Markies Monday: 5 Strategies for Creating a Connected Customer Ecosystem

We’re back with the next installment of Markies Monday, a weekly blog series designed to help you learn more about the 2020 Oracle Markie Awards and its categories, finalists, and winners. Make sure to check back each week to learn how Oracle Advertising and CX customers are driving success and building customer relationships that last.

It can be hard to tell where a brand ends and its customer experience (CX) begins—and that’s just the way it should be, particularly in today’s experience economy. The Nexus Award for Best CX Ecosystem honors an organization that architects a connected CX ecosystem with a CRM, third-party cloud apps, or API integration.

What’s clear from this year’s entrants is this: Connected customer experiences are at the heart of these digital transformations. Companies that connect all aspects of the customer journey through marketing, sales, service, and commerce—from the front office to the back office—are those best positioned to deliver a single and unified experience.

Let’s take a look at a few of the best practices shared by our Nexus Award finalists and winner.

Build a connected CX ecosystem that empowers a single customer view across sales and service

The first finalist deployed an integrated, reliable, and simplified platform, which interconnected Oracle Advertising and CX applications—Oracle Sales, Service, and Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ)—with Oracle Digital Assistant, Analytics, Siebel, EPM, ERP, and BI applications, along with third-party retail enterprise and dealer management solutions.

Since unifying its front-office, sales, service, and other applications with back-office systems, it:

• Empowered field and sales support teams with a single destination for a customer 360-degree account view—increasing collaboration, servicing higher user satisfaction, and retention rates.
• Increased efficiency while reducing dependency on their “middle office team” for configuration, pricing, and quoting.
• Added more retail outlets—expanding its reach and increasing the number of products sold at each counter.
• Drove more than 20% growth for its consumer products.

Drive data-powered, seamless marketing experiences

The ability to leverage data effectively continues to shift from a “nice-to-have” to table stakes, particularly as customers expect more personalized experiences. The second finalist built a world-class, connected CX ecosystem that flows data across multiple systems. It now captures subscriptions and leads, and it keeps the most up-to-date information from multiple sources in its platform.

Its ecosystem includes Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, Oracle Maxymizer Testing and Optimization, CRM, event management, social media, and analytics solutions, and an internally-built Data Lake, using a direct integration built with the Bulk API. As a part of its deployment, it also created a custom AppCloud audience service application that can query the Data Lake for advanced segments using additional data outside of Oracle Eloqua.

The results have been impressive and include:

• Total reachable contacts are more than 90%.
• Email marketing accounted for more than 11% of all website traffic last year.
• More than 350,000 inquiries captured, leading to approximately 90,000 leads.
• Paid search revenue of $4.4 million for a single product—up from $3.5 million over the previous year.

Empower connected, omnichannel experiences

Luggo, the third finalist, is transforming long-term apartment rental in Brazil. This innovative technology start-up and lifestyle brand of MRV, one of the largest construction companies in Latin America, created a connected CX ecosystem powered by Oracle Advertising and CX applications—Commerce, Service, and Field Service—and ERP for Contracts—integrated using Oracle Integration Cloud—along with other third-party applications.

Luggo now has an omnichannel customer experience that reduced the rental process time from weeks to just a few hours. Prospective residents can visit its dedicated site, take a virtual tour, and seamlessly complete the rental agreement process – but the experience doesn’t end once an apartment is rented. Residents, known as “Luggers,” will be able to digitally order and/or schedule a variety of services, from car-sharing, laundromat, and cleaning services to storage unit rentals.

In the first three months using the platform for rental management at two complexes, Luggo generated more than 3,300 leads resulting in 97% of apartment units becoming filled. Luggo has since rolled out the solution and added more apartment complexes to the platform.

Harmonize data and systems to transform and optimize your digital marketing

The fourth finalist, a leading global telecommunications company, built a connected ecosystem to successfully support the launch of its new brand identity, raise awareness of its non-mobile portfolio, and position the company as a digital transformation partner. It optimized data models and processes across eight platforms and six vendors and integrated digital and organizational components to bring the local databases into a single global Oracle Eloqua, contacts, and accounts database.

This new focus on data harmonization enabled better personalization and efficient lead conversion, supporting the growth of 1.4 million additional IoT SIMs per month and 14.5% incremental revenue. Additionally, by having a single view of all customers, this telecom company improved coverage within key accounts and expanded overall reach. Integrated tracking solutions also improved reporting and insights into customer needs and preferences.

Create exceptional employee experience while delivering service through any channel, at any time

There’s an undeniable linkage between employee and customer experience. The same focus on building brand loyalty and a superior experience for customers should be applied to employees — so they can achieve their full potential and drive business value.

This year’s winner transformed how its customers, in this case, their own employees, experience human resources. It centralized more than 25 unaligned and often non-digital channels into a single digital entry window, its HR portal, and integrated Oracle Service, Oracle Digital Assistant, Oracle PeopleSoft, and other systems via APIs and cloud connectors.

This leading financial services company successfully empowered its employees with seamless, digital, and real-time experiences while providing its support team with a 360-degree, internal “customer” view to enhance service. Since launching the portal, the company reduced the average handling time of queries by 50% while absorbing a 200% traffic increase by utilizing advanced self-service and artificial intelligence. Notably, almost 100% of employees—from bank tellers to board members—are now using the portal.

Visit our website to learn more about the Markie Award finalists and winners.

This content was originally published at SmarterCX by Oracle. It has been adapted for the Customer Experience blog.