MarketingNowThe Oracle Siebel Edition September 2007£ invaluable

IS YOUR AUDIENCE REALLY LISTENING? ORACLE Siebel CRM 8.0

David Patton Empowered and loving it

Blind data Give it the elbow

Measurability the long and the short of it

Issue

#1

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They say knowledge is power – and Sony’s technology-driven marketing model certainly proves the point. When asked to sum up what it delivers compared with more traditional marketing tools, Sony CMO David Patton needed just one word: empowerment. It’s not hard to see why. Take the all-important campaign design process, for instance. It’s a top priority for all marketing organizations to manage this process efficiently and effectively. But in a process of such complexity, that is easier said than done. Campaign briefs need to be developed and communicated; data has to be acquired and prepared; creative design and copy development must be facilitated. There is a requirement to segment and analyze customers; to develop fulfilment, testing and measurement plans; to manage collaboration and approvals. It is a process that often spans a range of departments and third parties, including agencies and partners.

It’s also a process in which bottlenecks all too often occur, especially in companies that rely on heavily manual procedures or extensive IT, or that make customer data hard to access by storing it in disparate systems. These

Oracle’s Siebel Marketing helps boost insert very long company name here results

Patton hails “empowerment” of new marketing

Latest figures released this week show electronics giant Sony strengthening its market position significantly across all its divisions. While several reasons have been cited for this, shrewd analysts have identified the company’s recent adoption of a technology-driven, customer-focused marketing model as a fundamental factor.

Industry-watchers are talking of a clear trend towards a richer, more fruitful dialogue between the company and its customers, both prospective and existing. This is thought to be due to the radically improved deployment of customer data which Sony Chief Marketing

Officer David Patton has initiated. Rather than settle for separate, fragmentary storage, Patton’s team has used Oracle’s Siebel CRM to create a single comprehensive database accessible right across the company. As a result Sony is now able to target consumers with a whole new precision, personalizing marketing communications as never before.

The company can now also measure marketing activity effectively at every stage, a benefit which Patton has hailed as key. “In an environment in which consumers see over �,000 marketing messages every day,”

says Patton, “it’s absolutely crucial that we can identify, quickly and accurately, what works and what doesn’t. By organising our data that’s what we have now been able to do – and it has brought benefits which have spread throughout the company.”

Others at Sony are happy to echo the sentiment. Sales Director James Bright, for example, is known to have been greatly impressed by the increased volume of high-quality leads Patton and his marketing team have helped generate. It is an increase that has led in turn to higher order levels and ultimately, higher revenues.

It has also led to a whole new respect for the value of marketing within the organization. In a situation where studies have shown that �0% of even measurable marketing spend is wasted, CMOs are under greater pressure than ever to demonstrate the Return On Investment their activity delivers. Siebel 8.0 brings scientific rigour to the business of customer relationships, and in doing so fosters a culture of accountability that is fully in tune with modern corporate realities.

Of course, while that is a vital benefit from the company’s perspective, its customers have other priorities. It hardly needs saying that they look for quality, choice, service and value. But when it comes to the marketing experience, what they want most of all is to be treated as an individual rather than just a face in the crowd. Now, with Oracle’s Siebel CRM, that is just how David Patton’s Sony marketers are able to talk to them.

No wonder they’re listening.

bottlenecks can be the cause of all manner of ills: delayed, poorly executed campaigns; conflict between campaign stakeholders; and ultimately, of course, a clear shortfall in ‘bang per buck’. While such failures might once have been grudgingly toleratedf, they are now seen as simply unacceptable. And they render a CMO maddeningly impotent as he or she strives to reach ever-more demanding targets.

Siebel high-velocity collaborative campaign design is different. It eliminates one source of bottlenecks by allowing all an organization’s customer data to be stored in a single repository. It helps eliminate another source by reducing dependency on the likes of e-mail and fax to share information. Everything connected with a campaign becomes accessible on the Web, allowing all parties to collaborate easily and effectively.

Likely results? Faster campaign development, more accurate targeting, better executions, preserved brand equity, improved performance, higher return on investment. Or, as David Patton more succinctly put it, empowerment.

IMPORTANT DATE FOR YOUR DIARY****************

Oracle and Wunderman plc cordially invite you to consider

some of the issues raised in this magazine further at a one-

day seminar on the subject

MARkETING IN ThE 21ST CENTURY

on Tuesday 13th November

Guest speaker: Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP Group

Attendance at the seminar is restricted to senior marketers

from Britain’s leading 100 companies.

