvious: We believe that Customer Experience is one of the most important topics for business in todays era of the customer driven world. To address this as an organisation you should be focused on how you want to be relevant to your customer, who that customer is, how you transform your organisation towards a customer centric one and of course how you should implement IT solutions that make a good All-Channel Experience reality.
At the end of the day, you want your customers to become your fans.

Cloud, Big data and Engineered systems
Three other big topics that actually are very much aligned with the topic of Customer Experience are Oracle Cloud, how Oracle covers Big Data and how the engineered systems support this.
I expect more in depth announcements in area of cloud on the way Oracle partners with others like Microsoft and SFDC. In the recent past there have been rumours about Oracle rebranding their Cloud offerings and moving away from the Fusion Applications brand, positioning Oracle in a certain way towards their competitors… One thing is sure, Oracle is transforming to become a cloud company and making changes in order for the organisation to be able to handle the new business models to come with it, but still making the same amount of money.

Be sure not to mis our view on how to apply Oracle cloud applications as they will increasingly help businesses adapt to changes at cloud speed.

On Big Data, of course a better insight can be expected on how engineered systems as well as the new Database 12c can give better and broader support for handling Big Data. In the same time sharing new features and evolution of Oracle's analytics tools to make sense of all internal as well as external, social data.

I don't want to keep you from an upcoming topic for Oracle, as they are trying to become part of the wave of the Internet of Things. Mostly showing how Oracle's product stack is and will be supporting it. To be continued I believe as this is in some industries a key part of something like Customer Experience, like smart technologies in the Utilities sector.

As you can see there is a lot to be watching at this years Oracle OpenWorld, want to be guided through the highlights?
Stay tuned to Capgemini's Social Channel and get all of the key information from #oow13 delivered right to your timeline!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off 

Turn your customers into fans!

Making the art of the possible reality...
 
I’m proud to announce Capgemini and Oracle have recently launched a global Customer Experience service offering, called OCommerce. This service offering is part of Capgemini’s All-Channel Experience initiative.
 
The reason for being proud is because I was the one that  started this initiative by crafting a solution set out of a set of Oracle’s Customer Experience products. And now it has become reality! Come to think about it, that’s actually the essence of what we do as Capgemini: making the art of what’s possible in Customer Experience today, reality!  Let me tell you what I mean.
 
What we learned in our customers engagements and research around Customer Experience or All-Channel Experience, as we call it at Capgemini, we found that a lot of companies are busy with the topic and launching great initiatives and nice interactive solutions to better engage with their customers. But these efforts are, in many cases not bringing the value as expected. The reason is simple but on the other hand complex as well: these initiatives are good stand alone, but they lack a clear vision and strategy and by that, are often not aligned or interconnected. The result: running these separate initiatives cost companies more than if they would be run interconnected, but the overall experience is still not what your customers expect and the value coming out of it is less than expected as well. Let me give you an example. Let’s say a company starts a social channel through Twitter for customer support and launches a mobile app for customer self-care, but the information presented for resolving issues is far more accurate through the social channel than through the mobile app. Customers are disappointed and will have a bad feeling about the company.
 
Another key element of an effective customer experience strategy is taking industry specific insight into account. For example, the Digital Shopper Relevancy study shows how customers use digital channels in their shopping journey. By taking into account which specific Digital shopper profile or profiles you would like to target (for instance the Digital Shopaholic) this will drive the choices and specific focus in your customer experience vision and strategy. As will it drive the actual technical solution implementation, of course. End of the day, it’s key to keep in mind that customer experience is all about the customer and his journey and the interactions he has with organizations.
 
Finally the most essential part is making the All-Channel Experience strategy and vision, based upon your organizations position, reality. It starts by building that vision and strategy and executing on that of course by transforming your business, because it needs to grow towards that All-Channel Experience. Besides that you will also need to support that vision and strategy by an IT solution based upon a best-of-suite or best-in-class product stack.
 
The elements discussed above and combining these in building an All-Channel Experience are key to make the art of the possible reality for your organization and to turn your customers into fans of your company, products and brand.
 
So don’t wait any longer, start growing fans!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Technology Blog: Capping IT Off

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

Oracle Enterprise 2.0 becomes Oracle WebCenter

As the people following Oracle’s steps in the social arena have noticed, Oracle rebranded their offering Oracle Enterprise 2.0 to Oracle WebCenter.

The reasoning behind this rebrand seems obvious: The web has a more prominent role in everybody's life then ever. Social networks to keep up-to-date with your friends, wherever they may be. But also networks to keep track of your business contacts. And what happens in the Enterprise: nothing. So it's time to do something about that. The rebrand to Oracle WebCenter reflects this: Oracle makes the Web experience through all available channels the most important aspect of their User Experience platform.

You could say that the Oracle WebCenter product stack is maturing and is getting more integrated day-by-day. As Oracle says “the different parts fit together like a puzzle”, altogether they form one user experience platform which enables a true single user experience: no matter what the channel is they use, be it mobile website, but even when they call up your contact center the same experience can be provided.

As WebCenter is the user interface of Oracle Fusion Applications, but also the future UI for other standard applications it has become a very important part of the entire Oracle Fusion Middleware product stack. Oracle continuously keeps investing in it either by developing, integrating but also buying new parts that further strengthen the product portfolio in areas were it didn’t meet the required level yet.

