Overall, mass campaigns are no longer effective: Rakesh Jaitly, Oracle Applications

Today’s evolving customer needs have taken customer engagement to a different level. Hyper-personalisation and New-Age commerce have opened new customer engagement channels for brands to stay connected with their customers. In the last few years, the entire customer engagement paradigm has undergone massive transformation.

Rising consumer expectations, the need to engage with customers more closely, high market competitiveness, and increasing digital needs have shifted the focus to technology. Oracle is a technology partner for many leading retail and commerce brands in India, supporting their entire Customer Experience (CX) operations. Companies across economic sectors like Tata Teleservices, Bausch + Lomb, BPCL, HDFC Ergo, Flipkart, Federal Bank, Lifestyle and SBI Card, among others, have employed Oracle Customer Experience (CX) solutions.

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Rakesh Jaitly, Senior Sales Director, Oracle Applications, speaks at length about their various customer engagement product offerings  and how customer engagement has today become the backbone of every company to meet customer expectations.

Technology has played a very pivotal role in today’s e-commerce business. How has Oracle helped the e-commerce companies to closely engage with their customers?

In the last few years, the entire customer engagement paradigm has undergone massive transformation. Rising consumer expectations, the need to engage with customers more closely, high market competitiveness, and increasing digital needs have shifted the focus to technology. Oracle is a technology partner for many leading retail and commerce brands in India, supporting their entire Customer Experience (CX) operations. Companies across economic sectors like Tata Teleservices, Bausch + Lomb, BPCL, HDFC Ergo, Flipkart, Federal Bank, Lifestyle and SBI Card among others have employed Oracle Customer Experience (CX) solutions. Our Cloud-native applications enable organisations to engage with customers more closely and manage their needs by leveraging smart technologies and processes such as real-time smart segmentation, customer analytics, actionable intelligence, customer behaviour mapping, and much more. This enables them to serve their customers efficiently while simultaneously accounting for the constantly changing market dynamics and customer purchasing habits and behaviour.

Can you elaborate more on hyper-personalisation? How is it helping organisations and brands in today’s transformed digital world?

To grasp the concept of hyper-personalisation, let’s consider the factors that contributed to customers' highly dynamic needs. For instance, the Indian economy is transitioning from a low-income to a middle-income region, with rising urbanisation, literacy rates, employment opportunities, and a growing market. Hence, customer expectations are rising as they interact with more and more brands. Overall, mass campaigns are no longer effective, nor are personalised campaigns that target customers based on personas or segments. This is where ‘Hyper-personalisation’ comes into the picture – emerging as a mega trend that will shape the customer engagement ecosystem for decades to come.

‘Hyper-personalisation’ is a step ahead of personalisation, catering to individual needs of each customer. The most advanced way for brands to tailor their marketing to individual customers is through hyper-personalisation. It is accomplished by using technologies like Data Analytics, Cloud Analytics, AI, and Automation to create customised and targeted experiences. In current times, businesses are looking for ways to improve the customer experience and evolve their marketing programmes to be more digital, targeted, precise, and personalised. To meet these expectations, retailers are implementing hyper-personalisation solutions for their customers, which are enabled by advanced innovations and technologies. These solutions work by mapping each customer's needs and behaviours, then using embedded smart technologies like Cloud and AI to recommend data-driven recommendations and, ultimately, providing highly superior personalised experience.

Customer centricity is the hallmark of every brand today. How are Oracle’s CX offerings helping brands in adding value to their customers?

‘Customer centricity’ is the core aspect at which Oracle’s CX applications focus on – to provide our customers across industries with cloud native applications with AI-embedded capabilities that help them cater to their customer base. Oracle Cloud CX uses a data-first approach to create the next great experience for each customer by connecting customer behaviours, transactions, and demographics across marketing, sales, service, and your back-office applications. With Data as part of the core DNA of our CX solution; for more than 40 years, Oracle has assisted customers in managing, securing, and driving business value from data.

Keeping up with our customers’ hyper-personalisation needs, Oracle’s cloud-native Customer Experience (CX) solutions, which rely on data-driven insights and AI-powered intelligence, assist our customers across industries in advancing their customer-centricity operations and meeting their customers' hyper-personalisation needs. Hence, brands can add more value to their entire customer engagement operations by providing data-driven servicing and personalised experiences.

How do you keep reinventing and innovating technology to meet customer challenges? What has been your approach here to introduce newer solutions?

We believe in constantly updating our applications to keep up with industry requirements. This includes market research, investing in R&D, understanding our customers’ growing business requirements, and updating and introducing new cloud applications accordingly.

We introduced two solutions as part of our Customer Experience Suite in the past year to cater to the growing market and assist marketers and sales people in creating personalised campaigns and sales strategies. Last year, we launched Fusion Marketing to assist marketers in creating personalised campaigns. This was followed this year by Fusion Sales, an AI-powered, predictive intelligence solution that provides sales people with the insight and bandwidth they require to close more leads.

In addition to this, we are focusing on localisation of our applications. Oracle CX unity solutions are now available on our cloud data regions in India – Hyderabad and Mumbai – to better serve public-sector organisations and assist them in adapting to concepts like hyper-personalisation. This will enable us to better assist our customers in the public sector and regulatory markets, two customer-oriented sectors that cater to our country’s citizens and their critical needs, while also providing data residency, a major request for public sector organisations. We will continue to expand on our growing momentum by introducing new offerings as well as upgrading our current offerings as per market needs.

As a technology provider, what are some of the new innovations one can expect in scaling up the customer experience and bringing in effective customer engagement?

As a technology player engaging with numerous players globally and in India, we recognise the need for smarter CX solutions that are focused on concepts such as ‘Customer-centricity’, ‘Smart Analytics’, and ‘Hyper-personalisation’. We believe that this will become an industry standard in the future, and that customers will expect this from brands in their day-to-day engagement. Hence, the onus is on technology players and brands to constantly capitalise on the vast technological dynamism and potential that we now have.

As demonstrated by Oracle’s recent launches, we are constantly expanding our CX offerings and incorporating new capabilities, increasingly relying on embedded technologies in our cloud solutions. In fact, our Oracle CX businesses grew by 55% year on year in the previous fiscal year (FY22). As a result, our CX solutions are growing in terms of both offerings and revenue, and we will continue to focus on scaling our offerings. In terms of CX growth, Public sector partnerships and the BFSI sector are contributing to the expansion of CX businesses, particularly in India.