For more information, contact Jacqueline Roose by emailing jacqueline.roose@oracle.com

or phoning 01189243998

*************

****************

“It’s absolutely crucial that we

can identify, quickly and

accurately, what works and what

doesn’t.”

www.oracle.com/uk/crm� www.oracle.com/uk/crm �

‘Everyone talking same language’ shock

New CRM solution brings customers closer

– people are getting tired of it. Whereas in 198� they were exposed to 6�0 commercial messages a day on average, today that figure has risen to more than �,000. The great majority of those will be ‘screened out’ by increasingly savvy, not to say jaded, consumers.

So is all lost, then? Of course not. What all this brouhaha does mean, though, is that to make any impact communications now need to be relevant to their recipient. Not vaguely relevant, but truly, madly, deeply relevant. And that means organizations are going to have to transform the way in which they segment, target and interact with their customers. As Forrester Research put it this year: “Retailers, for whom customer is king, must focus on using technology to get closer to their customers – knowing more about them and using that

knowledge in each interaction.” To which one might well add: “And not just retailers”.

This is where Siebel Marketing Suite comes in. It provides powerful modelling capabilities that allow organizations to convert gathered data into real customer insights. All known attitudes, needs and behaviour, together with customer value and lifecycle details, can form the raw material for these insights. And from them, together with innovative segmentation techniques, spring personalized, precisely targeted, customer-centric executions. The kind of executions which are being proved time and again to bring the best results in today’s environment.

After all, let’s face it, if there’s one thing few of us ever get tired of hearing about, it’s ourselves.

Siebel CRM adds to insert very long company name here ROIWith so many choices

competing for their attention, consumers have never changed their behaviour as quickly as they do now. Any company that takes its eyes off its customers, however briefly, may return to find they have transformed themselves chameleon-like into something barely recognizable.

In a context which sees products, channels and media proliferating daily, it’s no wonder direct marketing so often misses its targets. Cited average response rates for traditional outbound direct marketing activities are just 2.6% - although ‘less than 1%’ is often acknowledged.

Oracle’s Siebel Marketing offers an organization the capability to leave figures such as these behind. It allows it to place its customer, rather than its product or service, at the heart of everything it does.

By transforming the ability to assimilate, analyse, segment and utilize data, Siebel endows the concept of accurate customer targeting with a new sophistication. It also enhances the all-important area of customer service by bringing together all the business processes that touch a customer, including billing and delivery, and enabling all relevant departments of the company to access them.

In fact, by using Siebel CRM an organization gives itself the power and flexibility to get the right information to the right person at the right time – among both customers and employees. That is an ability which is invaluable in the drive to acquire more profitable customers, cross-sell and up-sell more effectively, and retain valued customers longer.

RIGHT INFO,RIGHT PERSON, RIGHT TIME

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. That might be said to sum up the relationship between the Sales and Marketing divisions in many organizations. The Sales side may be dissatisfied with the quality and quantity of leads generated by marketing activity it sees as misdirected and wasteful. The Marketing side, on the other hand, may point to Sales’s dispiriting failure to follow up the leads it has generated. Indeed, leading analyst firms such as Gartner and the Yankee Group estimate that between �0 and 80 per cent of leads are never acted upon.

It is a situation, of course, that does nobody any good. But even this greatly understates the tangled web of internal relationships which, left to themselves, can impede communication and severely impair an organization’s performance.

Take Hewlett Packard, for example. At the time of its merger with Compaq in �00�, HP had 86 different marketing organizations around the globe, each with its own resources, systems and budget. In

addition, the company’s various organizations relied on different processes, languages and metrics for executing, tracking and measuring campaigns. Quite simply, they couldn’t talk to each other.

Mike Winkler, CMO and Executive Vice President at HP, recalls that time. “Continuity was poor,” he says.

“Corporate marketing initiatives

were not always aligned with field programmes and campaigns. It was critical that we be able to build on all the customer touch points and present a common view of HP.”

That’s when Mike turned to Oracle’s Siebel CRM. He not only saw how its customer-focused solutions would help HP improve its understanding of customers in the wake of the merger. He also understood the way in which those solutions could enhance HP’s ability to manage marketing efficiently

– and seamlessly.

With Siebel Marketing, every part of an extended Marketing division can share data on prospects, customers, partners, competitors and employees. It can also share this data with other relevant divisions of the company, such as Sales and Customer Support. Together they can then combine to manage customers through their entire purchase lifecycle, from prospect to qualified opportunity to order. In other words, everyone can start

‘talking the same language’ – to their mutual benefit and that of the company as a whole.

HP deployed Siebel Marketing to over �,�00 users around the globe. Through it the company was able to standardize all its marketing operations on to a single common platform that provided a unified marketing language and a standard set of processes.

