S311891: CRM Innovations for Sales Productivity
Presenters: Mandeep Bhullar, Brian Kelly, Tarak Patel, Oracle
Learn more about how Oracle Sales Prospector mines your past sales data and intelligently identifies quality leads, enabling Sales to sell more effectively and efficiently; Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps enables you to build CRM gadgets without any programming knowledge; and the new integration with IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook enable you to manage your CRM data in the desktop applications your users already use.
Monday 10/12/2009 16:00 - 17:00 Moscone West Room 2010

S310763: Social CRM Applications: Strategy Overview and Road Map
Presenter: Mark Woollen, Oracle
Learn how organizations can use Oracle's social CRM applications to improve business results and build engaging customer relationships.
Tuesday 10/13/2009 11:30 - 12:30 Moscone West Room 2009

S310771: Harness the Intelligence in Your Social Networks with Social Applications
Presenter: Tara Roberts, Oracle
Oracle's social CRM applications are the tools sales professionals need in order to boost their productivity and results through the productivity social networks of their peers.
Tuesday 10/13/2009 13:00 - 14:00 Moscone West Room 2009

S310746: Optimizing Sales with Oracle CRM On Demand
Presenters: Chris Haven, Oracle; Matthieu Jusserand, Carlson Wagonlit Travel
Come to this session to learn how customers are using new capabilities in Oracle CRM On Demand to increase revenue, reduce costs, and make more members of the sales team peak performers.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Moscone West Room 2001

S311006: Improve Margins with Oracle CRM On Demand or Siebel Deal Management
Speakers: Tarak Patel,Billy Turchin, Oracle
In this session, learn how to strategically manage price to increase margins throughout the deal lifecycle with Oracle CRM On Demand Deal Management and Siebel Deal Management.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Moscone West Room 3016

S310782: Mobility Solutions and Road Map for Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand
Presenters: Raj Aggarwal, Hody Crouch, Oracle
See how Siebel Mobile solutions, Siebel Handheld, Siebel Wireless, and Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant can be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness within your organization.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 11:45 - 12:45 Moscone West Room 2009

S310773: Sharing Content through Social Networks to Boost Productivity
Presenters: Eric Ho, Alicia Wu, Oracle
This session highlights key capabilities of Oracle Sales Library and Oracle Sales Campaigns to empower your sales and marketing professionals with the collective knowledge of their social networks.
Thursday 10/15/2009 09:00 - 10:00 Moscone West Room 2009

S311019: Siebel Sales: Strategy and Overview
Presenter: Rajit Joseph, Oracle
The presentation focuses on Siebel Sales and provides information on the latest product releases, updated road maps, and customer successes across industries.
Thursday 10/15/2009 10:30 - 11:30 Moscone West Room 2009

Registered attendees can pre-enroll in these sessions. If you haven't registered yet, it's not too late!

With Oracle CRM Sales Campaigns On Demand, users can determine the best email templates and images to adopt based on user ratings, reviews and historical response rates. Sales users can create and send professional quality HTML campaigns and track the success of individual campaigns. Sales users can manage their contacts and groups for targeted campaigns. They can also honor customers' preferences to opt-out of receiving emails and comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and other privacy and marketing laws. Sales users can harness the collective experience of their networks to create effective sales campaigns with Oracle Sales Campaigns On Demand.

Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand allows users to easily share, search, preview, and select content from a collection of sales assets to build more successful, targeted presentations and messages. In Oracle social CRM release 3, Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand introduces many exciting capabilities, including integration with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 16. Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand also extends its support for different document types. This release makes available a powerful new feature that enforces compliance with crucial access policies. Enhancements to tags, filters and upload have also been introduced in this release. Sales users can spend more time in front of their customers and less time looking for content by leveraging winning sales assets that exist in their social networks.

Oracle CRM Sales Campaign On Demand, Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand and Oracle CRM Sales Prospector On Demand can be accessed at www.sales.com.

