Gabrielle Tao, VP Product Management, Oracle

Marketers want to connect data and intelligence in order to provide great experiences for their customers. But, only 11% of marketers express strong confidence that they’re reaching the right Audience.

To make my point, let’s take an average current data eco-system.  It all too often looks like the following where each dotted line is a set of data extract, transform and load (ETL) jobs stitched together:

Figure 1: A disconnected data ecosystem does not help create connected intelligence nor experiences.

This eco-system approach often suffers from 4 problems;

1. Disconnectedness,
2. Difficulty in scaling,
3. A rigid 3rd party data enrichment process, and,
4. It’s too IT-centric.

And as a result, the aspiration for having a single customer view remains elusive.

Oracle recently introduced a new product called CX Audience that provides a solution for large-scale audience segmentation and audience analytics. This is the next step in a larger Oracle vision to realize the vision of a comprehensive data platform.

CX Audience offers these 3 main benefits:

1. Manage and enrich data: You can import all kinds of cross-channel data into CX Audience - simple or complex, online or offline. In addition, 3rd party data from Oracle Data Cloud is readily available for use.
2. Explore and segment customers: Without needing developers to write SQL queries, a business user can use a simple drag-and-drop user interface to tap into even complex data. For example, “Give me all the customers who have purchased anything from me 3 times in the last 12 months.” Counts are provided at each step in seconds to minutes - a far cry from the hours that it usually takes to write SQLs - allowing business users to adjust audiences easily to balance reach with targeted impact.

Figure 2: Find your most engaged audience across all channels.

3. Analyze audience performance: After an audience is created but before they get included in any campaign execution, might you be curious about how the audience behaved in the past? Have they ever opened any similar emails in the past? Audience Insights within CX Audience allows you to analyze audiences on such a pre-campaign basis. Once the audiences have been published to Oracle Responsys for campaign execution purpose, the performance data from Responsys will automatically be made available within CX Audience, allowing business users to analyze the post-campaign performance.

Figure 3: Explore and analyze audience behavioral data.

Some use case example questions of what CX Audience can help you answer include the following.

• Who is your most engaged audience that you can directly market to across all interaction channels, including Web, e-mail, SMS, mobile app, and even offline?
• Who responded to promotions in store?
• You just signed up a new customer with very little info on them. How do you communicate to them beyond “Welcome?”
• Are my inactive customers buying similar products from my competitors?

In CX Audience, marketers will find a data system that is connected (segmentation with analytics, pre-campaign with campaign and post-campaign), allows for flexible access 3rd party data readily built in, scales to handle cross-channel interactions data, and is business user-led.