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How Oracle Created A Much Better Cloud Buying Experience

Oracle

When Oracle set out to create a fast, simple way for companies to buy its cloud services, it did so by first focusing on the success of the customer and then transforming its internal operations to offer the best procurement experience in the cloud. Oracle’s reimagination of its purchasing process is a modern-day example of how a technology company is using its own offerings to deliver the best customer experience and leapfrog its competitors.

The new Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience, introduced earlier this year to more than 20,000 Oracle salespeople worldwide, revamps the purchasing process for Oracle’s platform-, infrastructure-, and software-as-a-service cloud services. What used to take weeks or months, now takes just minutes or days.

This massive acceleration was enabled by Oracle’s own technologies—Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, and Oracle CPQ (configure, price, quote) Cloud. The Accelerated Buying Experience project team used Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle CPQ Cloud to run the new cloud-buying process, with real-time, click-to-chat support throughout the process driven by Oracle Service Cloud.

And now that the Accelerated Buying Experience has been rolled out, the project team is able to quickly fine-tune and improve the purchasing process based on user feedback, because the system runs on cloud applications.

For example, when European customers asked for quotes in US dollars rather than their home currency, Oracle’s IT team made the required changes to enable the customer request within a matter of hours and launched them as part of a weekly update to Oracle CPQ Cloud.

Cloud-Enabled Agility

Oracle’s experience launching the Accelerated Buying Experience shows two sides to how cloud applications bring a new level of speed and flexibility to a global, strategic project.

The first comes from faster project launches, even for a company of Oracle’s size, making changes tied to its mission-critical sales pipeline and revenue engine. Oracle executives had to make hard decisions about legacy policies to streamline internal processes—like eliminating the need for approvals of certain terms and conditions—but Oracle CPQ Cloud made it fast and easy to do that.

“CPQ as a technology was really the catalyst that allowed us to make these business process and policy changes,” says Paolo Juvara, Oracle group vice president, whose team runs Oracle’s internal applications.

The second lesson comes from how fast a company using cloud services can refine a system after initial launch. The days of waiting a year for the next software upgrade to fix problems are over—look at Oracle’s weekly internal CPQ releases in which it can deliver any small configuration changes needed. Process experts can use analytics to see how employees or customers are using cloud applications, and what questions they’re asking contact centers, in order to spot problems almost immediately.

“It’s a real-time feedback loop where we can continuously improve the whole end-to-end process,” says John Doyle, the vice president in charge of Oracle’s global quote-to-contract process. “That’s really where the magic is.”

To build the Accelerated Buying Experience, the team studied its historical transactional data along with all the steps involved in creating a new cloud deal and looked for places that required unnecessary human interactions that slowed the process. “The whole company is focused on how we keep the transaction, the customer, the sales rep online and on this express track,” Doyle says.

What follows are four examples of how the Accelerated Buying Experience gives Oracle customers and salespeople alike a better experience, made possible by increased process automation and more customer-friendly practices.

Simpler Purchase Documentation

In utilizing Oracle CPQ Cloud for the Accelerated Buying Experience, Oracle replaced a custom-built quoting tool that was more of a product catalog than a value-adding sales tool. The CPQ system helps guide salespeople to the right products and complementary services. “It’s cutting down on the cycle time it takes to sell something, plus the number of iterations salespeople need to go through to get the quote correct and get exactly what the customer wants,” Doyle says.

With the Accelerated Buying Experience, customers can manage all the documentation and agreements for a new cloud service digitally. In the past, customers would receive a PDF or hard copy as part of the purchase process, which they were required to sign, scan, and return. Now, they simply go to an online portal and click to accept.

Embedded in Oracle Sales Cloud

Oracle’s sales force was already using Oracle Sales Cloud to track potential deals, and now, as part of the Accelerated Buying Experience, Oracle CPQ Cloud is embedded in Oracle Sales Cloud so salespeople can move from opportunity to quote to sales documentation and agreement all in the same tool.

Unlike the legacy process, in which salespeople needed to log into at least four different systems to complete a deal, salespeople now don’t even see they’re moving between systems. Here’s a simple example of how that works: If a salesperson changes the value of a quote in CPQ, it’s reflected in the prospect’s value in Oracle Sales Cloud. “It’s a synchronized, single platform,” says Martyn Langley, vice president of Oracle's global sales operations, systems, and enablement.

Less IT Support Required

A lot of the strategic levers that business leaders pullfrom new product offerings to price changesrequire changes to a CPQ system. Using Oracle CPQ Cloud, when Oracle launches a new product, the product release group can now set up the options a salesperson will see about that offering, without requiring assistance from Juvara’s internal app support team. “Now it’s all self-managed by the business, which speeds up the product introduction cycle,” Juvara says.

More Interactive Support Through Multiple Channels

Using Oracle Service Cloud, Oracle has created a real-time service channel aimed at keeping customers on the Accelerated Buying Experience track. If a salesperson or customer has a question about using the online system, or about Oracle policies or agreement language, they can click to chat and instantly reach Oracle sales support.

Oracle has reinvented its five global finance centers to provide real-time support for the Accelerated Buying Experience, including a global help desk for questions on any part of the process. After someone clicks to chat and describes their question, Oracle Service Cloud routes them to the right support center. Setting up that routing configuration, for multiple global contact centers in two different Oracle organizations, took only about a week, Langley says.

Oracle moved fast to create and implement the Accelerated Buying Experience, but it’s not a one-time, big bang project. Teams across Oracle continue engaging with customers and employees to find new ways to improve the buying process and build those ideas into its cloud services. And, modernizing the purchasing process is only the first phase of Oracle’s internal cloud transformation. “The key thing for us is this is the start,” Langley says. “We’re absolutely not going to sit back at this point.”

To learn more, visit Oracle.com: