In the business world, more competition means the more a company needs to rely on differentiation and branding, to gain customer loyalty, brand top-of-mind and increase the bottomline. While Customer Relations Management (CRM) is a crucial part of building and maintaining customer loyalty, there is a fundamental shift towards Customer Experience (CX) as part of building a sustainable competitive advantage.
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Recently, we had the privilege of meeting Mr. Chandru Relwani, Senior Director, CRM Applications Product Management for Asia Pacific and Japan in Oracle to talk about Customer Relations Management (CRM) and moving towards Customer Experience (CX).
Through careful research by Harris Interactive (Customer Experience Impact Report 2009-2011), it has been found that 86% of customers will stop doing business with an organization after one bad experience, 26% of these customers have posted negative comments on social media after their experience and 79% of complaints on social channels are ignored by organizations. Through this, they also identified that 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience and 69% of business executives view customer experience as a competitive advantage.
What does this all mean?
Businesses are starting to realize the importance of customer experience and rely on various tools and expertise to achieve that goal. Through his presentation, Relwani identified a few reasons as to why customer experience is critical and how it is the only sustainable competitive differentiator. They are:
- More competition around the globe
- Products are becoming more commoditized
- Traditional marketing is less effective
- Customers have higher expectations
As more competitors enter the industry, companies need to rely on differentiation, to gain customer loyalty. A seamless and efficient service gives better customer experience, thus creating loyalty. Integrated solutions from Oracle can help deliver seamless customer experiences, grow revenue and reduce costs while having each system customized for each business, regardless of industry, sector or size. Oracle achieves this through integrated solutions, deployed individually depending on the needs of a business. Deployment time of such a solution varies, depending on scope, the company change management, current readiness of tech, and amount of training required.
Oracle is currently the leading and only company in world that is defining the transformation from Customer Relations Management (CRM) to Customer Experience(CX). Through its innovative and flexible systems, Oracle is capable of offering the best and most complete solutions. Oracle continues to provide unprecedented flexibility and choice of deployment models – on premise, private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid. Oracle’s solution set (Fatwire, ATG, Endeca, InQuira and Siebel) offers the best and most complete customer experience solution OnPremise while Oracle Fusion CRM and RightNow together offers the best and most complete customer experience solution in the cloud.
Relwani revealed that industries that benefit the most from customer experience are public sector, government, retail and telecommunications.
Asked about what the top challenges faced by organisations with regards to customer experience, Relwani replied – finding the right customer acquisition and growth strategy; consolidation of existing systems and information; and the need to adopt an open platform to ease systems integration. Acquisition strategies suffer where the customer data is not clean and that data management and consolidation is lacking and where integration in realtime is low or non-existent.
Malaysia is a growing market and is moving forward in terms of customer experience as organisations realise the importance and power of differentiation, and is catching up with the rest of the region.
Profile of Chandru Relwani
Chandru Relwani is Senior Director – CRM Applications Product Management for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Oracle Corporation. Chandru is responsible for all CRM Applications interactions between the Japan and Asia Pacific Field organizations and Development. Tasks undertaken by the Product Management group include such diverse responsibilities as defining the go-to-market initiatives for CRM, Product demonstrations, Applications Architecture definitions, Field Readiness for all staff and Partners for CRM Applications, Country and Industry specific localisations to products, and customer escalations. Chandru is also a member of the ASEAN Applications Management team.
Chandru joined Oracle in 2004, as Director CRM Applications Centre of Excellence (ACE) team. As Director, CRM ACE team, Chandru was responsible for driving key CRM initiatives across Asia-Pacific and engaging in strategic accounts to provide a holistic approach to customer management in a diverse range of industries. Chandru has also held the position of CRM Practice Director, Asia, managing the CRM practice of Oracle Consulting Services. In this role, post the Siebel Systems acquisition, Chandru was responsible for building the CRM consulting and delivery practice across multiple geographies including Greater China, India and ASEAN. More recently, Chandru was managing the ASEAN Sales Consulting team, where he was managing the applications pre-sales team covering the Oracle applications portfolio (ERP, CRM, BI, etc.)
Prior to his tenure at Oracle, he held the roles of Senior Engagement Manager at Siebel Systems, Program Manager at Standard Chartered Bank and Principal Consultant at Price Waterhouse Management Consultants.
Chandru holds a Master of Science degree in Data Communications, Network and Distributed Systems from University College, London University and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Mathematics and Computing Science from the Polytechnic of North London.
