Get with the Flow

Part 3 of 3: My Top 3 Oracle CX Add-ons Valuable to the Business

“Ten minutes. And they usually wait,” the well-educated, Level 2 service agent said. That’s how long it took the service agent to manually transition to the old billing database, open, search and find the necessary information needed and get back to the customer with the appropriate response.  This didn’t include the full call handling time. Ironically, my conversation with this agent came right after a meeting with the Service Management Team who had just reported on the multitude of improvements their agents were experiencing from their new knowledge, chat, and self-service capabilities from modernizing their call center to the cloud. 

Ironically, my conversation with this agent came right after a meeting with the Service Management Team who had just reported on the multitude of improvements….

This conversation occurred about two years ago, when I was consulting with a lab who produced and sold hundreds of scientific tools and consumables. Although there appears to be a disconnect between management’s results and the agent’s experience, I am not here to judge that situation as another Judy might do. This particular company was actually making excellent progress, following an agile mindset, and rolling out new functionality in phases.  Fortunately, the billing inquiries, although common, were not the predominant issues that were most painful to the customer.  The company had a Phase Two to address the next set of CX-related priorities that included the integration from their back-end system to customer service.

Oracle Integration Cloud & Application Adapters

So does your data drip or flow? Not all businesses or business models have the resources to move everything to the cloud all-at-once to realize the full benefits from the native dataflow that come with cloud. There are often niche, proprietary, or legacy systems that must be considered when moving your applications to the cloud that will require some type of integration; whether short or long-term.

If AT&T has taught us anything, “Just OK, is not OK.” There are many ways to integrate, but not all are the right way. Work-around integrations can cost a lot of money. Worse yet, non-existent integrations between your data cost time, money, and errors.

Worse yet, non-existent integrations between your data cost time, money, and errors.

Time to Integrate

The idea is to connect customer data from one application to any other application that also store data on that same customer in the easiest way. If you are using any of the Oracle products that are on Fusion (Sales, B2B Service, Subscription Management, PRM, ERP, HCM, etc.), integrations are made easy with the ability to natively integrate or you can also benefit from the use of modern RESTful API calls. That will be as technical as I will get for everyone’s sake.

For common CX integrations to non-Fusion products, Oracle has built many “Oracle-Built” pre-built adapters that are available on the Marketplace with details available in the Help Center. Pre-built integrations to your Marketing, CPQ, or 3rd Party Data like DataFox, DaaS, D&B are just a few examples where the integration benefits occur as real-time as you can imagine. I recommend downloading the CX Connectivity PDF for more detail on the different connection types and availability.

For your legacy or niche systems, Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) is also available to optimize the integrations to these commonly-used platforms; whether it is from Cloud-to-Cloud or Cloud-to-On-Premise systems.

Flowing Ahead

If you put yourself in the shoes of the business owner of my opening story, I am sure you can see how quickly the dollar signs can add up in terms of costs to service the customer as well as imagine the frustration of the customer and employee. If integration isn’t a part of your Phase One, I hope it is somewhere in the plan; as a smooth flow of your data can always help avoid turbulent waters ahead.

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Integration (OIC) is one of my Top 3 Top Oracle Cloud Add-ons that add value to the business as the pay-off from the benefits greatly exceed the licensing costs.  The KPI list below shows a sampling of benefit areas typically improved with a smooth integration policy.

No proprietary information has been shared. This post and this blog are solely the opinion of the author.

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This is Part Three of Three Top Oracle Cloud Add-ons Valuable to the Business