Top Gear: Useful Internet Marketing Strategies & Tips to Move You Forward: How to Thrive in the Experience Economy—and How Oracle CX Unity Is More than a CDP

Today’s customers—both B2B and B2C—are firmly in the driver’s seat of the “Experience Economy,” a once-in-a-generation shift of power from brands to buyers. Customers place more value in the customer experience (CX) than in the goods and services themselves—and they’re adopting new technologies to get exactly what they want, where, when, and how they want it. As such, their customer journey is no longer predictable and linear. The B2C and B2B worlds have morphed into B2Me, where friction can make or break your customer relationships.

With customers driving the evolution of CX at breakneck speeds, how can businesses keep pace, let alone thrive? The answer lies within their customer data—countless data points from many different sources (sales, marketing, service, commerce, point of sale, field service, finance, community, social, etc.). The problem? Harnessing that data into a single, dynamic view of the customer so you can market to a segment of one, on an enterprise scale.

Unpacking Customer Data Platforms

Data is the currency of the Experience Economy. The ability to organize it, gain insights from it, and then use it as fuel to power contextual experiences across the customer journey—whatever path that takes—is critical.

Entering the scene in recent years are customer data platforms (CDPs). CDPs are software solutions designed to create a single, unified, and continuous customer database accessible by other systems throughout the organization. They should allow for a comprehensive view of each customer, yielding the ability to offer personalized content and customized delivery. They should be able to predict a customer’s future actions as well, allowing for more personalized experiences throughout the customer’s journey. CDPs are usually managed by marketers and are structured to support campaign management, marketing analyses, and business intelligence.

But many enterprises are not achieving these results with existing CDP solutions on the market. Most CDPs are offered by startups whose solutions can address only narrow marketing use cases in either B2B or B2C scenarios, but not both. Most fail to create a truly singular view of the customer, as they are able to incorporate only marketing digital interaction data and nothing else. Their models and algorithms aren’t modifiable by the customer, providing a “one size fits all” approach that doesn’t work across industries and business models. More recently, we’ve seen the entry of enterprise content and CRM vendors into the CDP space that promise to deliver true CDP solutions. At Oracle, we think delivering an enterprise-grade CDP—a customer intelligence platform—isn’t about point solutions, content, or CRM—it’s about expertise in managing data at scale.

It is an extremely difficult engineering task to corral demographic data, transactional data, and behavioral data and to integrate it across devices and channels to create a complete, connected, insightful, and actionable customer profile. That’s why thriving in the Experience Economy requires a partner that has data at the core of its business—and its solutions.

More Than a CDP: Oracle CX Unity Customer Intelligence Platform

Oracle CX Unity helps enterprises thrive in the Experience Economy by weaving their disparate customer data—from marketing, sales, commerce, and service—into strategic intelligence. It merges online, offline, and third-party data to create a single source of real-time customer truth, helping eliminate the “blind spots” that prevent so many enterprises from better understanding their customers and delivering richer interactions.

What’s more, CX Unity goes one step further than the broader CDP market by applying built-in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to prescribe the optimal experience within existing business processes. Here are some real-life scenarios that illustrate the Oracle CX Unity difference:

You’re ready to execute a marketing campaign. Since Oracle CX Unity ingests service records, you might want to suppress customers who are having significant service issues, allowing their sole experience with your brand to be focused on their upcoming solution.
You manage your company’s website and know that 70 percent of your visits are anonymous. Wouldn’t it be great to turn half of that 70 percent into known visitors? Oracle CX Unity can help.
Your customer Rick buys wine from your online retail business. In addition to knowing that Rick enjoys wine, a third-party data source from Oracle CX Unity tells you that he also likes fine foods, hiking, and travel. Now you can build a deeper, richer relationship with Rick by offering content and products that speak to all his preferences.

You’re a sales representative for an insurance company that just released a new product. In Oracle CX Unity, you can see at a glance which existing customers are most engaged and have the greatest propensity for this new product.

Offering a connected customer profile, comprehensive customer intelligence, and personalization across the entire customer experience, Oracle CX Unity allows your brand to drive at the same hypersonic speeds as your customers. Learn more about how Oracle CX Unity can help you create personalized, differentiated customer experiences.

Having data is just the start. What you do with it is what counts. Find more by looking at “Modern Marketers Using Data-Driven Strategies.”

See the infographic.