Today, in the age of digital disruption, every firm needs to understand the changing behavior of their customers, the competition and the company itself to make strategic decisions and be able to outline tactical plans related to product performance, pricing strategies, promotion, and markets the firm needs to focus on or exit from. The marketing team needs to make strategic decisions regarding customer segments to target and therefore maximize the return on the marketing budget by efficiently allocating the company’s marketing dollars. With technological advancements, marketing is now a quantifiable, data-based function. And Business users should always use analytics to drive marketing decisions.
Over the years, as businesses expanded into new marketing categories, they continued to adopt hybrid applications both on premises and cloud to support their growing need. Multiple applications siloed the customer information across the business limiting the view of the customer and ability to analyze different marketing initiatives. Today, customers are fulfilling their marketing analytics need by adopting leading cloud analytics platforms like Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS).
What is a customer 360-degree view?
Being able to get a complete view of your customers by aggregating data from the various touch points that a customer may use to contact a company, to purchase products, and to receive service and support is a 360-degree view.
Customers today share tons of personal data as they engage with an organization through an increasing number of channels and applications. This means that the data is being stored in multiple applications both on premises as well as cloud applications. In order to become a customer company, organizations need to enable all customer-facing teams, from marketing and sales to customer service, to jointly capture this data, analyze it, and respond to it.
This combined effort builds an actionable 360-degree view of the customer, and enables companies to deliver an engaging and personalized customer experience.
Why the need for Customer 360?
Customers today expect a personalized, unified experience, regardless of which department they engage with. The 360-degree view of customers often requires an analytics strategy. Companies today can use a modern analytics platform in the cloud to combine different sources of data and to analyze them in a central location.
Below are some of the common IT challenges we see a number of our customers facing when trying to build a customer 360-degree view.
- Customer is siloed across the business
- Limited ability to join Customer across multiple sources
- Multiple and incomplete definitions of Customer
- Data quality concerns on key attributes (missing or inconsistent)
- Limited accessibility to those with a valid business need
- Timeliness of information availability (weeks or months)
- Operational attributes unavailable for analysis
- Attributes unavailable for operational need:
- Targeted messaging
- Complete information at the point of
engagement - Limited self-service capabilities
- Lack of agility in changing customer facing capabilities in response to customer information
Why consider cloud for Marketing Analytics and Customer 360?
The release of Oracle BI Cloud Service, the cloud-based version of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), brings a low-cost, enterprise-class analytics environment, with built-in mobile capabilities, to users across an organization, regardless of technical level.
Additionally, cloud speeds development by:
- Rapid provisioning: Provisioning an on premises infrastructure can be time-consuming and expensive. With cloud, the application and the analytics can be up and running in days. When capacity needs or project needs fluctuate, cloud responds fluidly.
- Cloud is Elastic: Cloud also offers pay-as-you-go and use-what-you-need models. This flexibility ensures capacity ahead of demand and also provides closer, more predictable links to costs and use. Cloud is elastic, and platforms easily scale up, out, or in. Harness the unbound, unrestricted nature of cloud to move faster, test more, and collaborate better.
- Compresses Test Cycles: With cloud, you can push code out to users seamlessly. As a result, developers receive near real-time feedback from users. You don’t have to guess what works, because long feedback cycles are eliminated. Time is compressed and production cycles are shortened to weeks, rather than months or quarters.
- Integration: Cloud Platform can integrate with third-party applications used by the agency and partners, adding value in the ecosystem.
Are there prebuilt marketing analytics on Oracle Cloud that we could leverage to accelerate deployment time and reduce implementation costs?
Yes, Oracle partners like Perficient have built prebuilt content of data models, metrics, best practice dashboards and reports which can significantly accelerate the time it would take to deploy a marketing analytics solution.
Perficient Marketing Analytics for Oracle BI Cloud Service gives our customers the ability to consolidate disparate Marketing, CRM, Sales, Billings, External/Third-Party data all into an Oracle Cloud Database. Marketing Analytics comes with prebuilt data models and metrics, prebuilt dashboards and reports which customers can use to leverage best practices and reduce implementation time.
If you are attending Kscope16 this year, please join us at booth #211 to discuss this topic and any other questions on Oracle Business Intelligence:
- Title: Building a 360-Degree View of Your Customers on BICS
- When: Jun 28, 2016, Session 8, 9:45 am – 10:45 am
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Shiv Bharti is the Practice Director of Perficient’s (NASDAQ:PRFT) National Oracle Business Intelligence Practice. Shiv has solid experience building and deploying Oracle Business Intelligence products. He has successfully led the implementation of more than 75 Business Analytics and custom data warehouse projects.
Shiv is a thought leader in the Business Analytics space and a frequent speaker at large conferences like – Oracle Open World, Collaborate, KScope as well as Oracle User Group, sharing his perspectives and thoughts on industry trends,strategies, best practices and case studies.
