Siebel CRM and Customer Experience (CX)

by Jan Peterson

In recent years and months the term "Customer Experience (CX)" has slowly but gradually started to replace the term "Customer Relationship Management (CRM)". A good starting point to understand CX is the Wikipedia article on Customer Experience. The article uses a widely accepted definition and states that "Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier."

As there are literally hundreds and thousands of articles, blogs and pieces of collateral around CX - just like the official Oracle CX blog for example - I will focus on highlighting some of the concepts and ideas.

Why should companies focus on CX?

The core value proposition is simple: Based on the assumption that we live in a commoditised world, the key differentiator for companies is the experience they provide to their customers. It is hard to come up with a current example where a company has a unique product. One might argue that Apple was in such a lucky situation when they released the first version of the iPhone and the iPad, but looking at the current market, I am unable to come up with any decent example. There are various surveys that underline that the customer experience is directly linked to the behavior of customers. The general message is simple (and totally in line with my own behavior ;-) ): "Happy customers will come back and buy more, while unhappy customers will buy somewhere else".

In the context of CX a generic customer life-cycle is often described by using the following picture:

Customer Lifecycle

From a traditional CRM point of view we differentiate between Sales, Service and Marketing  (and sometimes introduce Loyalty as another pillar). However, customers are not aware of the organisational structure of a company and don't care if they talk to the Service, Sales or Marketing department. Essentially, they are only interested in getting their immediate need addressed or issue resolved.

Hence, CX treats these disconnected processes as part of a single journey. In addition, while we talk about multi- or cross-channel CRM, there is no need to talk about cross-channel CX (or to use a modern term, omni-channel CX). CX implicitly includes all channels that have been touched along the customer lifecycle. I mentioned earlier that "unhappy customers will go somewhere else". I should have added "and will tell their friends about it - potentially using a social channel". As social channel and mobile internet access have entered our world after the first wave of CRM systems, CX acknowledges three things:

1. Channels have evolved and changed over time. The most important changes include Social and Mobile.
2. The power of an individual - primarily driven by social channels - has significantly increased.
3. As a result of 1) and 2), achieving customer advocacy is a key goal for companies. This is inline with the observation that it is significantly more expensive to acquire new customers than retaining existing customers.

In summary, CX looks at customers more holistically than CRM and puts a higher focus on all customer interactions. To differentiate, companies need to provide a consistent and tailored experience across channels that is specific for every use case.

What does this mean for Oracle Siebel CRM?

Oracle has acquired various companies over the past few years to complement its CX application portfolio.
As the core of a CX solution is a CRM system, Oracle's customers have the following choice:

• Oracle's cloud based CRM products
• As Siebel remains Oracle's recommended on-premise CRM product, Siebel has a strong value proposition in the context of CX.

Siebel and CX - Application Portfolio

While Open UI has received a lot of attention, the work that Oracle has done around integrating the acquired CX products with Siebel has barely attracted any attention.  In the following articles we will look at how the different Oracle CX products fit into the Siebel universe and how they enable Siebel to be part of a compelling CX application portfolio.

Thanks to Jan for this article

have a nice day

@lex