The results have been dramatic as Mike Winkler can confirm. Since deploying Siebel CRM, he says, “our annual marketing spend has been reduced fifteen per cent. At the same time we’ve been able to double our spend in advertising for brand and demand generation.

There have been other consequences too. Marketing has now earned itself a far more influential position in the HP boardroom. In fact it, rather than finance or planning, is now responsible for driving the company’s three-year plan.

“Marketing is at the strategic table at all times, and constantly brings the voice of the consumer to bear in every decision that we make as a company,” says Winkler.

Just shows what can happen when everyone talks the same language.

Which, when you think about it, is hardly surprising. Employing such technology leaves Sony ideally placed to capitalise on opportunities for rapid growth as they present themselves. Its highly talented marketing professionals can now make faster, better-informed decisions, keeping up with the pace of change in today’s business environment.

These are not theoretical benefits. They produce concrete results that show up to advantage on balance sheets. Using Siebel to its potential can be shown – indeed, has been shown - to reduce marketing cost and produce a greater return on marketing spend.

Traditional marketing has one big problem

key Siebel CRM benefitImproved collaboration between Marketing and Sales divisions and their partners

headline resultFull year target for accepted leads achieved in April.

Customer Focus: Novell

“Over the last 2 years, CRM technology has been a key enabler for Sales and Marketing alignment at Novell. Siebel has been a key component.

“

Branden Tsetsilas, Director, Global Marketing Operations, Novell

The Gartner Group, in a �00� Research Note, stated: “By �007, marketers that devote at least �0% of their time to advanced, customer-centric marketing processes and capabilities will achieve marketing return on investment that is at least �0% greater than that of their peers.”

In a discipline in which ROI has been notoriously hard to quantify, this prediction may well have seemed contentious at the time it was made. Yet it has come spectacularly true. And no programme has contributed more to its fulfilment than Siebel Marketing.

For confirmation, one only has to look at the revenue increases coming out of Sony since CMO David Patton presided over the introduction of Siebel CRM. Patton’s vision has always been to bring together the very best people, processes and technology And alongside the first two elements, enlisting the services of the most innovative, complete and technologically advanced CRM solution available today has clearly proven invaluable to the company.

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Personal touch boosts loyalty rates

As everyone knows, one important task of marketing is to attract new customers. But it also has another, equally important task – to retain existing ones. With statistics showing that acquiring customers is five times more expensive than keeping them, companies wordwide have embraced the concept of the loyalty programme. Indeed, today’s consumer is likely to have a wallet full of loyalty cards issued by everyone from airlines to petrol stations.

Yet despite the popularity of such programmes, most companies are failing to make the most of them. With expensive, inflexible legacy systems, few loyalty programmes actually succeed in helping companies build long-term meaningful relationships with their customers.

It’s certainly a problem. But it’s a problem with an answer: Oracle’s Siebel Marketing. Siebel Loyalty Management is a fully packaged, multichannel loyalty management solution that gives its user a complete, �60-degree view of each customer’s profile, history and behaviour across all channels and touchpoints. It supports the accrual and redemption of points; creates and manages member groups and tiers; in fact implements and administers all components of a comprehensive loyalty programme.

With Siebel Loyalty Management you, the marketing manager, can award varying points for business conducted through different channels. You can create rapid-fire, personalised campaigns. You can assess each customer’s lifetime value, and tailor service levels and promotions accordingly.

You can also make full use of the Web to encourage customers to participate, presenting highly relevant and personalised offers online. You can even expand your loyalty programme further by

seamlessly integrating it with the distribution channels, programmes and offers of selected partners.

In short, with its full range of analytics, marketing, and servicecapabilities, Siebel Loyalty Management gives marketers the capability to improve their loyalty programmes dramatically, while reducing programme management costs. What’s more, they can use that capability independently of the IT resource. And that’s a

development many an IT department has welcomed wholeheartedly.

“Before we acquired Siebel Loyalty Management, the company’s marketing systems were stiff and inflexible,” says Ajit Patel, IT Director of Sony. “Marketing would be wanting to change and refine their campaigns on a continual basis, yet they weren’t able to do so without huge, time-consuming input from us. Now that’s completely changed – they can make the changes they

need quite easily by themselves. “And you know what?” adds Patel, laughing. “We all get along a lot better now!”

It seems the powers of Siebel Loyalty Management may sometimes verge on the miraculous. In essence, though, its effectiveness can be summarised in quite down-to-earth terms. It gives your loyalty scheme the power to do what it was always meant to do: deliver real value to your customers – and your company.

