That companies need to tailor experiences to customers and employees should come as no surprise -- that is, after all, an overarching business theme of recent years. But you might be taken aback, as was Oracle in analyzing results of a recent study it conducted, by how imperative the mandate has become for them.
Through this study, conducted in January and February, Oracle aimed to discover how companies across a variety of industry sectors perceive the personalization trend and its impact on them. It gained a cross-industry snapshot via phone and online interviews with 300 C-level executives in North America, results of which it released today in a report, "The Era I Enterprise: Ready for Anything."
Most respondents said their organizations have realized a trend toward customers and employees wanting more individualized experiences. By the numbers, 84% of respondents cited a desire among their organizations' customers, while 70% indicated such to be the case for their companies' employees.
While Oracle isn't surprised by the high level of interest in the personalized experience, it hadn't expected this level of results and "this sense of urgency around delivering individualized services," Doug Suriano, Oracle Communications SVP and GM, told me.
Communications Gets It
The need to address the push for personalization is highly apparent within the communications sector, which falls under Suriano's purview. Every respondent within this market segment acknowledged customer demand for personalized experiences, while 77% said employees have such expectations, as well, he noted. What's more, 70% said that competing effectively is more challenging in light of this shift.
As part of the survey, Oracle also asked respondents to rate their organizations' abilities to offer such desired personalization. It found that most organizations are unprepared, with few respondents -- fewer than one in five -- willing to give their organizations an "A" grade on the ability to offer individualized customer or employee experiences.
On the communications side, some 33% of respondents gave their organizations As on customer experience and 30% gave As on employee experience. "So, this rating is slightly higher in communications than the rest of the industries, but definitely doesn't show a stellar ability to provide these services," Suriano said.
Clearly both service providers and enterprises in the communications space need to be able to innovate quickly and focus on providing personalized services, he added. "This is something Oracle has been saying for many years now" (and others, I might add).
Those organizations that do feel they've made good strides in delivering highly personalized experiences for customers and employees are likely to have corresponding IT investments aimed at improving their agility and flexibility, Suriano said. Oracle, of course, has made no secret of its belief that the cloud is the way to get there. "The cloud will be the way organizations differentiate and accelerate the move to personalized services," he added.
Personalize & Monetize
From his corner of the Oracle universe, Suriano sees what this means from the service provider and enterprise communications perspectives. The challenge service providers have, he said, is to figure out how to increase personalization while growing revenue -- particularly necessary since they're "topping out on subscriber penetration" and reducing costs. This has them first turning to private clouds, using network function virtualization, as the means of delivering the infrastructure behind these services in a cost-effective way, he said.
In addition, watch for service providers to enter new markets to achieve revenue growth beyond subscriber personalization, Suriano said. Internet of Things is one potential growth area for them, he added.
Collaboration & Individuality
Naturally enterprise communications has a big role to play in helping any organization improve the personalized experience, particularly for employees. And, in fact, nearly 50% of communications respondents said advanced collaboration was one area of missed opportunity for increased individualization.
"There are things like UC, through video, voice, and messaging, and email integration -- getting to that level, especially on the enterprise side, will help solve the challenge," Suriano said. "And improving call center and customer service effectiveness, [and] being able to do a lot more with self-service, is a big part of the personalized services piece, too."
Suriano linked the study findings to trends he saw coming out at last month's Enterprise Connect conference, at which he was a keynoter. For one, UC and collaboration are moving from the desktop to full mobility. And two, given the proper experience and the right applications, enterprises are more than willing to move to the cloud.
But enterprises, like their service provider counterparts, are looking to cut costs as well. That's a big emphasis of theirs, he said. They not only want to move to the cloud but do so with five-nines quality guarantees for real-time communications, great agility and flexibility, and lower costs than they have with traditional infrastructure.
That's a tall order. But then again, why should getting an A ever be easy?
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