Maintaining strong customer relationships and finding new ways to improve customer satisfaction is paramount for success in today’s competitive business world.
As businesses strive to deliver personalized experiences and foster long-term loyalty, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have emerged as indispensable tools. Among the leading providers of CRM solutions, Oracle stands out with its comprehensive suite of products tailored to the diverse needs of businesses across industries.
Read on to learn more about Oracle Customer Relationship Management and how our senior-level Oracle consultants can help your organization maximize success.
What is a CRM Solution?
A CRM solution is a sales, marketing, and customer support system offering a one-stop shop for sales, marketing, and customer support teams to close sales deals quickly and retain customers over time.
A CRM system collects and analyzes customer data, such as purchases, contact information, exchanges with company representatives, assets, proposals, quotes, and service requests. Effective CRMs allow users to access critical business data and fully understand the context of each touchpoint. This allows an accurate customer profile to be built, enabling stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.
Customer data can also be combined to support initiatives across the following realms:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Customer service
- Incentive compensation modeling
- Sales forecasting
- Territory segmentation
- Campaign design
- Product innovation
CRM software and technologies facilitate more efficient customer contact, close more sales, create longer client relationships, foster client loyalty, and ultimately boost revenue and profitability.
What Makes CRM Systems Great?
CRM systems provide sellers the resources to manage current and potential customers effectively. An effective CRM system is user-friendly and offers an intelligent user interface with resources that allow sellers to:
- Provide customers with a comprehensive view of accurate and fully integrated first- and third-party customer data.
- Leverage AI-enhanced guided selling to improve efficiency and speed
- Maintain connections between sales teams through complete mobile support and integration capabilities
For managers, top-tier CRM tools create accurate and realistic sales forecasts, manage sales compensation, ensure sellers are paid quickly and accurately, and support complex quota and territory planning.
For sales teams, the best CRM tools do more than contact management. They can equip your customer service representatives with the right information at the right time, enabling them to deal with issues effectively and route service tickets accurately. CRM tools also allow field service teams to access the information they need on any device and empower marketing teams to create relevant campaigns that generate sales-ready leads.
Main Benefits of CRM Systems
Customer relationship management is one of modern enterprise application software’s biggest and fastest-growing categories. Businesses are using CRM solutions more frequently to increase sales leads, enhance the sales funnel, improve overall productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction. However, many have encountered issues like system access restrictions, CRM integration difficulties, and cost overruns. These issues are preventable; you can avoid them by putting your customers and their needs first.
Businesses need integrated, adaptable, and comprehensive views of their current and potential customers’ product interests, customer service requirements, and purchase history, and any modern CRM system should offer such functionality through well-designed dashboards.
Marketing teams can also use CRM solutions to plan individualized marketing and lead-generation initiatives. From engagement to purchase, these tools can assist in tracking all cross-channel interactions and facilitating integration with back-office systems to support the complete customer journey effectively.
CRM systems can inform all communications and marketing endeavors by managing prospect and customer engagement points across all channels from a single platform. This provides the comprehensive customer perspective for a fully linked omnichannel experience and initiatives tailored to specific customer needs.
Effective CRM systems offer the following features for enterprise users:
- Simple, easy-to-use interface
- Budget-friendly tools for a better return on investment
- Simplified integrations with other internal and external systems
- Consistent, reliable data to create a 360-degree view of your customers
Top 6 Features of an Effective CRM System
With abundant CRM options on the market, finding one that provides all the functionality needed to meet critical business needs and improve overall productivity is critical. Here are a few features that can help users improve sales efficiency and profitability:
1. Intelligent predictive capabilities
Track, report, and build forecasts based on products, territories, channels, accounts, or other custom criteria, including weekly, monthly, or quarterly predictions and budgets on a rolling basis.
2. Territory management
Create and alter sales territories with intuitive categories to optimize sales efficiency and maximize return on investment.
3. Quota management
Build realistic and challenging quotas while maintaining your company’s existing objectives.
4. Channel/partner management
Recruit top distributors, wholesalers, and partners to grow your sales channels and provide branded, user-friendly tools to facilitate collaboration, improve sales leads, register deals, and generate quotes.
5. Compensation support
To minimize overpayments and payment disputes, offer visibility into critical compensation data, and minimize manual tasks to free sellers to close more sales agreements.
6. Manage customer data
Offer a comprehensive view of customer data checked for accuracy and timeliness from various data sources, enabling more reliable client records across the organization.
What’s the Difference Between CRM and Oracle CX?
