Expert Advice for Medium and Midsize Businesses
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Customer Experience,
Success Stories
November 13, 2019
Vermont Country Store and Oracle CX Cloud Supports Shoppers, Not Servers
We recently spoke with David Noel with the Vermont Country Store about his thoughts and experiences with Oracle Commerce Cloud and the impact it has had on their growing business. This family-owned business operates two stores, a catalog, a restaurant, and a growing ecommerce business.
Thanks for joining us today David, let’s start off by asking – in your opinion – what is the most important step to providing a great customer experience?
We feel that it's important to have an emotional attachment to what our customer is experiencing. We want to make sure that we have empathy for our customers, that we get it and that we’re treating them right as a result. Providing customers with a great experience does ultimately result in sales but putting customers before sales is what brings them back, keeping our brand reputation strong.
Are you seeing your customers’ expectations change? And, if so, how fast?
Generally, customer expectations are always changing. No sooner than you figure out what those expectations are, and you develop a way to meet them, the customer has already moved on. Change is constant. So, to try to think of customer expectations as a fixed point in time is just not practical and you'll quickly outdating yourself.
When you're trying to measure if/how you are meeting your customers’ expectations and why, what’s the main KPI that the Vermont Country Store focuses on?
It kind of comes down to revenue, but it's a blend of things. It's how often are customers contacting our call centers, what comments they are leaving. Many customers also write personal letters to us, so our customers are very loyal and we're proud of that.
So you are an Oracle Commerce Cloud customer. What can you do in your organization and in your role today with Oracle Commerce Cloud that you couldn't do before?
Oracle Commerce Cloud lets us focus on creating a great customer experience versus having to maintain a ton of servers and licensing and patching. With our traditional platforms we kind of had to create the whole experience. We had to develop the backend and the front end, so this really lets us focus on creating that best customer experience and allowing Oracle to take care of the finer details. We are no longer having to get up in the early, early morning to support these long, extended maintenance windows.
We have had a great relationship with Oracle. It's so much more than just the product; it's the support that comes with it and the teams that we get to work with. We can be much more innovative without spending as much money.
It’s about bringing the size of Oracle to our smaller company and allowing us to be more adaptive and flexible. We are very excited about what Oracle is doing, where they're headed. We're currently looking at other areas of our organization and how can we integrate those with other Oracle products. When we have more tools at our disposal, we can provide a better customer experience as well.