Smart Lists: The best CRM search is the one you never have to do

TikTok has a fascinating ability to instantly snag—and keep—the attention of not only power users and content creators, but even first-time visitors. How do they do it?

I’m your typical millennial in a committed relationship with an active Instagram account—but zero TikTok experience. Yet the instant I open the app, I see a video that TikTok predicts will interest me. And the minute I’m done (and usually after I’ve watched said content four times), I simply scroll on to the next. As I scroll, TikTok refines what I see, and my feed quickly becomes hyper-relevant to me.

This ability to predict what content matters, and then up the stakes by making it increasingly relevant, is the main way TikTok builds stickiness and drives adoption.

For those of you who don’t use TikTok (no judgement here), think about your favorite streaming service. How much time have you spent searching and scrolling, debating what to watch—even with highly curated recommendations provided for you? Sure, you’re sticking around longer, but how much time did you waste before making a decision? Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to search at all? Instead, you could rest assured knowing the best option is automatically playing on your screen.

Now apply this to your work. What if you never had to search your laptop or applications to find that one piece of info you need to tackle the item at the top of your to-do list? Even better: How great would it be if you didn’t have to create or manage a to-do list at all?

Smart Lists demonstrate the power of personalization

Whether at home or at work, personalized content saves time, and a lack of personalization can really make our lives much more difficult. Add to this a significant increase in digital sellers’ job responsibilities and a long list of time-consuming mandatory tasks, and it’s enough to push sales reps past the breaking point. In fact, ninety percent of digital sellers complain that aspects of their job take longer than they should.

To help solve this problem, Oracle’s product development teams have been creating time-saving personalization solutions for today’s customer relationship management (CRM) users. TikTok fans …or really anyone wanting to make their work less, well, work-like … let me introduce you to Smart Lists, a new addition to a growing list of transformational user experience updates for Oracle Sales. Smart Lists ensure sellers spend more time on the work that matters most and less time rage-clicking and searching ad hoc with questionable results.

Smart Lists are intelligent lists generated by Oracle Sales on behalf of sales reps, using information about their patterns of behavior within the application. Here’s how they work:

• Leveraging an underlying user context service and relevancy engine, Oracle Sales assesses which records will be most important to sellers based on criteria like how recently and how often they interact with a specific record and whether the record contains urgent or timely events, such as an upcoming appointment or task. It also takes into account whether a sales rep has marked a record as a Favorite. 
• The CRM application automatically generates Smart Lists that appear in a seller’s already highly personalized and searchable Workspace. Sellers can start each day confident that they have a clear view of what’s most important for them.
• As sales reps engage with a range of records, the User Context service adjusts relevancy scores to keep Smart Lists up-to-date with the most critical things that require attention.
• Reps can view Smart Lists on their personalized, task-based homepage in Workspace Infolets, on their CX Sales Mobile app, Oracle Sales Assistant and even via Microsoft Outlook 365 integration. No matter where they are, their Smart Lists are always available to guide them in the right direction.

To learn more about Smart Lists, watch this short video:

To see how Smart Lists play a role in Oracle’s ongoing evolution of the seller experience, check out the B2B Sales highlights from our latest Quarterly Update on Innovations for Advertising and CX.