Oracle rolls out Loyalty Cloud, other new CX products

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Oracle on Tuesday is announcing three new products within its Customer Experience (CX) Cloud Suite: An analytics application called Infinity; a powerful, easy-to-use segmentation tool for marketers called CX Audience; and a new cloud service called the Loyalty Cloud.

In the last couple of years, most enterprises have come to recognize they need to undergo a digital transformation to react to customer expectations with more self-serve digital and mobile experiences, according to Des Cahill, Oracle VP and head CX evangelist.

Now, he told ZDNet, "The conversation is more about where you are in the transformation of your business."

The products that Oracle is rolling out this week, Cahill said, enable that process in three ways: By connecting customer data, applying intelligence, and ultimately helping to enhance the customer experience.

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The CX Audience and Infinity tools are part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud (within the CX Suite). They help organizations connect customer data and use AI to gain better insights into their business. More specifically, Oracle Infinity unifies behavioral data within a marketing organization and across any other digital touchpoint. While a typical analytics application captures around 10 percent of visitor information from a site, Infinity captures 100 percent of digital traffic, Cahill said, and analyzes it in real-time. It can then trigger actions based on user activity, such as sending a user relevant discounts.

CX Audience, meanwhile, enables marketers manage and enrich data with less help from the IT department. It has design tools and re-usable filters accessible to non-technical employees, so they can easily create and publish audience segments. Oracle also says it enables segmentation and analysis in a matter of seconds or minutes instead of hours. Also, CX Audience is integrated with the Oracle Data Cloud, a massive third-party data marketplace, giving marketers more information to work with. All this data can be used to predict future results and discover sub-segments of potential customers. CX Audience also continuously tracks audience and campaign-level performance.

Oracle is also rolling out the Loyalty Cloud within the CX Suite, to help organizations administer loyalty programs across different channels. Creating a seamless experience for customers across channels is critical, Cahill said, noting that it can be much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. The Loyalty Cloud is available worldwide in 20 languages.

In addition to the new CX tools, Oracle is adding several new capabilities with adaptive intelligence across sales, marketing, and commerce.

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First, Oracle is giving salespeople new AI-based forecasting capabilities within the Sales and Engagement Clouds. The company is also using AI to offer "next-best action" advice to sales teams, based on factors such as a customer's call history or the status of their shipments.

Sales representatives will also be able to use a virtual sales assistant when helping clients out in the field. It's effectively a voice-based chatbot service that lives on a sales agent's mobile device or desktop to help agents as they're working with customers.

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