Cross-channel engagement was among the key themes of the Modern Service Experience track of the Oracle Modern Customer Experience conference in Las Vegas last week. Brian Curran, vice president of customer experience strategy and design at Oracle, kicked off the Modern Service Experience keynote and called on businesses to redesign their service experiences through thoughtful journey mapping.
"It's service organizations' time to lead," Curran said, as he introduced a customer experience design model centered on customer profiling and engagement. Though profiling and engagement should make up the two halves of customer experience strategy, both are made possible by three sets of tools that help service teams identify and understand customers, design and deliver experiences, and collect and analyze data based on those experiences. To deliver top-notch service, companies have to stay on the cutting edge. When it comes to engagement capabilities, for example, technology that facilitates expertise-based routing and internal agent collaboration will become crucial, according to Curran.
Oracle Service Cloud customers shared the stage on day two of the conference and discussed how the vendor has enabled them to achieve results. Becky Ploeger, vice president of digital commerce customer care at Kohl's, explained how Oracle has helped the retailer with its goal of "inspir[ing] and empower[ing] families to lead fulfilled lives." For Kohl's, the Oracle Service Cloud serves as a funnel through which customer service interactions are filtered. While in the past, phone calls were the primary channel used to reach customer service, Kohl's customers now rely on a number of channels, including chat, email, and others, and Oracle Service Cloud has enabled the retailer to make sense of the massive influx of contacts and route them to the right agents more efficiently.
Kohl's path to customer service improvement has involved not only implementing "tools that enable" but also "policies that empower," and both changes have allowed agents to "quickly, consistently, accurately say yes" more often, according to Ploeger. The company's customer experience overhaul over the last several months has earned it Oracle's 2015 Customer Champion Award and CRM magazine's 2015 Service Elite Award.
Oracle customer LinkedIn received recognition as well, earning Oracle's Modern Experience Award. Andy Yasutake, director of global technology solutions and operations at LinkedIn, talked about the company's customer experience evolution and how LinkedIn has transitioned from being "brilliant at basics" to being "best in class," Yasutake said.
When LinkedIn first set out on a customer experience transformation, the company aimed to deliver consistent service levels "at target or better for sustained periods," increase automation and integration for case management, and improve resource forecasting, scheduling, and planning across all operations functions. LinkedIn also focused on improving employee engagement and satisfaction with its tools and consolidating multiple help centers into an integrated platform scaled to support customers.
With the first phase complete, the company began to "scale to meet emerging market needs as it grew, increase cost efficiencies and minimize productivity churn, introduce rich media and interactive content, and expand interaction channels for members and customers," Yasutake explained. Now, the company prides itself on best-in-class service levels with minimal variance, as well as on being able to leverage the community "completely." LinkedIn has also been able to integrate a single view of the customer and deliver service as a "proactive value center," according to Yasutake.
Other customers shared their experiences with the Oracle Service Cloud as well, and praised the vendor for its cross-channel capabilities. Integration between the marketing, sales, and service clouds as well as cross-channel functionality among the three have been priorities for Oracle, CEO Mark Hurd said during his keynote at the event, and the company plans to continue on this trajectory. "Customers are going to want suites of capabilities.... [They] just want to pick a few horses to ride," he said during a media roundtable discussion." [So,] you have to be both best of breed, and bring a set of capabilities that doesn't force the customer to integrate a bunch of different clouds. They don't wan to work with fifteen different companies anymore," he added.