Customer relationships are the key to any successful company.
Today’s clients are looking for more relevant, personalised, and impressive interactions with brands. Fortunately, there are tools available to help them reach these goals. CRM, or “Customer Relationship Management” software is one of the top products on the market today for managing customer conversations, and nurturing brand loyalty.
There are plenty of CRM options out there. Salesforce and Oracle, two of the market leaders in customer experience, offer some of the most sought-after CRM solutions on the market.
Today, we’re going to cover the features you get from each offering, to help you make the right investment choice.
Salesforce Customer 360 Features
Salesforce is one of the best-known companies in customer service, support, and relationship management. The leading CRM provider worldwide, this company has built a reputation for its amazing community, fantastic range of features, and unique product offerings.
The Salesforce Customer 360 platform is more than just your standard CRM solution. The platform includes everything you need for nurturing leads, connecting with clients, and improving brand loyalty. You can even connect your 360 experiences to various tools within the Salesforce space, like omnichannel conversation tracking and Einstein AI. Features include:
- Employee experience: Dedicated insights and portals for agents, as well as learning and training opportunities for development
- Platform development: Build apps, mobile experiences, blockchain connections and more in one shared environment
- Analytics: Comprehensive insights into customer service through AI, Tableau, and other in-depth reporting features from Salesforce
- Service: A comprehensive range of omni-channel contact centre tools, chatbots, routing, and pipeline support for better customer service
- Sales: A complete cloud ecosystem built to improve your chances of sales in any environment, with lead scoring and activity capturing
- Commerce: Comprehensive shopping experiences with AI recommendation, and automated sales on all devices
- Partners: Access Salesforce’s diverse partner ecosystem to connect with people who can expand your CRM environment with hardware and software
- Integrations: Integration options with a range of leading apps, including top contact centre and collaboration tools
- Success: Connections to Salesforce experts who can help with everything from technical guidance to organisational health reporting
Salesforce also recently purchased Slack, which means companies now have a native environment for collaboration within the CRM ecosystem.
Oracle Cloud CX Platform Features
Oracle’s version of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform is Oracle Cloud CX. This is a comprehensive platform, like Customer 360, which supports business leaders in building effective workflows for customer service, support, and sales. The platform builds on top of highly secure and reliable cloud technology from Oracle.
Oracle’s fantastic CX platform is home to all kinds of excellent tools, like AI analytics and insights to help you better understand your business, real-time smart segmentation, and even low-code development tools so you can build your own automated workflows. Features include:
- Unity customer data: The customer data platform within Oracle Cloud CX is a unified environment for customer profile enrichment. Users can create in-depth insights into their target audience, and benefit from segmentation, actionable intelligence, and analytics
- Analytics: Oracle supports users in learning from every conversation with their customers. Through access to AI and machine learning solutions, as well as data visualization, smart data connectors and Oracle adaptive intelligence, you can learn more about your audience
- Content management: The cloud CX content management solution comes with an API-first design, to help you make the most effective connections for your company. Oracle simplifies the management and syndication of content for CX
- Integrations: Oracle allows users to build the CX solution that’s right for them with all kinds of rich integrations to leading business tools. There’s flexibility to connect solutions with an API gateway, journey mapping recommendations, and a point-and-click UI
- Low code development: Visual low-code development means you can configure and design experiences most suitable to your customer experience needs. The fully-featured tools mean you don’t need an in-house developer to create new workflows
- Security: Oracle takes security seriously, building it into the entire CX environment. Features include everything from unified single sign-on to PII analysis and behavioural monitoring for identity and fraud protection
- Digital assistant: Upgrade and empower your team with digital assistants featuring pre-built skills, intent detection, and natural language processing. You can even build your own multi-lingual chatbot
Salesforce Customer 360 or Oracle CX?
Salesforce and Oracle both go above and beyond to deliver the kind of meaningful experiences today’s business leaders need. You don’t just get a full CRM environment with these tools; you get everything you need to analyse your customers and build better workflows too.
Salesforce Customer 360 is an adaptable, flexible, and comprehensive solution for viewing the end-to-end customer journey, and pinpointing areas where you can improve. Salesforce also stands as one of the market leaders in bringing intelligent technology into the customer service environment, with Salesforce Einstein for AI insights.
Salesforce offers a 99.99% uptime anywhere in the world, drag-and-drop report creation, and amazing insights into every stage of the customer relationship.
Similarly, Oracle’s CX environment is built on a reliable infrastructure with absolute durability and fantastic security. There are tons of tools to help give you peace of mind, such as multi-factor authentication and behavioural monitoring. At the same time, you still get the flexibility you need to design the perfect view of the customer journey.
Oracle’s service includes AI-based strategic insights and predictive analysis, along with low-code development tools for building your own intelligent apps. While Oracle does offer collaboration tools to keep staff connected, Salesforce has recently surged ahead of Oracle in this area, thanks to the acquisition of Slack.
Salesforce and Oracle are both excellent tools for building connections with your customers. However, Salesforce might be slightly more appealing if you’re looking for a little extra help getting started. There’s more training and support available for beginners here, and a stronger back-end collaboration environment too. Alternatively, Oracle may be the choice for companies with prior industry knowledge and developer skills.