Known Problems Customer Strategies Siebel Loyalty

• High maintenance costs

• Insufficient Scalability

• No integration with core CRM

• Inflexible applicatins that require programmatic overhead

• Inability to offer targeted loyalty promotions

• No integrated partner and loyalty Web site

• Completely integrated Siebel CRM

• Flexible, scalable, uprgrade-ready

• No need for programmers to make minor changes

• Integrated analytics

• Integrated with a partner portal and Web site technology

• Capability for targeted loyalty promotions

• Focus on packaged applications

• Integrate loyalty programs into CRM

• Use analytics to drive more intelligent programs

• Turn loyalty programs into profit centers

• Invest in architectures that are mosern and flexible

• Integrate program with partners

Measured success shows value of marketing, says PattonA canny company chairman once said: “Half of my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” It’s a sentiment echoed in many company boardrooms, about not only advertising but the entire discipline of marketing.

Organizations typically spend up to 1�% of their revenue annually on marketing. Yet around the boardroom table its contribution to a business has increasingly been viewed with suspicion. Not only is the expenditure huge, but processes are frequently seen as inefficient and results unproven. Indeed, many chairmen and CEOs see marketing as problematic – something vague, immeasurable, disquieting.

However, that’s a view David Patton, CMO at Sony, is able to refute. “The fact is, marketing plays a critical role in sustaining revenue,” he says. “And since we deployed Oracle’s Siebel CRM solutions, measuring its impact has been totally achievable.”

Of course, it is easy enough to measure the immediate effects of marketing activity – the number of responses, and cost per response. But Oracle’s Siebel real-time analysis makes it possible to measure what really matters – Return on Investment.

The first stage in doing this is to identify the type of campaign – for example, acquisition, lead generation, cross-sell/up-sell, survey or retention. For each of the 11 campaign types, Oracle’s Siebel Marketing Analytics application specifies a scorecard that captures key success criteria for that campaign type. For example, in a cross-sell campaign, relevant metrics would include change in average revenue per targeted customer and percentage of targeted customers that bought additional products.

With the Siebel solution, knowing that, for instance, a campaign generated 100 leads is just the start. The marketer is able to move on from that to see exactly how much revenue was produced by those leads.

He can also drill down to view the performance of each individual stage of a campaign. Message delivery, response capture, response qualification, lead generation, lead acceptance, lead-to-order conversion – if there is a problem at any of these stages, it can be identified in real time and corrective action taken. For instance, if targets for an e-mail campaign are failing to open the message, Siebel analysis will readily reveal the problem so that the message can be made more appealing.

The Siebel solution provides a totally reliable way of gauging success, based on predetermined criteria. Furthermore, to ensure that success is maintained and enhanced, the data it generates can be shared with all internal and external stakeholders.

It can also, as David Patton is happy to testify, be shared in the boardroom.

key Siebel CRM benefitMore efficient and flexible marketing with less reliance on ITFaster capture and routing of leads from website to dealersBetter visibility and accountability

headline resultCustomer relationships are being maximisedOutsourcing costs and campaign development times have been reducedCompany now using Siebel to support over �0 types of marketing programme.

Customer Focus: BMW

“ “BMW Group Canada is using Siebel to support the creation of a premium, consistent customer experience across all touch-points, from the call centre to direct marketing to the Web.Kelly Lam, CRM Manager

Siebel Loyalty Management addresses customer pain points and meets their strategic needs.

Image

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Want to be first?

Go fast.Fact:60% of marketing executives say that their companies are weighed down by long marketing campaign cycles.

Procrastination is the thief of time, as the old saying goes. If it were to be coined by a marketer of today, the same very true sentiment might be expressed as ‘Delay can do your head in’.

Long development-to-execution campaign cycle times are simply a waste of a company’s resources. For one thing, because time is money, they inevitably limit the number of campaigns the company can afford. For another, there is a clear connection between long development and lower response rates, as the messaging and data used for targeting gradually becomes obsolete over a long passage of time.

Yet overlong gestation periods are all too common. Where technology is inadequate, or organization inefficient, the result is delay. Progress can be stalled by reliance on manual processes and extensive IT support. And when progress is stalled, the eventual execution is frequently poor.

But delay is not inevitable. By utilizing Oracle’s Siebel, its causes can be confronted and overcome.

For instance, instead of allowing customer data to be dispersed around different systems, the Siebel solution brings it together in a single repository where it can be accessed more readily. Siebel also reduces dependency on highly manual processes, such as e-mail and fax, for sharing campaign plans, creative material and target lists among stakeholders. Instead, all objects related to a campaign become easily accessible to all involved via the Web, significantly improving approval times at every stage.

In short, with smarter processes and more effective collaboration, Siebel CRM improves not only the quality but also the speed of marketing design and execution.

We could go into a lot more detail, of course. But we wouldn’t want to slow anyone down.

