Oracle Corp yesterday announced two front-end office applications which the company says will greatly streamline organizations’ service operations and improve customer care. The Redwood Shores, California company says its new Oracle Call Center and Telephony Suite and Oracle Customer Care Contact Center provide a true 360-degree view of customer interactions, whether they occur through direct sales and services contact, customer access via the web, inbound call centers or indirectly through partner channels. Oracle says customer care is becoming an important differentiator for companies selling products in highly- competitive industries. Previously, Oracle integrated its customer care facility within its Oracle Service application but Cathy O’Leary, a company spokesperson, said Oracle decided it was a strong enough product to stand on its own. She said Oracle decided that customer care didn’t just apply to service levels, but that it was important in other areas too, such as sales and marketing. Having separated the customer care feature from its service application, Oracle made a number of improvements to the software, she added. These include the ability to track all customer interactions as well as being able to make notes on a particular customer that can be accessed by any other person in the enterprise. The other main benefit is that Oracle has integrated the application with its back-office ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software which means users or call center staff will be able to access financial or manufacturing-type information while on line or during a call. For example, a customer service agent assisting a customer with a technical question will be able to quickly access accounting information to answer a billing question, whereas before he or she would have had to call another department first. In addition, any data resulting from the query is only entered once, which reduces data errors caused by manual retyping. O’Leary said the second new application, the Oracle Call Center and Telephony Suite (CCT), is a technology suite that improves call center technical performance by reducing transfers or dropped calls. At present, the suite only supports inbound call centers but O’Leary said Oracle, through its acquisition of Versatility Inc last month (CI No 3,480), would soon be able to support outbound centers too. Unlike other call center products, she said Oracle CCT is fully integrated with its front and back office applications, allowing users to telephony-enable their own business processes, providing better interfaces for customers and smoother transitions between agents. The new applications are available separately or together as the Oracle Customer Care Call Center. The latter provides a centralized system for managing inbound customer calls. O’Leary said using the applications together provided greater functionality. It would allow agents, for example, to enter, view and update service requests, complaints, returned merchandise and so on for new sales leads. They can view and update the installed base, customer interaction history and account details as well as search the database for solutions to common problems, she said. Oracle CCT and Oracle Customer Care are scheduled for roll-out at the end of September. Pricing is yet to be announced.