Incorrect information that persists on net can be perceived as the truth. The information gets replicated and if businesses do not actively address the issue, the perception can start to feel like the truth. Take the case of the Irish student who as part of a social experiment added a fake quote to Wikipedia about a composer that then got published in various newspapers around the world. Everybody believed it to be the truth, until the student emailed the newspapers about the fake quote.

In a recent article about using Twitter for Business, the author lays out five use cases.

1. Voice of the Customer – Listen to what customers are talking about a product or a service. Companies can use the Twitter search or more sophisticated tools like monitter.com to listen when customers talk.

2. Proactive Customer Service – The next step is to act when customers complain or experience bad customer service. Pro-actively addressing the concerns raised can help restore some of the negativity in the marketplace the tweets generate.

3. Recruitment – The author makes a case that Twitter can be used as a recruitment tool by companies for future employees. I am not too sure that this can actually work but as per him some companies are doing this.

4. Customer feedback – Once you create a following on Twitter, you can use this channel to gather feedback on your products. You can direct customers to use web based tools like SurveyMonkey and gather the feedback.

5. Viral Marketing – The social nature of Twitter can be used as a channel in a campaign. The idea is not to run your campaign on Twitter but to integrate into the campaign as a channel.

Lots of companies have started using Twitter for business including British Airways and American Honda. A list of them can be found at the socialbrandindex. It’s become vitally important to listen to the customer and to gather feedback. Whether Twitter or Facebook were a medium to satisfy that requirement was a question in many people’s mind. To twit or not to twit. That was the question. Not anymore.

In the end, whether a business or personal conversation, I don’t want to broadcast to the average person and risk being ignored. I want to have a discussion with people who share the same interests and passions: friends, innovators, early adopters, hyper-influencers; people who want information and want to participate in the conversation. If I can succeed in establishing a rapport with this group, they will in turn influence their friends, co-workers and their social media followers.

Near the end of Seth’s talk, I finally noticed one of the footnotes next to the video: Filmed in 2003. I was shocked – he seems to be describing the role of social media today, yet this was long before Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other players shaped how I get information. The influence of social technologies is not a solution looking for a problem, but they are addressing a real problem with communication today.

Social media has done several things to make it easier to communicate:
• Enabled individuals to participate in the conversation, not just the marketing machines of television, print, website owners
• Enabled individuals to subscribe or follow people, groups and topics they are interested in. Contrast this with email where you are deciding what the audience is interested in. With email you can deliver the message to specific people, but there’s a good chance it will be ignored.
• Simplified the means of conversation. The free form nature of blog posts means we don’t need to conform to a preset communication format. The 140 character limit on twitter or other micro-blogging forums may seem like a constraint, but it makes it focus in the message and not the format.

“When you give people easier ways to share information, more good things will happen. This quote, and the title of this post, is from Evan Williams, CEO and Founder of Twitter. Social media enables a conversation with an engaged audience; this is a good thing for your business.

For example, I am listening to Pandora on my Blackberry as I write. Pandora on Blackberry rocks. It is an innovation that clearly disrupts iTunes and iPod. With Pandora, I am letting people like me to refine and play the songs that I might like. Does this mean I trust my peers more than myself? Perhaps. By partaking in the voting process, I can also give back to the community as well as to myself. It is a good thing Apple has added a recommendation feature.

In another example, in the customer support arena, when getting answers to everyday issues, Yahoo Answers is a great way to zero in on the best solutions. Yahoo Answers is a fantastic site that motivates community members to
provide answers to one another by awarding points and reputation levels for activities.

Companies are starting to take note and have introduced similar capabilities to engage their customers. In the customer support arena, Samsung has such an example. I have actually "enjoyed" debugging issues with Samsung technicians and other Samsung owners on CNET's Samsung forum. I enjoyed being in the virtual company of the people who have run into similar issues. More often a lurker than an active poster, I benefited from referencing solutions eventually arrived at by the original posters.

In addition to purpose-built web 2.0-inspired enterprise sites, micro-blogging sites like Twitter also provide opportunities for companies can listen to, and possibly, have conversations with, their current and target customer segments.

