The News: Oracle today announced new integrations between Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) and Zoom that will help sales, marketing, and customer service teams seamlessly incorporate video into existing processes and workflows in order to make every customer interaction better. Read the full release from Oracle’s Newsroom.
Analyst Take: This week at Oracle live, the company introduced a series of integrations between Zoom’s communications platform and Oracle Cloud CX applications. These integrations focused on three of the company’s CX applications including CX Marketing, CX Service, and CX Sales.
Here is a quick look at each of the company’s announcements (italics) and some perspective on the importance of each of these integration.
- Marketers: A new integration with Oracle Eloqua, part of Oracle CX Marketing, helps marketers improve the performance of multi-channel demand generation and nurture programs. With the integration, marketers will be able to deliver richer digital events and improve the performance of webinars by quickly and easily collecting and analyzing data surrounding engagement and registration. The integration will also help marketers deliver a consistent experience and improve customer engagement by leveraging branded assets (i.e. emails, landing pages, forms) across channels.
Take: As physical interaction wains to almost zero in many businesses, the use of digital events to engage and drive demand is seeing exponential growth. However, lower in-person can be harder to maintain engagement and keep customers connected to the efforts of brands. Tools that can measure digital event performance and nurture attendees through the funnel are important. With Zoom being one of the chosen platforms for large online events and meetings, this integration should provide many marketing teams value that can be extracted through better data and customer journey management.
- Customer Service Agents: A new integration with Oracle CX Service will help service teams improve customer satisfaction by solving incidents faster and delivering a more contextual and personalized customer experience. In addition, service agents will be able to better build relationships and get answers from colleagues faster by using video to improve collaboration between teams while working remotely.
Take: The way I see it, a quick video interaction between service and a customer can mimic much more closely the in-store type of customer service that can diffuse frustration and bring more personalization back in real-time. This should certainly wind up being a use case, while another use case will be service agents and teams/vendors/managers being able to quickly collaborate to deliver better and more timely service outcomes. Zoom, with its simple and familiar interface should be well received here for service agents and third parties, whether customers or team members.
- Sales Teams: A new integration with Oracle CX Sales will help sales teams use video to engage with customers and prospects. Sales teams will be able to schedule or start a Zoom meeting in the context of a sale against an account, contact, lead, opportunity, or proposal. In addition, sales teams will be able to view the Zoom interaction as part of a feed, record and save a meeting for later, and even run a transcription to capture insights from the meeting.
Take: A simple, yet useful integration for Sales to be able to deploy video as part of the sales funnel. This also simplifies the sales journey management as the interactions being launched out of CX Sales will manage and track these calls to help deliver analytical data on the process, next best action and sales likelihood. Simplifying disparate app usage for more consistent data leads to better business intelligence. This is an obvious integration, but makes a lot of sense for enterprise users of this application.
Overall Impressions of Zoom + Oracle Integration News
It seems that Oracle and Zoom’s budding partnership is gaining momentum as the partnership, which started in the cloud, is spreading to other parts of Oracle’s business and application ecosystem.
Zoom certainly has been one of the most popular tools of 2020, seeing exponential growth due to the pandemic. However, as remote work remains a key part of how companies operate for the foreseeable future, a deeper level of integration to better understand customer needs, service requirements and data from sales calls, all has a strong merit and value proposition to delivering better business outcomes.
Futurum Research provides industry research and analysis. These columns are for educational purposes only and should not be considered in any way investment advice.
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The original version of this article was first published on Futurum Research.
Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.