ORACLE SALES CLOUD (Fusion CRM) Customer Data Management – Identify your “Golden” customer

Do you know?

•     “#1 reason CRM projects fail: Data Quality.”
•     “..Fortune 1000 enterprises will lose more money in operational inefficiency due to data quality issues than they will spend on data warehouse and CRM initiatives.”
•     “…recent study cited poor data quality as the biggest inhibitor to successful CRM implementations…”
•     “Only 30% of BI/DW implementations fully succeed. The top 2 reasons for failure? Budget constraints and data quality.”
•     “Data integration and data quality are fundamental prerequisites for the successful implementation of enterprise applications, such as CRM, SCM, and ERP.”

** Sourced from Gartner Report.

Why Customer Data Management in CRM?

Fragmented inconsistent Customer data hides revenue recognition, introduces risk, creates sales inefficiencies, and results in misguided marketing campaigns and lost customer loyalty.

You’ve been analyzing terabytes of customer data for years. You’ve told your customers and stakeholders that your organization is customer-centric. But your customer data is unreliable and it’s affecting your ability to retain customers, minimize fraud and manage privacy. According to Forrester, 92% of companies believe having an integrated view of customer data is either “critical” or “very important.” Only 2% have actually achieved that goal.

Why have only very few of companies achieved a 360 Degree Customer view?

• Customer data is often created and maintained in non-CRM systems, so different departments have different view of the customer.
• Customer Data isn’t about reusing or dumping your data warehouse into CRM application. A data warehouse is an analytical solution, not an operational, transactional solution.
• Customer Data isn’t about building your own customer master application. That’s too risky–and expensive and practically not possible.

The problems that arise from inconsistent, incomplete, inaccurate customer data are very real resulting in unproductive sales teams with duplicate reps working on duplicate accounts, ineffective marketing with duplicate leads, and poor customer service. Sales reps depend on their CRM system to track their customers, and sell more to the install base. They want to know that the customer data in the CRM system is accurate and complete.

Oracle Sales Cloud Customer Data Management

Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM) has an embedded customer data management capability so that sales reps can trust their account and contact data in CRM. Sales reps can manage accounts effectively, run email campaigns using correct contact information, and up-sell and cross sell opportunities with confidence. Accurate and rich customer data is a cornerstone of an effective and efficient sales team, and can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

Oracle Sales Cloud Customer Data Management provides the capability to manage a customer record over its complete lifecycle – from analyzing/measuring the quality of customer data, to identifying potential duplicates, merging them, standardizing the record, cleansing and validating the address, updating the record over time, enhancing it with third party data, and monitoring data quality over time.

Oracle Sales Cloud Customer Data Management has two key components –

1. Oracle Fusion Customer Hub
2. Oracle  Fusion Data Quality.

Oracle Fusion Customer Hub

Oracle Fusion Customer Hub takes the complexity out of maintaining clean and complete customer data in CRM. It is an administrator tool that enables data stewards to consolidate and remediate account and contact data from various sources. The administrators can import bulk data from internal or external data source, clean and de-duplicate records, and create the “Golden” customer records, essentially the single source of truth.

With a “Golden” customer record, an enterprise has a single consistent, accurate customer view that can be used across multiple systems and business units. A single view provides a holistic picture that allows for rationalized account planning, improved sales execution, and true customer profitability.

Oracle Fusion Data Quality

Oracle Fusion Data Quality is an add-on to Oracle Sales Cloud which provides,

• Catch duplicate entries of data being entered online
• Provide real-time and batch address verification
• Enable contact and account fuzzy searching and matching during data import

These are enabled in all the data entry methods within the application, whether the data entry is accomplished via UI, batch import or real time integration. Once potential duplicates are identified, it provides mechanisms to resolve the duplicates.

Data stewards can either physically merge the duplicate records, or link them. In the link scenario, each individual record would remain untouched in the application and can be used in future transactions while a duplicate relationship/link is established between the records. With merge, only one record would remain, the rest of the duplicates are no longer able to be associated with new transactions. This provides flexibility and satisfies companies’ various business situations.

Key Features in Oracle Sales Cloud Customer Data Management :

Oracle Sales Cloud Customer Data Management performs a source of clean, complete, distinct and accurate customer data for entire organization. The primary roles are

• Consolidate & Give a unique complete set of Master Customer Information
• Track and Maintain changes over time
• Distribute the information as single point of truth for all operations & analytical applications.

Let’s see few capabilities of Customer data management which helps to accomplish the above points.

Trusted Customer Data: The CDM has evolved and developed over many years to the point where it is able to master not only the customer profile attributes required extended to Account, Contact, Address and Product.