Speaking of listening to the crowd, I found this New York Times piece on Twitter words used during this year's Super Bowl very interesting. As people use their favorite channels to express themselves and converse with others, companies can set up listening posts to discern changes in sentiments, and shifts in perceptions and preferences in their target demographic segments.

It is almost dinner time. I wonder where that Kogi truck is headed. Ah, 4100 in Silverlake. Too bad I am more than 300 miles away. I will plant some key words in my tweets. Maybe the Kogi truck guys will hear me. My geotag should say NorCal.

Here are a few snippets:
- "Sounds innovative…this doesn't sound like Oracle..." - a friend who founded a B-B start-up (that failed)
- "Social apps...like Facebook for Oracle?!...crazy..." - my niece who is an IT consultant for one of those Firms
- "Invite me when you get the application going...I’ll be your friend…MySpace-like, right?" - an ex-consultant co-worker

Anyway, I further described the applications’ intention of leveraging social information (e.g. blogs, wikis, ratings) to create more engaging and meaningful relationships between customers and a companies/products. I mentioned that the applications are envisioned to: require no training, be innovative and functional, and be sexy in appearance. I left out "sexy" when I was discussing this with my niece though. In the end, the folks above, as well as others, seemed genuinely excited about the idea/opportunity and for me!

From an application vision perspective, believe Oracle’s Social CRM vision epitomizes hockey legend, Wayne Gretzy’s quote: "Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is."

A coworker also asked, "Do you really believe in this Social CRM thing?”. I said, "I do...". I didn't tell my wife I said that though...

This applies to software too, possibly even more so, there's a great article by Andriy Solovey applying it to software development. I believe it applies just as much to software's functionality.

I've spent years working on traditional Enterprise CRM & ERP packages, huge, immensely powerful software suites with a staggering range of functionality. But their very size and complexity is also their biggest hurdle to adoption in that they're difficult to implement and maintain, and their flexibility makes it hard to realise their potential benefits. This syndrome doesn't only apply to big business software, I've recently given rein to my inner geek and replaced my PVR, DVD, CD et al with an HTPC where I run some wonderful software called Media Portal to drive all my TV and audio. This should be digital nirvana, and to me it is as it keeps me entertained for hours. But this is because I'm busy tweaking it, installing plugins, and otherwise trying to get it to work as I think it should, and for some reason the rest of my family don't find this entertaining at all, they don't want all the bells and whistles they just want to watch the telly.

What's this got to do with Social CRM? Well I think it offers an interesting perspective when applied to sucessful social networking sites. The sucessful ones aren't normally the biggest most feature-rich web sites around, they're more focussed on doing a smaller number of things but doing them well. When they do seem to offer wide functionality it's normally though some form of add-in such as the plethora of facebook apps rather then core functionality (and it's interesting to see how facebook's recent redesign put the core social functions to the fore at the expense of those other apps). The most extreme example must be Twitter which does nothing more than allow users to post 140 character updates to anyone interested, yet seems to be taking over the world.

Socialising is part of our everyday existance. Social networking software needs to make it easier for us to do this if it's to have any value. Complex processes don't help this they hinder it. It's always tempting to add new functionality, and techies always like more options to play with. But with software, and perhaps especiallty with Web 2.0 software,we always need to keep focussed on making the core functionality just right. For me this means not being afraid to stop doing and spend more time thinking.

But this blog's probably far too long already, so there's just room to mention a delicious update to Mark Twain's message you can find at XKCD which says it better than I ever could - and with much fewer words ;)

"We have a managerial retention problem and low customer satisfaction. I can see Social CRM playing a big part in my organisation to turn things. How would you start deploying Social CRM in a large, disillusioned and potentially dangerous organisation? Thanks, Mike"

Simply knowing that your customers (or, supporters) are unhappy does not address the reason why. The attitude of the company (or club) and its officials must be oriented toward dealing with the feedback, both positive and negative. This of course is not a new problem, but the increasing take-up of social networking actually means that these issues can be made far more public than before. An advantage of the social network in the above case would have been to bring the knowledge to the organisation faster. This is only an advantage if the organisation is prepared to deal with the information, of course.