So said the DMA USA in �006. With consumer behaviour becoming more complex, and products, segments, channels and media proliferating, effective targeting is becoming ever more problematic. That’s why, when seeking a CRM provider, the ambitious organization needs to settle for nothing less than the acknowledged leader - Oracle’s Siebel.

Siebel has more than 1� years’ proven experience of delivering CRM globally. Siebel CRM has been rated the leader in no less than 11 Forrester Wave reports, and in � Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

With solutions tailored to more than �0 industries, Siebel is dedicated to reinventing the way in which business targets, acquires and keeps more customers. Its recently released Siebel 8.0 is the most innovative, complete, and technologically advanced CRM solution available today.

A senior Gartner executive* predicted this year that most companies will continue to fail to understand the value of customer feedback. If so, they are likely to fall further behind those companies that have taken the customer-focused message on board.

L’Oreal, the world’s largest cosmetics business, is one of the latter. It has improved the efficiency and ROI of its campaigns by deploying Siebel CRM. Virgin Mobile recently deployed Siebel CRM to enable world-class customer service with real-time, multi-channel interactions. The BBC is using Siebel CRM applications to boost many different aspects of performance.

The list is endless. In fact, Siebel CRM Applications have beensuccessfully implemented by more than �.6 million users worldwide. In today’s business environment, it seems clear that any company aspiring to market leadership will need to embark on the multi-channel CRM journey. And there will be no more rewarding travelling companion on that journey than Oracle’s Siebel.

*Scott Nelson, a Managing VP, at Gartner CRM Summit �007. [This prediction can be found on p.8 of the Oracle Practitioner Paper “Marketing in Real Time – the challenge of Closing the (new) Loop in the Digital Universe”]

Want market leadership?Choose market-leading CRM

key Siebel CRM benefitReplacement of up to 9�% of manual sales and marketing reporting

headline result�1% reduction in cost per lead1�% reduction in undelivered direct mail through improved customer segmentation analysis

Customer Focus: BT

“ “Siebel Analytics is a priceless part of our strategic marketing campaigns…we can pick customers for individual campaigns based on our dashboard view of their needs, compare the success rates and applicability of different channels, analyze response rates and fine-tune our future effectiveness – all within my own personal dashboard.

Katrina Lowes, Head of Marketing Operations, BT Major Business

“Today, managing the customer relationship has become the

single most important dimension of enterprise strategy.”

8

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AWARDS LATEST:

At last night’s Marketing Now awards ceremony, Sony continued its astonishing recent run by scooping yet another award for Best Data Driven Campaign. Chief Marketing Officer David Patton received a standing ovation from the industry’s great and good as he stepped up to collect the gleaming trophy.

Interviewed later, champagne flute in hand, Patton

reiterated how proud he was of everyone involved in

producing the winning work. He also reserved a special

mention for Siebel CRM solutions. “Siebel has given us

more flexibility, more responsiveness,” he said. “It has

enabled us to listen to our customers, and find better

ways of making them listen to us. If it hadn’t been

for Siebel, it might not have been me shaking Angus

Deayton’s hand tonight.”

Sony wins Best Data Driven Campaign

Hot favourites Fuchsia won Best Digital campaign

The Brain Drain team celebrate their Best DM piece award

Best Ambient Campaign went to Rhubardandcustard

Hop Skip & Jump’s Best Direct TV award proved popular

Hotshop Macdoodle scooped Best Outdoor

Automatically sunshine for modern marketing

Deploying Siebel Marketing empowers a company to grasp this new discipline fully and use it to maximum advantage. A whole range of automated alerts can be captured, shared and managed on lead data as it passes through the sales pipeline.

For instance, automation can make email marketing programmes much simpler and more efficient, with response to a lead email automatically triggering one course of action, while lack of response triggers another.

Overall, the benefits are tangible. Not only can marketing velocity be markedly increased, but so also can visibility. Stakeholders are able to collaborate more fruitfully. Consumers can be targeted

Added to this complexity, increasing regulatory pressure and financial accountability, as well as customers’ increasing insistence on tighter, faster integration across channels and functions, have made data-driven process automation - technologically enabled marketing - a critical new discipline.

key Siebel CRM benefitMore relevant communicationsHigh value customers receive preferential treatment at every touch point.

headline result�% improvement in top-tier loyalty promotion response rates60% reduction in system costs

Customer Focus: Finnair

“ “With Siebel Loyalty, we will be able to ensure that the right customers receive promotions that increase lifetime value while delivering a superior customer experience at a much lower cost.

more precisely. Processes can be controlled more tightly. The intelligent use of automation gives a company the wherewithal to be more responsive – to sense changes in the market earlier, and adjust to them more deftly.

