Markies Mondays: Combining technology and creativity for a better customer experience

Welcome back to Markies Mondays, a blog series where we celebrate the finalists and recipients of Oracle's 15th annual Markie Awards. Check back each week to learn how Oracle Advertising and CX customers are building their brand and creating lasting customer relationships with our connected suite of applications.

This week, we’re recognizing the finalists of the Thinker Award for Best Innovation in CX, an award that honors those who strived for bigger, better customer experiences and made them happen with technology and creativity.

Let’s dive into how these five organizations leveraged technology, brought teams together, and developed creative incentives to catapult revenue.

Streamlined solutions relieve stress for customers and staff alike

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Center Parcs was forced to close its UK network of holiday villages and contact centers last year. The closure prompted thousands of questions from customers regarding reservations and refunds, and their customer contact form simply couldn’t handle the volume. Customers soon grew frustrated with long wait times, and staff were overwhelmed by the pressure. The company needed to quickly implement a solution that enabled agents to manage a large influx of customer requests while also working remotely.

With partner Boxfusion, Center Parcs was able to upgrade its existing Oracle Service solution to allow agents to access their systems from home. They also introduced Oracle Digital Assistant and live chat to streamline communications between customers and agents.

As a result, Center Parcs decreased customer wait times from 1 hour to just 5 minutes and decreased customer frustration by managing 75% of chat queries fully within Oracle Digital Assistant.

Making the world a better place with sustainable, service-oriented strategies   

The impact of the pandemic allowed one leading supermarket chain to bring its commitment to sustainability to fruition. To provide a more engaging, safe, and environmentally-friendly way to update customers with relevant offers, the company took a big step last year, becoming the first supermarket in Australia to stop delivering paper catalogs.

Working with partners Movable Ink and Mu Sigma, they chose Oracle Responsys Campaign Management to create a highly customized digital catalog experience, including personalized special offers, inspirational content, fresh creative, and more.

As a result of this digital experience, they saved more than 11,000 tons of paper per year, increased their annual revenue by $5 million, grew subscribers more than 300% in 12 months, and improved engagement and brand perception for their commitment to sustainability.

As the financial burden of the pandemic hit, the City of Los Angeles successfully distributed funds to over 100,000 impoverished residents across the city in less than 70 days. To accomplish this, they needed a safe, secure, and easy-to-use solution.

Alongside partner APEX IT, the city implemented Oracle Service, TimeTrade Scheduler, and Oracle Intelligent Advisor to facilitate the intake of critical information needed to serve its residents within just three weeks. With Oracle Service, the City of Los Angeles created a large email outreach program with a link to a secure portal to capture the necessary information to bring this initiative to life. TimeTrade Scheduler and Oracle Intelligent Advisor enabled applicants to follow an easy, dual-language, step-by-step process to prepare for their appointment and receive helpful reminders and notifications.

As a result, the city was able to schedule more than 50,000 appointments across 21 locations, distribute more than $36.7 million in nine weeks, and helped over 100,000 of the city’s residents.

Making great strides by optimizing internal processes behind the scenes

For one healthcare organization that provides technology for patient treatment and monitoring, sales performance and compensation were critical to reaching its aggressive business objectives. However, their outdated incentive compensation system prevented them from reacting quickly enough to market dynamics. When compensation plans changed during the pandemic, they needed a quicker, digital system with automation at its core.

With implementation partner Infosys Limited, the company was able to replace its 20-year-old system with Oracle Incentive Compensation, a part of Oracle Sales, to manage credit rules, roles, and sales incentive mapping.

Thanks to their new Oracle system, they’ve been able to implement more than 8,000 rules in 60% less time. And within just one year, they were able to save $20,000.

One critical infrastructure service was in need of a more streamlined global business process and wanted to move its many customized systems and processes spread out across multiple CRM applications into a single global view. That’s no easy feat.

Also working with Infosys, they designed a seamless system using Oracle Sales and Oracle Configure, Price, Quote to enable sales teams to easily configure products and services and create custom quotes and proposals in a unique engineering to order process.

As a result, they increased customer satisfaction by reducing the time to manage customization requests and provided end-to-end integration and automated pricing so that customizations are error-free.

There’s so much more to share about the finalists and winners of the 15th annual Markie Awards in the upcoming posts in this series. Bookmark the Customer Success Stories category of the Customer Experience blog and check back regularly for updates.

In the meantime, learn more about the Thinker Award for Best Innovation in CX and the other 13 award categories at the Markie Awards website.