I am currently in the market for a new bathroom after a weekend of serious demolition (I can wholeheartedly recommend Makita power tools & the Red Hot Chili Peppers for your demolition needs). Many of those that know me will understand I just can’t help myself – if it’s there, then it’s there to be knocked down and reduced to so much dust and rubble. Anyway, prior to the destruction phase, I was doing a little research into the sort of bathroom I wanted and found a range I thought would suit.

Now, this may be old-fashioned, but I like to see what I’m buying, so I found this manufacturer has a web site upon which was a link for stockists; but it was “coming soon”. The warning should have been there, any company who ultimately sells products to the public and has a web site, needs to get the basics right. Frankly, being able to see and touch the product is pretty basic, hence a principle requirement should be to have a working stockist list, integrated preferably to be kept up to date.

Not to be deterred, I pinged off an email to the “contact us” link and carried on thinking about important things like pipe sizes, software and integration technologies. After a few days, I realised there had not been a reply to my enquiry – another one of the basics that really does need to work. At this stage, my thinking was more along the lines of “this manufacturer really should not have a web site at all”, rather than “where can I buy this stuff”. Anyway, I called the phone number on the same “contact us” page and actually got to speak to a real person and very nice she was too. So I came away from the phone with a list of local places that I could go to and see the product. It wasn’t even that hard for her, there was a list of postal codes and associated resellers. I should have taken the opportunity to see why it was I had to phone for this basic information, but at the time there were too many other distractions to get into a protracted conversation about email and web sites. At this point, we are still talking Web 1.0 and have not even gotten into social and other Web 2.0 aspects.

So, the important thing here is that the company needs to service the communication channels on offer. The thing with email is that it is easily ignored, it’s not like the customer or prospect is stood there in the shop after all. By introducing social networking into this means a public discussion can be had and that in itself means there should be more motivation on the part of the supplier. Of course, without the will to address it, where is the point?

Implementing socially orientated software is a strategy and not software alone. Like pretty much any other software tool, the hearts and minds of its users must be on-board with the idea. But in the case of “social” software, even the hearts and minds of those that do not use the software can be necessary for success:
- whose job is it to “monitor” the conversations
- what action should be taken, if any and by whom (they may not be a user)
- how should the social metadata be interpreted

The list could go on and on. The point is, don’t ignore the non-software aspect because ultimately the software is a tool and the people do the business.

As a footnote to this, I actually prefer dealing directly with people as opposed to email, forums, etc. I appear to be one of the few that laments the passing of the human travel agent to be replaced with a travel portal. But then that’s me and at this point I really should say that these are my opinions and not necessarily those of Oracle Corporation.

This leads to the other point, which is if I am starting a SaaS company, what would be my strategy. Should I take a top down approach and build the applications to SaaS standards or should I take a bottoms-up approach and design my SaaS foundation/infrastructure first and then design my apps to run on this foundation. I would think the latter would be more beneficial since once you lay your foundation, it’s more difficult to change. The level of abstraction as one move up the stack to the applications makes it easier to change.

So, then the real debate about who is a true SaaS provider should not be about the level of multi-tenancy but more about which provider can give me the uptime, performance, security and application functionality . Not that the multi-tenancy debate is less interesting or compelling but all it does is make for a good discussion.

That brings us to the core of SaaS which is the foundation as I call it. The foundation constitutes not just the infrastructure but also the shared components that are built on top of the infrastructure which the applications can consume. I will delve on the layers of SaaS foundation in my next blog. Until then, be safe, be SaaS-y.

Obviously, social networking have different values to different people. So how can a social network bring value to the masses so that more people will join and participate.

I look at how I use social networks. I think the key is to not target the masses but to target only those that brings value to them. I look at how I use LinkedIn. It is a great network but what do I do after adding these contacts to my contact list and joining social groups. For me, I didn’t find much use for it as an engineer. After awhile, I have stopped checking it or updating it. But for another friend who’s business is in consulting and trying to grow his business, it became a valuable tool for him to try to network his way into a company. He has gotten some business from networking with different people.