By closing information gaps and avoiding broken processes, the automation delivered by Siebel effectively empowers marketing, positioning it far more favourably to meet the challenges of the modern market. And one thing’s for sure: the role of intelligent automation will only grow even further over time.

Or to put it another way, the future’s bright – the future’s automated.

www.oracle.com/uk/crm1� www.oracle.com/uk/crm 1�

The holy grail – every penny accounted for

“Thelastbastionof unaccountablespending.”

Ask a Chief Financial Officer for their view on marketing, and there’s every chance their brow will furrow.

“Maverick spending”, or even something rather stronger, may be the sort of comment you’ll hear.

Increasingly, the demand is for marketing expenditure’s substantial influence on the balance sheet to be justified. The revenue-generating effect of activity must be shown to match, and more than match, that expenditure. Specifically, the marketing function is being pressured to account for every action taken and – here’s the rub

– every pound, euro or dollar spent.

Not every financial supremo has the same jaundiced view of marketing, however. Helen Brown, CFO of Sony, is one who certainly doesn’t. What’s more, she can say exactly what it is that caused her pro-marketing view to crystallize.

“At one time I tended to take marketing measurements with a pinch of salt,” she recalls.

“Measuring revenue generation and Return on Investment is what I’m really interested in – and I hadn’t seen anything that persuaded me that could be done with marketing.

“When David Patton began talking about Oracle’s Siebel CRM, I saw how it could bring many benefits. But I wasn’t sure it would be able to fulfil the strict measurement criteria I wanted to see implemented.”

Once Siebel CRM was in place, however, the doubts began to evaporate. Brown was able to appreciate how its ability to mine, analyze, share and act on customer data transformed the visibility of the marketing budget in the organization. And its measurement tools really could show each activity’s contribution to the bottom line. Something about Helen having a dashboard on her desk so has access to the results without having to ask. She never realised marketing were doing such a Perhaps most importantly of all, the dashboard on Brown’s desk allowed her to view the results of marketing activity without having to ask anyone.

“Now I can finally see marketing’s contribution for myself,” says Brown, “I’ve realised just how valuable to our business it really is.” And what was that tone in her voice? It sounded very like respect.

View of marketing among CFOs, quoted in the Marketing LeadershipCouncil Survey, “Measuring Marketing Performance”

Insert long company name so careful not to miss out on inbound

For a typical direct marketing campaign, where a company sends out bulk mailings to its customers, a response rate of � per cent would be considered an extraordinary success. But there’s one marketing opportunity which quite commonly sees a response rate of over �0%. That is the opportunity presented by inbound service interactions. It’s an opportunity David Patton, Sony’s CMO, has grasped with both hands.

Patton appreciated the fact that, when customers contact a company’s call centre with a request or issue, their mindset is likely to be quite different from what it is when they receive a communication from that company. He saw that, assuming the original reason for the customer’s call can be settled to their satisfaction, they may well be unusually responsive to another message from the company – as long as that message is carefully chosen.

What he was looking for was a technology-driven solution that

would make the most of the opportunity. He found it in Oracle’s Intelligent Offer Generation (IOG).

IOG is designed to make the best use of every inbound interaction by determining the next action most appropriate to each one. Tightly integrated with Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management system, it combines the writing of business rules with a series of predictive models.

Used by themselves, business rules would make it easier for a company to match up a certain message with a certain set of conditions. But of course, there are a vast number of different situations that can arise in an interaction. The customer profile, the reason for contact, the progress of the contact, even the experience of the agent – all are variables which may have an impact on what can and should be presented. Hence the requirement for predictive models.

“If you want to tailor the messages to the situation, you have to write a

lot of rules to figure out what is the best offer,” says Nicholas Bonnet, Director of Production Management for Oracle RTD. “This is where combining rules with predictive models is quite effective.”

Predictive models compute which messages are likely to interest which customers, based on how customers with similar profiles have responded. In tandem with business rules, the maximize the opportunity to achieve a cross-selling or up-selling result from the interaction. They even allow the agent to determine whether that is actually the appropriate action. after all, for some segments of the population, it might be more important to offer free services and information that would help retain them in the long run, rather than trying to up-sell them at all costs.

Sony, of course, like all companies, has to generate revenue, reduce costs and satisfy its customers all at once. David Patton has seen with approval how IOG contributes

“Whatever the query or issue a customer calls into the centre with, we can build on that interaction once it has begun by presenting relevant messages and communications, and opening a real dialogue with the customer.”

David Patton, CMO of Sony

to all three goals by making each customer interaction a richer experience for both parties. As he says: “Whatever the query or issue a customer calls in to the centre with, we can build on that interaction once it has begun by presenting relevant messages and communications, and opening a real dialogue with the customer.”

