Oracle Intelligent Advisor (OIA) enables organizations to build interactive interviews based on business requirements, complex policy, and legislation. Siebel CRM is a robust and mature Customer Relationship Management enterprise application that is used across industries to maintain Customer and their related data for Marketing, Sales and Service business processes.

Any Industry-specific use case that requires step-by-step data capture and rules to reach a decision or an outcome is a very valid scenario for integrated solution with Siebel CRM and OIA. This led to revisit integration options and define best possible way for Siebel CRM to integrate with OIA and reap maximum benefits out of both applications.

The existing integration is enhanced with a new simplified integration approach, released with the Siebel CRM 22.4 Update. The integration framework uses client side integration to provide an embedded interview approach.

The embedded interview approach is designed as follows:

OIA Integration Architecture

This enables each application to have more control on what scenarios to display and reduces the time and effort integrating the two applications.

User Experience is enhanced as well:

  • Users will access the Siebel CRM application and once the OIA Interview is loaded, all navigation and actions within the interview are managed directly in OIA.
  • On specific actions like Interview Exit or Submit, the user interaction switches back to Siebel CRM application.
  • The data will flow from Siebel CRM to Oracle Intelligent Advisor and vice-versa based on the use case flow design and Siebel CRM configurations.
  • On interview Exit in between, a snapshot will be saved in Siebel CRM in order to resume the interview later from the same point. This uses the checkpointing capability of OIA. Simple configurations in Siebel CRM can enable the auto-deletion of a snapshot once the interview is completed.

User Experience summary

Siebel CRM and OIA UX highlights

Integration Overview

The diagram below explains at a high level the design, setup and configurations required between Siebel CRM and OIA for implementing an industry use cases. 

Siebel CRM and OIA industry use cases configuration

The interview User Interface is designed in OIA, therefore UI configuration in Siebel CRM is limited to just the container applet and view where the OIA Interview is to be embedded. Integration configuration is significantly reduced due to the framework and reference objects provided with the new integration functionality.

Integration summary

Siebel CRM and OIA integration highlights

Conclusion

The key benefits of this simplified OIA integration with embedded interview approach are:

  1. Rich user experience with Oracle Intelligent Advisor for Interview styling and embedded seamlessly from Siebel CRM.
  2. Low cost and reduced effort of integration between Siebel CRM and Oracle Intelligent Advisor.
  3. Easier Oracle Intelligent Advisor upgrades in the future due to a simplified integration approach making it easier and faster to adopt new innovations and features. 

 

This insight was authored by Asakti Srivastava, Siebel CRM Principal Product Manager at Oracle.