For me, a social network will bring value when it can aggregate all the information to me and forecast what I will like to know based upon my interests. Bringing attention to news or information that I would be interested in learning. Show me all the topics, blogs and etc that most interest me daily and refresh it based upon my participation during the previous week. In other words, push the data to me so I don’t have to mine it in the networks. I would like a social network that will help me find connections, interests, information that is relevant for me instead of me having to mine that data.

The value of social networking is to help find data that interest me the most and constantly keep me up to date on the latest changes that is of value to me. Social networks should be able to adopt to different ways that the users uses the network. It should provide multi-dimensional interaction instead of a contact list. I want to be able to network with people outside of my network, outside the country that I live in and speaking a language that I can’t understand.

What else do I look for in a social network? I look for the one that is easy to use. That provide good search capability so I can easily find information that I need. I am not interested in contact networking, but more of mining data from the network. I look for the ones with cool interface that keeps me intrigued and a mobile application is a plus.

So how does it keep me in and not lose me? Continuous innovation with new capabilities, more topics, integration to other networks. Find it all in one place so I keep coming back to it as a starting point.

At the end of the day, it is the people and content that makes a social network successful. So an innovative network that provides tools to help bring knowledgeable experts to the network and retain them to actively participate in the network.

While its only part of the solution, social metadata can help organize and navigate to relevant content. In this context, social metadata is data added to content by people other than the content creator, such as tags, ratings, votes, comments, etc. Examples can be found everywhere on the web; ratings and comments on amazon.com, tagging in digg.com.

In the past accessing data in an enterprise application was controlled by an engineer who developed a predefined path through the application. An example I remember using was to display a list of available content or links to the user. The list could be narrowed by selecting one keyword from a drop down box. Keywords were typically created by the team implementing the system and didn't always represent the way the users would describe the content.

Now, our social applications are taking advantage of social metadata so that a user can dynamically create a navigational link to content. For example, I can tag a presentation that is relevant to me and choose the tags I believe best describe that presentation. The keywords I choose help organize and categorize the content in a way that’s meaningful to me. Later I or my colleagues can use those tags to locate data using meaningful keywords.

Using social metadata in a social network with a focused purpose (be it a product, team or region) can help users navigate to relevent content even quicker because members can use social metadata to provide context and relevant description to the content.

One of the ideas that resonated with me was the concept of Global Class computing, much of which came from a conversation with Dave Cearly of Gartner. Global Class computing is another categorization of computing service just as Departmental and Enterprise class computing were before. I’ve spent most of my career in Enterprise class computing and I’m convinced of it’s benefits. It offers (or should offer) a robust platform for computing services together with a stringent set of practices for managing that platform. Done correctly it should offer world class standards of performance and availability. So what do we need Global Class computing for?

First we need to look at what Global Class computing is intended for, which is Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). At least according to Gartner these constitute a revolution in computing, and there's a lot of people lining up to agree with them. The fundamental difference being that you do not own, install and manage your IT resources yourself, instead someone else does this for you, and you subscribe to services to access these resources. The examples closest to my heart right now are the Social CRM products I’m working on. These are typical SaaS products, to use them you just sign up, point your browser at them, and go. No need to install anything.

But SaaS and cloud computing still need to have all the traditional IT resources somewhere, there still needs to be a data center with fans whirring and racks of faceless servers running databases and applications. There also still needs to be the processes and people to look after these. However there are also new challenges placed on those IT resources. To run hosted services you need to work on the basis that:
• Your users could be anywhere, anytime
There are no barriers to use of the service
• You have no control over your users or how they access your service
You can’t rely on your IT department to provide a standard PC that you run on.
• Everything is delivered over the internet
You can't guarantee network performance
• You should assume you’re operating in a hostile environment
Your users’ systems could host viruses.
Any system exposed over the internet is subject to attack
• Your delivery must be massively elastic and scalable.
If you’re successful then you’re liable to experience rapid growth,
which you must immediately be able to accommodate.

