'Net Features : oracle

Customer Experience & the Importance of Support

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:15:00 GMT

Research released last week from Oracle reveals just how essential customer experience is for driving revenue growth and differentiating a brand in a globalized economy.

The report revealed that 81% of consumers are willing to pay more for superior customer experience, with nearly half (44%) willing to pay a premium of more than 5%.

Additional highlights from the Oracle Study, "Why Customer Satisfaction is No Longer Good Enough," include:

- Seventy percent of respondents have stopped doing business with a brand following a poor customer experience.
- 92% of this number have gone straight to a competing brand and made a purchase.
- Just a quarter of consumers (22%) are nearly always satisfied with their customer experience.

The research study, which surveyed shoppers who had made a complaint or enquiry to a customer service department in the last twelve months, also revealed some important, rather actionable insights. Improvement of the overall customer experience (40%), providing quick access to information and making it easier for customers to ask questions (35%) were cited as key drivers for spending more with a brand.

"By creating a consistent and connected experience across all points of customer contact -- including the increasingly important social channel -- businesses can clearly differentiate themselves and build priceless brand capital,” said Danny Rippon, CRM Business Solutions Director, Oracle.

“As an absolute fundamental, businesses must ensure that their customer experience systems can support fulfillment and service to the extent demanded by consumers, while at all times making it as simple as possible for them to interact with the brand. This is the key both to winning new customers and retaining them for the long-haul."

Most Consumers Talking Up Live Chat

Allison Howen — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:30:00 GMT

How effective is your online customer service strategy? If you're not sure, a new Oracle study has revealed some valuable insights into consumers' preferences when it comes to reaching customer service help online.

The Consumer Views of Live Help Online study surveyed consumers from all over the world in regards to their use of customer-service channels. One of the most interesting statistics from the study shows that social media users expect a rapid response to questions or complaints, with more than half of Twitter users anticipating a personal response within two hours of tweeting and 81 percent expecting a same-day response.

However, Facebook users aren’t as impatient, with only 29 percent expecting a response within two hours and 51 percent expecting same-day responses.

Consumers are also relying more on live help, with the study revealing that 57 percent of consumers believe that live help is among the most important features of a website. The findings also show that half of consumers have used live chat or click-to-call, which is an increase from the 37 percent that used live help in 2009.

And according to 38 percent of consumers, live chat is a preferred customer service channel because it enables consumers to multitask while they wait for a response.

"As consumers frequent online sites more than ever, they expect to engage with companies' customer service representatives while they are there," says Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail. "Whether the customer visits the company's commerce site or social media page, there must be a clear link to a customer service person that is informed and able to help."

Amazon RDS for Oracle Database

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 25 May 2011 01:45:00 GMT

Deploying and managing databases is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive – it’s of the most complex activities in IT and demand is high for those skilled and knowledgeable enough to get it working and keep it working. The complexity and cost can be magnified when working with more “robust” databases. That may be coming to a fast end.

Amazon announced the availability of Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) for Oracle Database today, allowing database administrators to run multiple editions of Oracle Database (11g Release 2) via Amazon. Developers can now provision a pre-configured Oracle database and scale the underlying hardware through the AWS Management Console. Amazon RDS also manages time-consuming database administration tasks, including continuous backups, software patching, and exposing key operational metrics.

Amazon RDS for Oracle Database can be run under two different licensing models – with the license include or BYOL (Bring-Your-Own-License). The "License Included" pricing (No need for separately purchased Oracle licenses as the Oracle Database software has been licensed by AWS) starts at $0.16 per hour, inclusive of software, underlying hardware resources, and Amazon RDS management capabilities. This model currently supports Oracle Database Standard Edition One.

The Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) is for those who already own Oracle Database licenses. , you can use the "BYOL" model to run Oracle deployments can be run on Amazon RDS under the BYOL model with rates starting at $0.11 per hour. Developers and database administrators can run Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One Oracle Databases in the AWS cloud.

Oracle & Open Calais: Discovering Meaning (Semantics) in Data

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Oracle and Thomson Reuters announced that the new Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Semantic Technologies will officially support the OpenCalais service (a semantic metadata extraction service). The integration enables Oracle users to directly tap the power of OpenCalais to incorporate "rich" semantic metadata into their production workflow environments.

Semantic metadata generated by OpenCalais (a natural language processing (NLP) technology) can now be loaded, indexed and queried natively within Oracle Database. This enables application developers to extracting the 'who, what, when, where and how' from text and break content down into its most basic elements to improve search and navigation, and make integration and interoperability of content possible across diverse platforms.

"Connecting the OpenCalais service -- which has helped popularize semantic technologies in the developer community -- with Oracle Database is a compelling value proposition for our customers," said Xavier Lopez, Director, Spatial & Semantic Technologies, Oracle Server Technologies. "This interoperability lets users quickly process documents in different formats such as Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF to extract semantic metadata that can be used for more semantically complete searches in Oracle Database 11g."

If you're asking yourself what in the world this possible has to do with you, consider this. You, just like Oracle, can leverage this semantic metadata extraction service if you're running WordPress (Tagaroo) or Drupal, and even "ride the semantic wave" with Yahoo using Calais QuickMeta.

Social Software Maturing: Too Little, Too Late?

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:20:00 GMT

Social software vendors are increasingly focusing on scenario-specific solutions and analytics according to new research released today by CMS Watch.

CMS Watch's Enterprise Social Software & Collaboration Report 2009 evaluated twenty-seven social computing platforms against eleven enterprise use-cases. Vendors reviewed include IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Jive, Telligent, Awareness, Drupal, SocialText, blueKiwi, Wordpress, Atlassian, Lithium, and Ning.

Despite some notable exceptions among wiki vendors, Social Software suppliers in 2009 are easing their pace of feature expansion, placing more emphasis instead on things like performance and analytics. According to the report, "Despite some notable exceptions among wiki vendors, Social Software suppliers in 2009 are easing their pace of feature expansion in favor of better solutioneering and productization, with more emphasis on things like performance and analytics," noted CMS Watch founder, Tony Byrne. "In other words, they're growing up."

CMS Watch also found Social Software vendors settling into traditional categories, including best-of-breed vs suite vs platform; SaaS vs installed; and open source vs commercial. "Customers have many good choices," adds Byrne. Other findings from CMS Watch include:

System and administrative services - things like back-up, archiving, and multi-instance management services - still remain weak across the board in this marketplace
"Cloud" computing is beginning to impact the Social Software market and blur line between on-premise and SaaS, as more vendors employ services from Amazon and others
SharePoint 2010 could still become a disrupter if Redmond dramatically improves the platform's social networking services, but it is too late for SharePoint to dominate across Social Software use-cases in an increasingly crowded marketplace

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