WHAT DOES YOUR COMPANY DO & WHAT IS YOUR USP?
A unified and complete CX platform is essential for retailers today. Shoppers expect a consistent shopping experience regardless of how, when or where they choose to interact. Also retailers need to be able to respond quickly to fast-changing market trends and they can’t do this if they’re spending time getting disparate IT systems to talk to each other.
Oracle offers the most complete, integrated and extensible CX suite on the market, spanning market-leading applications that enable commerce, marketing, sales, loyalty, social and service. We enable our clients to deliver great customer experiences throughout their customers’ journey.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE COMPANY’S VISION?
Our vision is to enable our clients to deliver consistent, connected and personalised brand experiences with an integrated set of applications that span the entire customer lifecycle.
HOW HAS ORACLE COMMERCE CLOUD DEVELOPED IN THE PAST YEAR?
Oracle Commerce Cloud has been developed hugely in the time since launch with a number of releases over the past year. These feature-heavy releases are opening up all of the functionality expected from Oracle’s on-premise solution into the cloud product.
One particular focus has been the customer journey and how the customer interacts with a retail brand from the first to last moment and everything in between. Oracle’s focus has been not solely on the Oracle stack but also on the marketing cloud, sales cloud, service cloud and social cloud and putting all of these things together to create a full CX journey.
The company has worked also on how best of breed applications integrate with the Oracle stack, what customers want to integrate and how it can be made as easy as possible so that they can create that complete customer journey.
In the past, integration with legacy applications has been costly and time consuming. The Oracle marketplace gives customers access to already integrated third party products and best of breed applications making it easier to get to market much faster.
WHO ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS?
Oracle has thousands of customers spanning industries and geographies including the world’s largest retailers and online businesses. We work with retailers such as Tesco, Shop Direct, Matalan, Schuh and notonthehighstreet.com, just to name a few.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE CHALLENGES FOR THE RETAIL INDUSTRY?
UK retailers are getting to the stage where they’ve done everything they can to reduce expenses and operational costs and have competed as far as they can on price, range and service. It means there are few areas left for differentiation and innovation.
There is also a desire to simplify operations so that businesses are able to scale more easily. Rather than focusing on hosting and worrying about their IT systems retailers would rather spend their time focusing on the customer, creating loyalty and reacting to things that are happening in the market. Old legacy systems don’t necessarily enable that.
At the same time, shopper requirements continue to change at full pace and not keeping up with their needs is not an option – discontented customers won’t wait around for a retailer to get it right, they’re much less brand loyal and will shop with the competition in a heartbeat.
HOW ARE YOU PREPARED TO MEET THESE CHALLENGES?
Oracle is focused on making it easy for retailers to meet these high levels of shopper expectations, both now and in the future. Oracle Commerce Cloud, combined with the broader Oracle CX suite, empowers retailers to stay competitive in this increasingly challenging market by reacting quickly to market trends and creating seamless experiences, at the same time as leveraging the efficiencies and cost-savings offered by the cloud.
Within this, AI is further enabling retailers to revolutionise the customer experience, not only in the way that customers are looking to shop but with the back end as well. Going forward, personalisation is going to be key in helping retailers to be able to understand customers, to meet their requirements, to build loyalty and really focus on those valuable customers.
This Company Spotlight was produced by InternetRetailing and paid for by Oracle. Funding articles in this way allows us to explore topics and present relevant services and information that we believe our readers will find of interest.
ORACLE IN BRIEF
Date launched: 1977 – Software Development Laboratories, the precursor to Oracle, is founded by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates.
Global reach: Oracle is a global organisation with offices across Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Date launched in the UK: Oracle Corporation UK Ltd was founded in 1984.
Turnover: US$37bn (£28.47bn) total GA AP revenue in FY 2016.
Customers: More than 420,000 customers across 195 countries and territories have harnessed Oracle technology to accelerate their digital transformation. Oracle CX customers in EMEA include Vodafone, PSA and Panasonic Computer Products Europe.
Employees: More than 135,000 employees including: 40,000 developers and engineers, 16,000 support personnel and 18,000 consulting experts.
Partners: More than 25,000 partners worldwide.
Contact: For further information contact Oracle via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn CX Showcase or YouTube. You can also view InternetRetailing’s interview with Christine Bardwell at IRTV.