And these factors make up the core components of Global Class computing. For me they encompass many of the issues I've been facing as a SaaS supplier. It's really about providing a quality service without control. You're no longer in control of who uses your services, where they do it from, and how they do it.

One thing it took me a while to recognize is that Global Class computing is not a level "above" Enterprise class the way Enterprise class is "above" Departmental class. Indeed in some ways Global class is below Enterprise class. For example an Enterprise class deployment will typically aim for "Four nines" (99.99%) or "Five nines" (99.999%) availability, whereas cloud vendors often only offer "Two nines" (99%) availability. This is probably because they have usually come from companies such as Amazon & Google which have been focused on providing services to consumers. It seems the rules learned for Enterprise Computing in terms of the value of process and procedures, rules which came out of the mainframe world, need to be re-learned by each IT generation. I remember the client-server wave going through the same learning curve.

Global Class computing is focused on a different objective to Enterprise Class. It focuses on more flexible services as opposed to the rigor that is required for Enterprise Class. And this is what leaped out at me. I believe in the value of SaaS and cloud computing, and that it offers great potential to Enterprise IT. I believe that Global Class computing exists and is necessary for this to be successful. But if a company is going to trust the provision of their IT services to a cloud or other SaaS platform they're not going to give up on the benefits of Enterprise Class computing that they're used to. They need that sweet spot where they get the flexibility of Global Class with the rigor of Enterprise Class. This is where anyone hoping to sell SaaS or cloud computing to the Enterprise need to be.

Being a Siebel Technical Architect has meant working on wide ranging issues, including the performance challenges of high volume and high population environments. In these situations, rich features or complex processes sometimes have to give way to efficiency and simplicity - not always an easy message to get across.

So, I am onto my new role with the Social CRM applications. I am looking at how the new Social CRM applications can be integrated with a myriad of different data and functional sources spanning internal business information sources and external ones. Internal sources of information would be your existing sales and provisioning systems to capture data, such as closed opportunities and shipped orders, either on-premise or not.

These new ways of visualizing and working with sales information will need mechanisms to keep them fresh. Poor or inaccurate data will lead to all sorts of potential problems and not just for the users of these applications, but their customers and prospects as well. I certainly form a low opinion of someone who tries to sell me something I already have or they have already told me I do not qualify for.

Effective data integration is required to prevent these potential issues as well as ensuring the collection of this information is completed timely. My goal is to address just that using a combination of Oracle technology and the support of our partners, both new and old.

I found out about some of these while talking to a colleague from an IT security consultancy (we use them to independently assess our security practices). However as he explained the security risks with social networking sites are not necessarily technical. Indeed the rapid uptake of social networking applications has led to the biggest current growth in security attacks.

The problem isn't necessarily that social apps themselves are full of security flaws, it’s just that the sort of information that social networking encourages you to share can also be used to access more than you expected. As the David Porter stated in a BBC article on these dangers entitled: Cyber thieves target social sites:
"It is remarkable that people use social networking websites to publish details about their lives, loves, jobs and hobbies to the entire world that they would not dream of sharing with a stranger in a bar, such data is invaluable to identity fraudsters."

A simple example is your personal history. Most social networking sites want to know something about your past (schools, jobs, etc), and by sharing these you make it easier for friends and colleagues to find you. However harmless looking items such as your first school or the town where you were born are also often used as security questions by other sites. At one point I found that of the four security questions I was asked by my online bank, the answers to three of them could be found out from my public profile on one social networking site.

There can be other social engineering vulnerabilities too. For example after landing that job you've been after for ages it's natural to put the news out there. but knowing your name, title, and that you're a new starter at BleedingEdgeInc is enough information for some effective identity theft scams. New starters often need to ask for help and no-one knows them enough to verify whether a caller is who they say they are. So a call to the HR or IT help line of your new company pretending to be you could get access to all sorts of info about the company's systems.