A recent example is the acquisition of FatWire a leading provider of web experience management solutions. So what is FatWire adding to the existing product stack? Well at the moment it’s still not completely clear how the integration will be done, but a couple of things are certain! It will be definitely used as the Web Management tool in combination with the existing UI’s. So it’s not only an addition to WebCenter, but also applications like ATG and Siebel. FatWire already succesfully integrates with those products, but will be even more integrated when it’s completely fused with the rest of the Fusion Middleware stack.

A key benefit of FatWire are the capabilities it has in the Social Tools area. FatWire is already integrated with all leading Social media which enables the direct use of these media in Marketing, CRM and Sales! Compared with the current WebCenter Suite that really is a key benefit, since this was not well developed yet.
Another key feature is the ability for so called “Business” users to be highly involved in and even in charge of the changes to the online web branding and experience. You don't need the techie guy from IT to change the header font of your news-items or adjust the layout of your online customer portal. You're in charge, if you like...
The third feature which will definitely be kept intact is Dynamic targeting, which enables real-time, context dependent content: a user will get information based on his profile, the situation he is in or the link he’s just clicked. All to get the best suitable interaction with the person you target in a campaign, on the site or in your mobile app.
Later this week Oracle will be announcing more details about the strategy with FatWire and how it will be integrated. Check back soon to read about this.

What is remarkable is that Oracle is not only talking about the Technology side of this acquisition and the rebrand. They deliberately also mention the integration with applications like ATG, Siebel CRM and Fusion Applications.

And to my opinion that’s spot on! The only way of winning todays customer in a B2C context, but also in B2B and even winning the employee of the future is to have a real social user experience in the workspace of Marketing, Sales and Service. By adding FatWire and further integrating and rebrandin gthe WbeCenter product stack, Oracle sets the future path for the enterprise: the Social Enterprise!
Don’t hesitate, because the number of “social natives” is growing day-by-day and it is not only generation-Y who will soon make up the majority of the worlds population, start becoming social!

And think about the following: What if you would combine all this power in a solution together with applications like ATG eCommerce, Siebel CRM and Identity & Access management, how powerful would that be... I’ll get back to that soon!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog

Process, content and collaboration

Taking a look at today’s business, most companies still have a lot as far as adapting to and leveraging Web 2.0 possibilities is concerned. Sometimes it’s because of fear to open up, sometimes it’s non-compliancy reasons but in most case it’s still unfamiliarity with what benefits it could bring a business or what it is about anyway.

If we zoom into what Enterprise 2.0 or applying Web 2.0 within a corporate environment really implies, there are three factors that are most significant and describe the core of Enterprise 2.0:

• Process
• Content and
• Collaboration

We’ll look into each factor, see what it means and how they finally join to form Enterprise 2.0.

Process
Process means the (business) processes within a company involved in the day to day work people do within that company. This can be handling incoming calls from customers ordering goods and the entire process following that. In all cases those are little steps in the context of a larger sequence of steps. They are orchestrated or governed as you will to finally reach a particular end situation. Important in this respect is that these steps can be operated by an human-being or automated system and that the process is bound to change because of whatever influence from outside.
An aspect of web 2.0 influencing the processes is that now not only the inside of the company is involved in a process (with sometimes a starting point outside) but also the outside world is part of the process. An example of that is when Twitter is used to communicate on a particular issue back and forth or peoples comments on a blog about a new product.
In all circumstance it’s important that when people are involved, the aspect of these people interacting with each other in the steps of the process is crucial for the success.

Content
In Enterprise 2.0 sharing and combining of information is essential. The amount of information or content necessary at a given point in the overall process may vary but inevitably content is needed in order for a process step to make sense. What is important from a content perspective is also who is able to see which information, till what extend and what is the person or system allowed to do with it. This could be referred to as security of the content.
Probably the most crucial part in the content area of Enterprise 2.0 is that everyone shares the same information and people can all work together on that same content at the same time, seamlessly without worrying about things like versioning, etc.

Collaboration
Within the processes people and systems are interacting with each other, collaborating to eventually reach a certain state, product or relationship together.
The strength of people coming together and really collaborating could probably be best explained by the example of Open Source communities creating solutions. Not a single person is able to create whatever product on his own, you will always need others with particular expertise or capabilities which combine together to a particular product. In Open Source communities this is facilitated by Web 2.0 technology that enables discussions, commenting, tagging and drive decisions by rating.
Resulting in a collaborative solution in the end.

Value
We know now what the key elements of Enterprise 2.0 are, but what is it going to bring you? What value is in it from a business perspective? It should however be clear that if people start working together, supported by technology that enables sharing of the same content. And people can collaboratively combine and improve that along a joint and standardized process this will bring several advantages. Advantages like higher quality of work, more efficiency and innovation. This eventually will lead to business value like better customer support, innovative products, cost effectiveness and many more.

Probably a good thing to keep in mind when you send out your next yam or tweet …

Capgemini offers you the required technical skills to implement Enterprise 2.0 for instance by the means of Oracle Enterprise 2.0 for you, of course. More important we are able to determine together with you what the most important Enterprise 2.0 areas to focus on are, specifically for your business. Pragmatically choosing the most beneficial areas with the least effort and costs, and fitting it in with your current Oracle or non-Oracle landscape.

So if you think your company is ready to start acting in the Enterprise 2.0 arena based on the above, by working on one of the topics or a combination of these… don’t wait till your competitors start working on Enterprise 2.0, start benefiting now!

Contact us to discuss what value Oracle Enterprise 2.0 can bring your company!

Originally posted on the Capgemini Oracle Blog