INFORMATIONINNOVATES

Improving Customer Acquisition and Retention in Business Services

Pursue the right service opportunities. Create

customized service offerings. Proactively manage

contract renewals. Cultivate long-term, strategic

relationships with customers. Oracle can show

you how.

Drive effective leads. Improve sales. Increase contract renewals. These are your highest priorities in an industry where barriers to entry are so low that new competitors are around every corner. To succeed, you need to be innovative in the ways you acquire and retain your most-valuable customers.

Around the world, organizations are out-sourcing specific services—from equipment repair, to security, to building and facility maintenance—and relying on the expertise of the business services sector. Oracle delivers the only fully integrated business solution that enables you to differentiate your services from the flood of other offerings on the market. By completely supporting and au-tomating your sales, marketing, and service efforts, Oracle helps you identify your best opportunities and most-valuable customers, collaborate across customer-facing depart-ments, personalize the customer experience, and manage the entire contracting process.

Gain Complete Visibility into Opportunity and Account Management

Your employees’ ability to work effectively across the organization requires a complete view of each customer’s or prospect’s history and interaction with your company. This is difficult to achieve in the business services industry, where data quality issues are com-mon and customer information is scattered among siloed systems. Oracle can help your services organization gain insight into your customer base.

• Centralize accurate sales data—Oracle’s integrated solution consolidates dispersed customer information into a single view that includes leads, sales opportunities, service calls, and payment history. With complete customer information—including terms, preferred method of contact, order/issue his-tory, payment/credit history, and campaign responses—your sales and service represen-tatives can better service customers with consistency and personalization, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.

“Basically, all our existing

customer contact system did

was to ‘tickle’ account executives

to follow up with customers

periodically, but that wasn’t

enough. We needed a solution

to help us get to know our

customers better, and we had to

develop a real sales process—

one that would help us evaluate

the potential of each customer

and prioritize our calling efforts.”

Ric VillarrealSenior Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Special Assistant to the Chairman, Oakwood Worldwide

• Align customer lifecycle management practices with company strategy—With centralized customer information, your sales representatives can easily identify their best customers, recognize potential customer-profitability issues, and put plans in place to optimize each customer’s revenue potential. In addition, mapping sales opportunities to your company’s growth strategies lets you offer your most profitable customers the appropriate up-sell and cross-sell services so you can increase renewals and lower sales and service costs.

Target the Right Customers, Qualify Leads, and Up-Sell New Services

In a competitive industry characterized by thin sales and service margins, your company’s health depends on its ability to generate leads and quickly close deals.

Oracle’s marketing and campaign manage-ment solutions provide comprehensive customer profiles, paired with marketing analysis, for finer customer segmentation. These solutions close the loop between marketing and sales departments, making it possible for you to

• Target the right customers—Identify your highest-value customer segments and market to them based on their preferences.

• Qualify new leads—Efficiently capture leads and route them to the most appropri-ate sales representative to close the order.

As leads mature into opportunities and ul-timately into signed contracts, Oracle keeps the complete data trail so you can continu-ally monitor real-time business metrics such as contract conversion, win/loss rate, cost of sale, and sales by territory.

• Up-sell new services—View every cus-tomer interaction as a potential opportunity to offer new services. Sales and service repre-sentatives can easily evaluate new service of-ferings and target existing customers for the up-sell and cross-sell of additional services with personalized e-mail, Web, phone, mail, or other marketing campaigns.

With Oracle, you can continually refocus your marketing efforts based on the processes and programs that drive proven results.

Automatically Create Contracts and Proactively Manage Renewals

Proactive contract management is essential to retaining your best customers. Well before a contract reaches its expiration date, sales representatives should be formulating a renewal strategy and analyzing new services they can up-sell into each contract. To ensure customers stay with your company during their renewal, you need a solution that supports the complete contract process, from negotiation and signature to service entitlement and support.

Oracle’s integrated pricing, service contracts, and order management solution lets you seamlessly manage the contract lifecycle. Automatic renewal alerts give sales represen-

tatives enough time to review every cus- tomer’s contract, identify up-sell/cross-sell opportunities, and negotiate the best con-tract terms. With comprehensive contract version control, you can compare current articles to protected, historic versions. In addition, you can version-protect supporting documents—subcontracts, e-mail trails, contract addenda, and so on—and electroni-cally attach them to contracts. With Oracle, you can reduce contract errors, maximize selling accuracy and productivity, and improve customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Innovate and Win with Oracle

Only Oracle has a complete, end-to-end solution for the business services industry that helps you improve customer acquisition and retention. In an environment with no room for error, Oracle provides the flexibility and built-in analytics you need to intelli-gently refine your marketing and sales processes for measurable business results.

Fact: 16 of the top 20 most-innovative

business services firms run Oracle Applications.

(InformationWeek, September 2005)

Improving Customer Acquisition and Retention in Business Services

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