None of these risks are reasons against using social networking apps (and as Brian Krebs warns by not using social networks you can be at risk by letting someone impersonate you!). They are reasons for putting some good basic practices in place. There are many sites out there with sound advice, for example security company Sophos say this about Facebook settings. I find four simple rules help me:

• Don't publish anything you wouldn't be happy to tell a stranger. Assume everything you publish will be public.
• Don’t put information on social networking sites which is also used to identify you on other sites such as security questions. Either give different answers to security questions (when asked for your first school''s name give your first pet’s name, or something like that), or just don’t publish the information in your profile.
• Don’t accept friend requests from anyone you don’t know.
• Limit the visibility of your personal information so it's only available to people you know. Don't just accept the default privacy settings.

I think it's nicely summed up by Paul King in the BBC article I referenced earlier: "There were a lot of benefits to using social networking sites ... and the downsides should not put people off using them...It's about trying to manage risk rather than avoid risk", and managing risk is what what we do all the time. There was a talk at the recent Black Hat security conference with the great title Satan is on my Friends List, so just be sure it's the devil you know.

Oracle Data Mining’s Predictive Analytics Power Next-Generation CRM Applications

As a consumer, I’m sure that you have all received telemarketing calls. They usually arrive during dinner. “Hello, I’m calling from … I’d like to make you aware of our new program. By accepting our special offer, you can take advantage of all of the benefits….”. The script generally continues to point out the many rewards and conveniences that will be yours if you accept the special offer.

The problem with this approach is that 99% of the time, you are not at all interested nor have any need for the product or the service being offered. Sadly, your name appeared on a “list”. You were selected to receive the phone call and “offer” because you probably bought a product somewhere else and now someone in marketing thinks that you might be a candidate for their product and offer. Often, very little else is known about you. Traditional mass selling involves many calls being made with the hope that pitching a generic “offer” will generate a sufficient number of positive responses. This broad mass marketing approach requires a large number of suspects to yield positive net results. In truth, it only makes the majority of customers who are not interested in your “offer” (99%) very unhappy.

On the other hand, if the “offer” happens to be for the right product or service, come at the right time and is accompanied with the right supporting information, then it is an entirely different scenario. You might actually take the time to listen and consider the proposal. You might even thank your sales person for helping to anticipate and satisfy your needs.

The key to this presenting the appropriate offer, to the right person, at the right time is predictive analytics. Oracle Social CRM’s Sales Prospector is an example of the emerging next-generation of intelligent applications that embed data mining and predictive analytics. Sales Prospector automatically mines past customer demographic and purchase data, find patterns and relationships that it captures as a “predictive model”, and then applies that model to suggest next-likely products, associated probabilities, expected sales cycles to close, and references that are most likely to be of interest to the prospective customer.

Businesses already possess volumes of data about their customers. However, without predictive analytics, this data is left underutilized. Predictive analytic models capture the many relationships among numerous pieces of information and, based on previous purchases and activities and can find patterns, relationships and probabilities. Predictive analytics can provide sales people with candidate offers, the likelihood that a prospect will accept the offer, expected purchase amount, time frame to close and customer references that would most likely resonate for the prospective customer. A sales person informed with what a customer has purchased previously and recommended “best offers” of what they are most likely to want to buy makes shorter sales cycles, happier customers and ultimately greater profits.

Oracle Data Mining provides the “analytics inside” Oracle’s Social CRM Application and are integrated into a next-generation application that automatically unlocks this customer intelligence. Oracle Data Mining (ODM), an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition, provides twelve in-database machine learning algorithms that enable automated harvesting of “new information, predictions and insights” from CRM data. Sales Prospector leverages this analytical horsepower to deliver predictive analytics and new insights to sales people. Because the data, models and results remain in the Oracle Database, data movement is eliminated, security is maximized and information latency is minimized.

Oracle Data Mining provides in-database predictive analytics that support strategies described in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) article Competing on Analytics [http://www.revenueanalytics.com/pdf/CompetingOnAnalyticsHBR2006.pdf].

Oracle Data Mining is also the analytical engine behind Oracle Open World’s Schedule Builder that provides recommendations to Oracle Open World Attendees. More on that and the analytics that power Oracle Social CRM in future blogs.

Charlie Berger