When customer relationship management initially became popular, businesses would gather data from various sources but needed help figuring out what to do with it or where to store it. As the modern technical landscape has evolved and AI is now at the forefront of enterprise data management, CRM systems leverage integrated AI functionality to forecast and evaluate the meaning of the data and store it securely in a single platform.
CRM AI capabilities are the foundation for adopting a complete perspective of the customer and empowering customer expectations to improve as AI enhancements progress over time.
Companies must understand and relate to customers and their purchasing habits to provide memorable buying experiences, build trust, and keep them coming back for more. This is CX’s future, and it should be your basis when choosing the CRM product to meet your needs.
Oracle CX
Connecting critical business data across marketing, sales, inventory management, partner relationship management, commerce, and service teams enables companies to improve customer experiences and derive more meaning from each interaction. Oracle CRM simplifies customer relationship management by enhancing customer interactions and improving customer satisfaction and sales growth.
Oracle Client Experience (CX), a connected suite of tools that transcends standard CRM capabilities, makes it easier for enterprises to create, manage, serve, and build long-lasting client connections. Users can leverage Oracle CX to build a comprehensive picture of their clients and critical interactions, regardless of when, how, where, or who they interact with. Oracle CX also allows each department to provide outstanding customer experiences, from acquisition to retention and everything in between.
Why Should Users Choose Oracle CX?
1. Linkback-office and CRM systems
Integrate data from external business applications with information from existing CRM applications to stay aligned with customer needs and empower strong brand engagement. No matter where, how, or when customers interact across commerce, marketing, sales and service, finance, supply chain, and human resources teams, Oracle’s unified cloud platform gives users a comprehensive view of every interaction, enabling personalized experiences and improving data visibility across the organization.
2. Strengthen customer experiences in real-time (CX)
With the help of Oracle CX functionality, users can transform data into intelligence and drivetimely, customized experiences based on previous activity and historical buying data.
3. Use facts to understand your clientele
To tailor each consumer touchpoint, combine customer data points to streamline advertising efforts, and build a 360-degree customer profile. Real-time marketing data and optimized customer interactions drive business success and generate more sales leads.
4. Drive improved advertising results
Oracle Advertising, previously Oracle Data Cloud, can unlock digital advertising success across audience, context, and measurement groups. With solutions that help users enhance audience delivery and safeguard against ad fraud and harmful brand environments, Oracle CX users can optimize advertising initiatives and drive better ad efficiency.
Understanding Oracle Customer Experience Applications
Sales Cloud
Oracle Sales Cloud offers a full suite of solutions for managing sales operations, including social collaboration, analytics and predictions, sales force automation, and sales performance management. It also provides mobile sales tools for improved speed and efficiency on-site or on the go.
Marketing Cloud
Oracle Marketing Cloud combines technologies from several of Oracle’s acquisitions, such as Social Cloud, Eloqua, Maxymiser, and Infinity, to assist customers in managing social media, email, and online marketing efforts. It also offers intelligent marketing automation tools for improved campaign management and efficiency, including planning, publishing, business processes, and analytics.
Service Cloud
Oracle Service Cloud enables customer service connection and engagement through social and web channels and mobile and desktop devices. It offers critical applications, including automated policy management, contact centers, field service management, knowledge management, and field service management.
Commerce Cloud
Oracle Commerce Cloud helps businesses manage omnichannel shopping experiences, customization, navigation and search, and promotions by providing tools to establish and operate e-commerce sites. It provides intuitive support resources for B2B and B2C organizations, enabling stronger brand engagement and improved profitability.
CPQ Cloud
Created to help businesses streamline their sales procedures from estimate to payment, from order fulfillment to inquiry, the Configuration, Pricing, and Quoting Cloud (CPQ) helps standardize and regulate critical procedures for resellers and distributors.
Social Cloud
Oracle Social Cloud provides social listening, engagement, and marketing tools and a private social collaboration platform for staff members to manage social relationships and improve team productivity.
CX Unity
CX Unity offers a single, dynamic perspective of the customer by combining online, offline, and third-party customer data sources with an integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning platform for real-time customer experiences and improved visibility.
How We Can Help
Whether you need help choosing the right CRM solution, implementing a new Oracle CRM application, or just an extra hand getting started on your journey with Oracle, Surety Systems has you covered.
Our senior-level Oracle consultants have the technical skills and functional expertise to guide your most complex implementation or integration projects and help your internal team achieve long-term success.
Contact Us
Are you interested in learning more about Oracle Customer Relationship Management and where our senior-level Oracle consultants can fit in your organization?
Contact us today!