And whatever the outcome of the interaction, something can be taken from it. “ Whether the customer proves to be interested or not interested in the offer, he or she provides the system with information that will update the underlying business logic,”says Patton. “In other words, we’ve learned something.”

With all CRM solutions, it is the diligent, tireless quest to understand the customer ever more completely that brings results. That’s why, in David Patton’s quest to optimise marketing effectiveness at Sony, Oracle’s IOG has proven a more than useful tool.

key Siebel CRM benefitAbility to segment customer base by pre-defined clusters, demographics and buying patterns across channels.Ability to test campaigns more accurately.

headline resultIncreased campaign volume – 1�0 campaigns in the first � months after adoption.Campaigns performing up to 6 times more effectively.

Customer Focus: L’Oreal

“ “Siebel is the solution we use to support our multi-channel consumer marketing strategies from purchase behaviour analysis to segmentation, execution and ROI measurement of campaigns, across brands and countries.Georges Edouard Dias, Strategic Business Development Division

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and update end-user content so easily. Organizations can create a complete hierarchy of end-user documentation, process flow charts, procedures, job aids, user acceptance test scripts, instructor led training guides, and web-based training, that is specific to their exact business processes and application environment.

What user training support does Siebel offer?As an end user of Oracle’s Siebel applications, the day-to-day performance and use of your business systems is in your hands. Oracle fully understands how important it is that you learn the skills needed to perform your job function effectively.

Oracle University offers end user training in a variety of learning formats, for both individuals and teams, to bring everyone up to speed on all the robust functionalities of their applications:

• Transition services assist in preparing end users for the new system and processes. They activate end users’ skill - and will - by assessing how ready they are for change, identifying the specific training they need, and guiding them through the implementation maze with clear, consistent communications.

• Customized instructor-led in class and online training is offered and can be tailored to specific business processes and end user training needs. Customized in class training can be delivered either at your location or at one of our nationwide education centres.

• Online training is offered across various job roles and is accessed through a one-year membership of the Oracle University Knowledge Centre or individual course purchase. This training allows for convenient, available �� x 7 access, and includes tutorials, demonstrations, practice scripts and quizzes.

How do I define what goals are realistic for a Siebel CRM programme?The Oracle Insight programme allows Oracle to focus on your business, helping you identify how you can produce measurable enterprise value. Insight gives you answers to questions such as these:

• What are other customers doing?

• What are their best practices?

• What are the new technologies and what is their impact on my business?

• Which business capabilities are critical to our success?

• What is the road map to achieve our goals?

• What are the technology and business risks, and how do I mitigate them?

• Are we using applications and technologies to their full potential?

• What is the value proposition?

How do I decide between on-premise and on-demand solutions?You don’t have to. Buyers of CRM are being led to believe that they must decide between an ‘on premise’ or ‘on demand’ solution and deploy one single all encompassing CRM application for every user in their entire organization. But in many cases organizations have different needs WITHIN their enterprise, and choosing only one CRM application leads to a significant compromise – both for the organization and for the customers it serves.

Ask the expert

My CEO is unsure about CRM. How can I convince him that it will deliver value to the company? As the global economy becomes more interconnected, the pressure to improve performance has accelerated. Demands for new market share, new revenues, and new levels of efficiency and accountability have become increasingly urgent. Yet changing an organization to capitalize on opportunities or respond to threats has become more complicated than ever.

Competition now comes from every corner of the globe, in the form of Web searches, overnight delivery and continuous access to help, advice and ideas. Compliance requirements are increasing the cost and complexity of operations, making it harder to be nimble. Talent is scattered across the globe and employees are more mobile than ever. Partnerships are built and dismantled ever more quickly as market dynamics change.

In the middle of this new business reality are customers. They have more information at their fingertips, and more choice than ever before. Losing a customer’s loyalty only takes an instant. And it happens more than most organizations would like to admit.

As a result, successfully running a business, university, utility or government agency now requires making the customer the central point of focus. Any strategy that does not put customers at the centre is likely to cost more than expected, produce fewer results and endanger the relationships that power growth.

The customer-driven age is here, and succeeding in it requires a new set of goals and a new set of tools.

How will Siebel CRM integrate with my company’s existing business processes?Oracle Application Integration architecture implements a variety of integration strategies to connect external and Siebel applications on a variety of logical levels.

By providing customers with pre-built integrations and ongoing support and enhancements on these integrations, Oracle has reduced the time, complexity, and cost of implementing the industry best practice processes that connect and optimize business operations.

