Customer satisfaction

Oracle’s Stephen Fearon discusses CRM in the midst of an economic downturn.

“Behaviours are being changed. The downturn has led customers to be even more discerning and demanding about who they buy from and the service they receive”
-Stephen Fearon, Oracle

The twin pressures of the downturn and disruptive technology will lead to an arms race in the large B2C sectors such as retail, telco, banking, transport and others. The weapons will be used in battles around competitive differentiation, customer retention and margin management. Among these weapons will be a new CRM capability that leverages disruptive technology – the Customer Application.

Impact of twin pressures
Behaviours are being changed. The downturn has led customers to be even more discerning and demanding about who they buy from and the service they receive. From the supplier side, the downturn has brought greater competition as suppliers chase after ever scarcer resources. So customers want the best service and best deals, and competition escalates as suppliers take actions to win and keep customers.

Disruptive technology accelerates the decision making on both sides of the equation. Web 2.0 technology is being absorbed into mainstream commerce through activities such as social networking and opinion sharing. ‘Anytime, anyplace, anywhere’ access to e-commerce applications through platforms such as the iPhone is becoming the benchmark for the customer. These two factors mean that information will be found, shared, digested, decisions made and transactions completed in an instant.

At any time convenient to the customer, they could drop their supplier, or investigate other suppliers or maybe explore and purchase a new product or service. With no warning, a supplier could lose a customer or, conversely, by making the right information available to the right customer at the right moment, sell more to an existing customer or win a new customer.

Next generation
CRM 101 will still apply – the Customer Application will bring the core pillars of CRM to bear at a moment of truth of the customer’s choosing. Consider this scenario: John is a customer of a retail book chain, so is Jane, a friend of John’s. Independently John and Jane are shopping in a particular mall. They both have a Customer Application on their phones and have given permission for certain suppliers to know where they are in return for receiving relevant offers and loyalty points. In this case, location based services feed information about them back through the network to the CRM of the retailer.

Through the 360-degree view of customers, the CRM knows that they both like a particular author (perhaps they have browsed this author on their web-site or purchased his work before). Through the retailer’s own customer community, the CRM knows that they are friends. The CRM senses a possible moment of truth to win more business – the CRM Loyalty engine sends them both a message via their Customer Application suggesting that they meet in the branch at the mall, it also includes a review (by their friend Michael) of the new book.

The message includes loyalty points or a voucher that they can use in a part points/part cash purchase at the point of sale in the store, it also contains a further loyalty incentive to review the book for the customer community, Twitter or Facebook status (‘Just read xxx book, its great and I recommend it’ with a link to the retailer site). Similar concepts, including self-service, and with or without location based services, can be applied in travel, hospitality, wealth management, media/ telecoms, speciality products and so on.

Prediction
How close is this? Oracle’s Siebel CRM and CRM On Demand is the foundation for this. We are collaborating with customers right now to build the first Customer Applications. How will they benefit? Competitive differentiation, margin management and customer retention…. and customer acquisition.

Stephen Fearon is the Vice President in charge of Oracle CRM Sales Development and CRM On Demand for EMEA. In this role, he guides the leading edge of CRM across the region. Fearon has been with Oracle for 15 years.