Learning About Customer Experience

At the IOUC Summit in January I attended a session on customer experience or CX as it is known. This is a great story, well crafted by Oracle and was its first outing. What is great is that although there are products behind it, they are talking about the business needs and great customer experience is relevant to all of us. James Haslam from UKOUG also attended and we agreed some of the concepts being explained would help us within UKOUG.This concept has grown over the last year being more and more important, it had a lot of airtime at OOW and is still being mentioned on twitter.

Why stage the Customer Experience Summit at #oow12? Find out from #Oracle's GVP, David Vap http://t.co/ouJua71A

And last week Oracle UK had their own event in London

Marisa on the UKOUG stand at CX event

I would guess there were 250 - 300 attendees and it was full capacity. What I loved about the day was the lack of actual selling. Anyway here are my tweets from the day:

• http://t.co/mDWAKHGF Marissa working hard at 0830 at oracle CX day in London #ukoug
• Just adding my contribution to the 140 million tweets a day
• Great speaker in first session on CX now about to hear from Anthony Lye #oracleLDN then Mark Hurd this afternoon #biggunsforCRM
• Great CX day. Products have been mentioned but not sold, great day of delivering knowledge
• a few hundred at the #oracleLDN event and it has been really good, now Mark Hurd will address audience a great coup for the UK Oracle team
• Entertaining, Mark Hurd announced as country leader Dermot OKelly at #oracleLDN but shows a human side to the org. Now Q&A great day
• Mark Hurd at #oracleLDN http://t.co/Ra4RP2pp session is very engaging, much better than practised slides
• Got a question for Mark Hurd anything but the US elections?
• Mark Hurd and Anthony Lye 'customers will drive product integration priorities
• Really really happy now, they are talking about the design principles of Fusion Apps

I loved the keynote speaker Colin Shaw of Beyond Philosophy, he really understood the problems and shard many insights about customer experience. One story that resonated so much with me was the hotels who provide shampoo and conditioner but by the sink not the shower. Simple to fix but rarely done.

                                                                               

There was also a great customer story from Bill Hopkins of The Trainline on how they have invested in the CX of their customers.

Antony Lye SVP CRM was the main speaker and he talked about the CX imperative

His premise is every relationship is changing. Products have been commoditised, there is no advantage through product alone, and it is very easy for people to copy your product. The ways in which you reach your customer are changing. Mobile technology and social networking has thrown a huge spanner into everything we thought of as normal. The rate of innovation, (social, mobile data, cloud) has accelerated how behaviours are rapidly changing in a world where we are always connected, always sharing, always aware. Customers want more options, more access, more influence increasingly at home, where they buy, where they work. You need to change incentives to those who deliver.

It is disruptive, fun if you take advantage, but painful if you don't? The same old approaches to CX simply don’t work.

I loved the day, I learnt, I thought about myself as a customer and a deliverer of the customer experience, but that wasn’t all…………..

Mark Hurd CEO of Oracle appeared at the end of the day. He was on the agenda and I must admit I had thought it might be a remote presence but no he was there in person and held the audience attention for 40 minutes in an unscripted Q&A. He said all questions were acceptable except for those on the US presidential election (but someone asked anyway). It was great and this is where executives should be used more. I asked a question and am sure all Oracle people held heir breath, but what I asked was for more roadmap information for acquisitions. I also congratulated them on the event, we are all Oracle’s customers and the experience we had on that day was excellent