I have read that Customer Relationship Management is difficult to implement. Can I expect this to be the case with Siebel CRM?No. Oracle offers Siebel Rapid Implementation as a fixed-price, rapid solution that leverages best practices from over �,000 successful Siebel implementations and Oracle’s existing solution centre expertise. Typical time-to-market periods for deploying Siebel products are:

• Siebel Sales (~1� Weeks)

• Siebel Partner Relationship Management (~1� Weeks)

• Siebel Call Centre (~1� Weeks)

• Siebel Technical Upgrade (� – 16 Weeks)

What measures can I take to ensure smooth user adoption?Oracle Tutor and User Productivity Kit (UPK) are compatible with all Oracle Application product lines and provide customers with business process documentation and application use simulations. Together, they provide an ideal way to deploy precise end-user training, quantify its effectiveness, and enable regulatory compliance.

No other application company provides tools that allow customers to model

Oracle offers the only CRM solution in the industry that preserves the diversity of applications required to ensure complete user adoption and performance across an enterprise, yet shares a common foundation to ensure that customer information is comprehensive and complete. From the “consumable” Oracle CRM On Demand solution to the “strategic” Siebel CRM solution, only Oracle provides the flexibility and choice to end the compromises of traditional CRM solutions.

Does adopting CRM risk compromising the creative side of marketing?No. All marketing organizations must manage the campaign design process effectively – and that includes facilitating creative design and copy development. Managing this often spans multiple departments and third parties.

Unfortunately, many companies today rely on highly manual processes, such as email or fax, for sharing campaign plans, creative material, and target lists with field sales, distributors, partners, and agencies. Their data management also often relies on extensive IT support. This approach typically results in delays, poorly executed campaigns, low ROI, and conflict between marketing and sales organizations or brand owners and their partners.

In contrast, Siebel enables marketing organizations to rely less on IT and work more effectively with all stakeholders on campaign planning and design. With Siebel Marketing, organizations can efficiently define campaign visibility and contact ownership rules. Using Siebel Partner Portal, all objects related to a campaign — including briefs, project plans, and creative content — become easily accessible to everyone via the Web.

As a result, organizations are not only able to shorten campaign development times. They can also deliver the more targeted, more creative executions that preserve and enhance brand equity.

Is Siebel CRM only for large, multinational corporations?No. Siebel CRM has been successfully and economically deployed into small, medium and large organisations. It offers a choice of deployment options, from multi-tenant or single-tenant hosted On Demand (SaaS) deployments to On Premise solutions, which enables Siebel to meet the needs of its customers whatever their size. Uniquely, Siebel may also be deployed as a hybrid of On Demand and On premise to facilitate business agility.

How can Siebel CRM make a difference to the effectiveness of my email campaigns?Oracle’s Siebel Email Marketing is the solution for organizations ready to conduct their own email campaigns in-house as part of integrated marketing programmes. A comprehensive, permission-based solution that is fully integrated across all customer touchpoints, it enables you to take advantage of the superior economics of email while building your customers’ trust, respecting their preferences and creating profitable relationships.

Siebel Email Marketing meets the needs of even the largest consumer marketers with a proven, highly scalable and open architecture that permits real-time visibility into email marketing performance. Embedded best practices and support for the entire e-marketing process will help you produce more targeted, timely, lower cost email communications. Automated bounce handling and real-time unsubscribe processing will further reduce costs and lower the risk of being “blacklisted.”

The result? Higher response rates, lower opt-out rates, higher conversion rates and more rapid ROI.

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www.oracle.com/uk/crm16

CRM On Demand provides the data management and segmentation that enables organizations to understand their customers more fully. Email provides an instant, cost-effective means of conducting a dialogue with those customers. Put them together and you have a truly powerful marketing tool. Siebel CRM On Demand Email Marketing is a natural, seamlessly integrated extension of Siebel CRM On Demand. It enables organizations to utilize the customer information held by Siebel CRM to create and leverage high-impact, professional-quality email campaigns.

Intuitive, fast and easy to use, it is a solution that requires no HTML planning. And because of its

unified architecture it eliminates the need for third-party tools – providing marketers with a single, trusted vendor.

Furthermore, Siebel Email Marketing includes powerful delivery and response capabilities that enable users easily to measure, optimise and analyse program effectiveness. Each opened mail, click-through, bounce and opt-in

is automatically captured to provide accurate delivery and response status. And Oracle’s dedicated deliverability team ensures that your email hit rates are always optimised.

Yet the cost of this highly effective, flexible resource

is remarkably small. Without any need for specialist IT skills, a CMO using Siebel Email Marketing On Demand can send out 10,000 segmented, personalised, tracked and measurable emails in a month for just £76.

No wonder it’s clicking with so many marketers. For more information, visit

www.crmondemand.co.uk.

Email on demand sends marketers into raptures