Definition

Oracle Customer Experience Cloud (Oracle CX Cloud)

Oracle Customer Experience Cloud (Oracle CX Cloud) is a suite of cloud-based tools for customer relationship management (CRM), sales, marketing, customer service, e-commerce and other tools, such as configure, price, quote (CPQ) tools. Increasingly, Oracle is building integrations between these tools so contact center service agents, for example, can refer to sales or marketing information as they review the information residing in a customer case to try to resolve an issue. Like Microsoft, Oracle offers on-premises and cloud-based CRM technologies.

Launched in its original incarnation of Oracle CRM in 1998, Oracle features several acquired product lines that make up its CRM portfolio, including Siebel -- an on-premises CRM -- as well as Oracle CRM On Demand and Oracle Sales Cloud, which are software as a service (SaaS), or cloud-based, CRM technologies.

Oracle CX Cloud application suite

Oracle CX Cloud includes the following applications, or modules:

Oracle CX Sales. Oracle CX Sales provides tools for optimizing sales performance, such as customer data management, sales cataloging, sales force automation (SFA), sales prediction, sales forecasting, analytics, and communication among sales teams and with customers and prospects. The CPQ feature provides tools for product configuration, pricing and quoting.

Oracle CX Marketing. Oracle CX Marketing enables organizations to craft digital marketing campaigns to target prospects and existing customers. Oracle CX Marketing enlists automation and data analytics to segment audiences, target recipients, and craft personalized content and messaging to them.

Oracle CX Service. Oracle CX Service consists of tools for customer service management. The platform lets enterprises establish contact centers that enable them to interact with their customers across multiple channels -- often referred to as multichannel CRM or omnichannel CRM -- provide a 360-degree view of customers, and track and manage incident reports and resolutions.

Oracle CX Commerce. Oracle CX Commerce enables companies to build websites or virtual storefronts. Using templates and other prebuilt components, users design, implement and manage their storefronts on the web.

Oracle CX Platform. Oracle CX Platform is a platform as a service (PaaS) product that enables organizations to connect their applications, analytics dashboards for data quality, automated processes and other data on a unified cloud infrastructure. Features include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, identity and compliance, chatbots, process automation, prebuilt integrations, a prebuilt application programming interface (API) catalog and more.

Oracle CX for Industry. Industry-specific cloud applications are also available through the Oracle CX Cloud suite. These include the following:

  • CX for Communications and Media
  • CX for Financial Services
  • CX for High Tech, Manufacturing and Automotive
  • CX for Consumer Goods and Retail
  • CX for Public Sector
  • Government 2.0

Oracle CX Cloud competes with products such as Salesforce, the leading cloud-based CRM; Microsoft Dynamics CRM -- and its family of applications for enterprise resource planning (ERP) -- SAP Hybris and SugarCRM.

Pros of Oracle CX Cloud

Reported benefits of using Oracle CX Cloud include the following:

  • For companies heavily invested in Oracle with services such as databases, middleware or hardware, Oracle can provide ease of integration and familiarity of user interface (UI).
  • Oracle has acquired and developed sophisticated business intelligence (BI) tools for the suite, so Oracle CX Cloud is strong in this area.
  • According to some sources, Oracle CRM On Demand is priced quite competitively, though refer to Oracle site for details.

Cons of Oracle CX Cloud

Downsides associated with the use of Oracle CX Cloud include the following:

  • Oracle's UI is not as modern and user-friendly as competitors.
  • Oracle's social CRM features, enabling social engagement and monitoring of audience comments, may not be competitive with other offerings.
  • Oracle is not known for cultivating its partner ecosystem, and CRM On Demand, its cloud offering, lacks a healthy ecosystem of integrated third-party plugin solutions.
  • Mobile CRM is a highly important and competitive area for CRM providers. Oracle doesn't lead in this area.
  • Certain key functions may be browser-specific.

Who should use Oracle CX Cloud?

Any organization that recognizes CX as a point in its product's or service's value proposition could benefit from the use of Oracle CX Cloud. Businesses can potentially improve performance in sales, marketing, customer service, and e-commerce interfaces. Furthermore, CX Cloud's industry-specific applications can offer certain organizations a more tailored approach with tools to address business needs that might be unique to a given field.

This was last updated in October 2020

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