There’s growing need for real-time intelligence on customers: Paolo Maraziti, Oracle

In an interaction with Adgully, Paolo Maraziti, Vice-President, Asia Pacific and Japan SaaS Business Development, Oracle, speaks about the developments in the data-led marketing space, the need for brands to create a more personalised engagement for consumers, data security, Cloud and much more. Excerpts: 

Consumer expectations from brands have soared over the last few years and brands have been struggling to keep up with products, marketing and consumer experience. How can brands really catch up and go above and beyond to create customer delight?
I think it is going to be a little bit down set for India. According to statistics available, in India about 58 per cent of the population is online already, with more making the move towards online. Brands have the opportunity to capitalise on a series of data that the consumers leave trace of online. Brands can make use of this data to create a more personalised engagement for consumers. So, they are not speaking to a segment anymore, but to an individual. I think these offer huge opportunities for brands’ marketing specifically in India because of the huge population being online and start capturing the data. And there is a first mover advantage always that brands can capitalise on. 

Therefore, you can have more personal interaction based on the fact that more and more people are online and are leaving a trace of their interest online. Thus, brands can have a one to one, more specific conversation with their consumers. 

Everyone has a lot of data and data mining, yet gaining the right insight is still a challenge. How can brands with this technology gain the right insight that can be acted upon to create ROI?
At Oracle, we are working on a project called CX Unity that we launched last autumn. It is all about creating a connection across all the data lakes – or what we sometimes call data puddles – that you have. 

Done in-house, we connect the typical customer data available, but also layer on top the interaction data, the data from our marketplace and time sensitive intelligence of what the consumer is doing. 

With growing use of data, data security, trust and privacy have become very important. How can brands build a healthy relationship with their consumers to be able to proactively follow this data?
We have a movement all over the world about the sensitivity of private information. Having said that, we are seeing increasing hacker activity on databases. Hence, it has become very important for brands to secure their data. That’s why you need to look at solutions such as cloud; we have Oracle Cloud to protect data. At Oracle, we provide a level of security that very few organisations in the world can match. We are speaking specifically about defense and banks that require a very high level of security. If you want to focus on improving your brand’s performance, our strong advice is to source the security to somebody else, such as Oracle, who will be able to run the cloud. 

With more and more companies undergoing digital transformation in their marketing function, what are some of the challenges and opportunities for brands here?
The opportunities are huge. We believe that brands guarantee an experience in their relationship with the customer above and beyond the transactional layer. As per our survey, about 20 per cent of the consumers are willing to pay more for a better experience, even in a price sensitive market like India. When you digitalise your brand, not only are you able to increase personalisation, but also provide a better customer experience. 

Finally, what are some of the key trends that you foresee in 2020?
The year 2020 is definitely going to be an era of more and more digitalisation, more and more marketing happening online from a technology perspective, especially in India. We see a lot of companies now investing in customer data platform. For example, our CX Unity is at the cutting edge of the transformation, we also work with customers in India like Toyota, which is one of the adopters of the platform. With CX Unity we will be able to merge old signals and old customer data being resident in the company as well as automate signals coming from outside. For instance, our data acquisition layer (which we call data-as-a-service), which gives B2B customers the ability to detect, say, financial signals that are affecting their customer base and prioritise which customer to go after. 

If you want to maximise the efficiency of your sales team, you will need to give some direction and prioritisation. Thus, I see more digital, more marketing and customer interaction on the digital channel and, therefore, the need for a customer data platform that gives you the real-time intelligence on your customer in order to prioritise and maximise your product in the market.