Consolidate: The “consolidate” capability solves this problem by delivering rich set of interfaces, standard compliant services and processes necessary to consolidate customer information. The Key features:

1. Source Data history: CDM maintains history of all changes made over period of time. This allows data steward not only see the lineage association also attributes to survivorship which contributes to best version of Customer profile.
2. Rules Based Survivorship: CDM  has been significantly enhanced to include rules based survivorship that now not only includes pre-seeded rules but also allows users to define any new rule in addition to allowing users to integrate CDM with any other rules engine.

Cleanse: The “Cleanse” provides an end-to-end integrated data quality management functionality that standardize and cleanse the data, match and de- duplicate the data and finally enrich the data to create the best version master record. One of the key features of the “Cleanse” includes, Address Validation/Parsing.  Mailing address data is the most fundamental information used by the operational systems. CDM delivers a powerful and comprehensive parsing and address validation features by including pre-integrated adapters to Enterprise Data Quality products.

Data Decay: “Data Decay” refers to the way in which managed information becomes degraded or obsolete or stale over time. CDM provides data decay dashboards to monitor and fix the data decay of Account and Contact records.

Govern:  The “Govern” enables users to “govern” master data across the enterprise using a few key capabilities like analytical dashboards, enhanced stewardship and history and audit features. Through its ease of use, the dashboards  accelerates the data’s time- to-value and helps to drive better business results by:

• Pinpointing where data quality improvement is needed;
• Enabling the data stewards to take corrective action to improve the quality and completeness of the Customer and Contact data;
• Helping to improve organizational confidence in the information.

Bottom Line:

Having clean data over an extended period of time requires commitment, and more importantly it requires processes and technology. A clean, complete and holistic view of your customer is vital in today’s fast paced, dynamic business environment.

 Oracle Sales Cloud Customer Data Management provides you with the tools and functionality you need to aggregate and maintain the knowledge about your customers that will lead to better sales execution and higher sales success.

For any Feedback/ clarifications
Jai Krishnan
Lead Business Consultant
CRMIT Solutions Bangalore
Email: r.jaikrishnan@gmail.com

Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM) SmartPhone Edition – Stay Current, Collaborate, Sell More On the Move

Sales representatives will only use your mobile CRM solution if the application is easy to use and actually helps them to get their job done.

Oracle Fusion Smart Phone Edition focuses on the most relevant information that a field sales representatives requires and confirms to their work style. Rather than clicking and scrolling through lists of data from views inherited from a desktop application, Oracle Fusion Smart Phone Edition’s application is rich, yet simple task-focused interface allows a sales representatives to easily find relevant information at a glance and quickly complete important activities or look for required information with fewer clicks. This enables field Sales representative to have right information handy every time.

KEY FEATURES of Smart Phone Edition:

• task-focused user interface designed for mobile devices
• Contact and account management
• Calendar and contact integration
• Opportunity and lead management
• Maps, phone, and email integration
• Real-time analytics
• Support for BlackBerry® from Research In Motion (RIM)
• Support for iPhone® from Apple
• Support for Android® phone

KEY BENEFITS of Smart phone Edition:

• Manage key information in real time from your mobile device
• Increase productivity with contextual actions
• Save time with location aware information
• Understand your customers with real-time analytics
• Easy to configure
• Easy to use
• Extend and enhance investment in Fusion CRM.

Integrated contact, account, and calendar management capabilities within one easy-to-use interface enables field Sales representatives  to easily retrieve and update key customer information and manage appointments, tasks, and notes in real time, eliminating the administrative hassle and data quality issues associated with managing two separate data sources or manually entering and synchronizing information from a laptop at a later date.

What is new in Release 7?

Child Object Enhancement:

Using Oracle Fusion Mobile Sales, sales representatives can now create, view, and edit child objects related to leads from their mobile devices. The standard child objects for Lead include:

•Contacts

•Calendar

•Notes

•Interactions

•Tasks

•Sales Team (view only)

This will help field sales representatives to capture the all the required related information in close to real time and get it available in the system.

Forecast Enhancement:

Using Oracle Fusion Mobile Sales, sales representatives can now view, edit, and submit current forecasts from their mobile devices to their Managers.

Sales Managers can view edit, reject his teams Forecast before approving it for Organization forecast roll up.

Add Photo to Contact:

Capturing photo and adding to Contact in Contact page feature is available from Release 7. Sales representatives can now capture photo from mobile camera or select photos directly from phone media gallery into the Contact detail page in Oracle Fusion Smartphone Edition application.

Those photos are then visible on the contact record in all Oracle Sales Cloud mobile and desktop user interfaces, so all members of the sales team can easily identify the contact.

Android Support:

The most sought after feature of Oracle Fusion Smart Phone Edition in the market is made reality in Release 7 enhancement.

Mobile Sales users can now download Oracle Fusion Mobile Sales onto their Android smartphone and tablet devices version 4.0.2 and higher.

