Not many companies understand value of digital body language: Wendy Hogan

She says it is exciting to see the acceleration of India towards a digital economy

Marketers, advertisers and publishers are still figuring out how to use different digital tools to convey the right message in the moment to deliver delightful customer experience, Wendy Hogan tells Sangeeta Tanwar

What's driving Oracle's India business?

Software as a service (SaaS) is an exciting space to be in. India's SaaS market is largely occupied by CX Cloud. Over the last two years, we have seen significant growth in our SaaS business in the country. In some areas, we are witnessing growth of as much as four times the market rate.

We are witnessing the uptake of SaaS-based application across the spectrum. Start-ups are cloud-native organisations and do not have any preference for on-premise solutions. For example, Myntra has deployed our Service Cloud and enterprise performance management applications. Myntra is using Oracle Service Cloud to integrate all their customer interfacing channels. We are also working with Ferns N Petals, Fresh & Honest (Lavazza).

What's your business and go-to-market strategy here?

It is exciting to see the acceleration of India towards a digital economy. The audience and customers are rapidly adopting digital technology. Marketers, advertisers and publishers are still figuring out what that means for their business and how to use different tools and technology to convey the right message at the time (in the moment) delivering a delightful customer experience. And differentiating their business based on customer experience and connecting to that emotion, which is ease of use or efficiency for a customer.

Now that the Indian businesses have established their digital presences, it is important for them to know how to utilise the data and digital body language, preferences and insights that they get from their digital customers to personalise their user experience.

What are your key product offerings for India market?

We are focusing on promoting a smarter Oracle CX Cloud Suite which connects marketing, sales, commerce, social and customer service in one kind of an integrated product suite. Whether a customer wants to become e-commerce enabled, start doing social listening and execute more personalised email or text messaging instead of mass broadcast, CX Cloud Suite enables all of this.

We have solutions across all of these and different use cases and activities. And we can connect all of that so that there is simplicity to how we enable businesses to deliver customer experience. And there is also the ability for businesses to do that without the huge amount of IT environment. We do work with big established enterprises. At the same time, we are focusing on businesses that are growing, businesses that may not be super established or those that may not have more employees or big revenues. We are spending a lot of time with smaller companies, helping them grow and scale up.

How best can marketers go about delivering a personalised experience to buyers?

One thing is around understanding what data you already have in business and connecting those to digital data sets to get a 360-degree view of the customer and prospects. Another thing that we encourage businesses to do is journey mapping, what does the customer experience looks like and how to add value to that experience to make it easier for the customer to transact with you as a business.

I do not think a lot of companies really understand the value of digital body language. Businesses are outsourcing a lot of their advertisement to agencies or investing in Google and Facebook (which a lot of Indian companies are doing). That is where their digital education is coming from. A lot of those data signals are not coming back into the companies' own operated environment.

What we are seeing is that the more sophisticated companies are making sure that these data sets are connected with their own data sets to give them a more comprehensive view of customers and prospects. This helps businesses gauge customer behaviour and preferences more sharply giving them the ability to segment customers and send them the offers that they may be interested in.

How are organisations measuring the impact of superior CX driving revenue growth?

There are different ways that companies do that. There are scores like net promoter score that companies use to measure customer satisfaction. People look at outcomes in terms of lifetime value of the customer, how long they retain that customer and revenue coming from a customer and also the basket size or the number of products that the customer has. Traditionally, companies have been investing in a campaign by campaign approach and the net promoter score to establish co-relation between CX and revenue. So the lowest common denominator that companies look at is the net promoter score and customer satisfaction is survey-driven. That's how a lot of people measure their key performance indicator. Some companies are starting to measure the entire business on net promoter score and not just their marketing or customer service teams. So they have this cultural change in the organisation to think about. More explicit business outcomes are the reduction in cost to acquire and retain the customer. And generate more revenue from the ongoing retention of the customer.