By Adrian Johnston
Senior Vice President, Applications, Oracle JAPAC
A metaphor used by one of my sales reps aptly depicts my philosophy on how to serve customers and earn their trust—and how to keep them coming back for more.
In the past, the rep related, he acted much like a pharmacist, selling only “painkillers” to clients to treat a single symptom as per a doctor’s prescription. Today, he acts more like the doctor, consulting with customers to comprehensively understand their health makeup and look after their long-term wellbeing.
In the cloud services era, instead of just selling products, we’re also providing long-term customer care, on both a technical and business-partnership level. The cloud’s subscription model makes it easier for customers to go elsewhere for a second opinion if their providers aren’t delivering first-rate care, making it imperative that we inextricably link our success to our customers’ success.
Looking after customers’ wellbeing isn’t just a one-off company project, nor is it just the role of customer-facing functions or any other single department.
Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), one of India’s largest petroleum companies, operates across a number of sectors, including retail, industrial, LPG, lubricants, and aviation and gas. A goal of BPCL’s Project Anubhav digital initiative is to deliver a consistent customer experience across all its divisions.
For the digital marketing pilot under Project Anubhav, BPCL is providing unique product offers to customers, personalized for their segment but with a consistent look and feel across the company’s various divisions.
“We are seeing the positive impact of this on business-specific KPIs such as campaign engagement, opt-in to receive more communication from BPCL, and greater footfalls at our retail store,” Rahul Tandon, BPCL’s head of digital transformation for Project Anubhav, told the Economic Times – CIO.com in December.“Our digital maturity has grown considerably with the adoption of Oracle CX Cloud. What started as an intelligent customer communication engine is now steadily transforming into hyper-personalized customer engagement for us in this pilot.”
Similarly, LG CNS, Korea’s leading Digital Transformation (DX) company is using Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation to respond to customers’ inquiries more quickly and roll out marketing campaigns more efficiently through standardized processes.
They also use the application’s AI capabilities to score leads and automate personalized retargeting based on real-time customer behavior. The company can now better identify, prioritize, and track high-value opportunities and top-tier accounts across its sales cycle.
Just like BPCL and LG CNS, there are many more businesses, of all sizes, across JAPAC, that are leveraging powerful analytics and adaptive AI to provide great experiences to their customers to have an advantage in the marketplace. Making every customer interaction matter, is just what the doctor ordered.