The Android version of Fusion Mobile Sales is compatible with Oracle Sales Cloud release 5, 6, and 7.

Mobile Analytics:

Mobile Analytics feature in Oracle Fusion SmartPhone Edition Release 7 has been enahanced. In the current release, both Standard and Custom reports are available on iPhone,Blackberry and Android devices.

Sales Representative can change the report  views and and apply report filters, which is another add-on feature introduced in Release 7.

Fusion Tap:

Fusion Tap is a single specialized application for tablet devices app that recognizes all the security and access of your Fusion Applications implementation and most importantly it also works offline.

Users can now access Oracle Sales Cloud on their iPad using Fusion Tap.

Fusion Tap runs on the Apple iPad 2 and the third generation Apple iPad, using iOS 6+.

In the current Release (Rel 7) Fusion tap application provides both custom and standard reports when compared with previous release which had only standard reports were available.  Embedded Analytics is also supported as Dashboards.

Language Support:

The Language support for fusion mobile application has been extended to support 21 languages. The number of language support has been increased from 17 to 21 in current release (Release 7).

Bottom Line:

Fusion SmartPhone Edition provides immediate access to critical information – anytime, anywhere – and enables the sharing of business information to remove barriers to productivity and collaboration resulting in better customer insight to improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and increase sales.

For any Feedback/ clarifications

Jai Krishnan

Lead Business consultant

CRMIT Solutions Bangalore

Email: r.jaikrishnan@gmail.com

Oracle Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM) Release 7 ‘FUSE’ – a New Face Introduced!

Oracle Fusion CRM provides an alternative set of simplified user interfaces called FUSE  for some selected standard objects.

These simplified pages are ideal for busy sales people who want a very streamlined and fast-loading experience when accessing core sales force automation tasks using their laptops or tablets.This is a simple, modern, productive way for users to complete their top quick-entry tasks.

The idea is to provide a clear, productive user experience that is backed by the full functionality of Fusion Applications.All Sales Cloud UIs serve the  common application infrastructure, including shared data, security and analytic capabilities.

The first release of the FUSE focuses on three types of users. It provides a fully functional gateway to Fusion Applications for:

• New and casual users who need quick access to self-service tasks
• Professional users who need fast access to quick-entry, high-volume tasks
• Users who are looking for a way to quickly brand their portal for employee

it has been designed for any device — Mac, PC, iPad, Android, SmartBoard — in the browser. Implementation scope may choose to introduce the simplified UI or not, depending upon requirements.

There are no steps necessary to enable these enhancements. Simplified UI is available by default for all users with the Sales Administrator and Sales Representative roles. The simplified UI is accessed through a separate URL which gives you the choice of when to make it available to your sales force. Oracle communicates the new URL information to the administrators with the upgrade information.

Comparison of Simplified UI (Pages) and Desktop UI

When a sales rep needs to access more advanced features or more detailed information, they can easily navigate to the desktop UI by clicking items with double arrow icons.

The administrator can easily select a color theme, icon style, button shape, and logo to personalize the user experience from the Settings page.

Home Page:

Home page contains 2 sections, the left section will have company wide announcements for Sales Representative. Right side section in the home page will have icons which will allow Sales Representative to navigate to specific object in one click.

Object Home page:

When a Sales Representative navigates to Opportunity Object in FUSE page,  Sales Representative will see list of Opportunities filtered by Record Set (defaulted to My Opportunities) and filtered by date (filtered to current quarter). These new features  would allow Sales Representative to view fewer set of current working will add additional benefit to the users.

The bottom section of the page contains sales performance data, it shows the Sales Representatives target quota and the quota achieved till current date in the current quarter and previous quarters.

The Keyword search and Manage Sales Forecast link (Link to desktop UI) are available in right pane which allows Sales Representatives to seamlessly navigate to Desktop UI.

Detail Page:

The Detail page of FUSE contains limited number of required fields to create record and capture the most required information for the Sales Representative.The page also contains the tabs on the left side to access the limited standard Objects which are most required for the Sales Representative to capture the most required information. Also the Action Menu in the top right corner will have limited actions available to be performed. For all other object specific actions Sales Representative has to navigate to desktop UI to capture all the detailed information and to perform other actions.

Seamless navigation to Desktop UI:

Sales representative accessing FUSE page in a separate url would be able to seamlessly connect to desktop UI.

Bottom Line:

FUSE pages are very intuitive and task focused pages with limited number of fields and actions, gives easy navigation and use for Sales Representative. The pages are so simple to the extent where no  help or training required to help Sales Representative to understand the application. FUSE will definitely help to save Sales Representatives effort in capturing the information and help in spending more time in field Sales.

For any Feedback/ clarifications
Jai Krishnan
Lead Business Consultant
CRMIT Solutions Bangalore
Email: r.jaikrishnan@gmail.com