Gartner Magic Quadrant “CRM Customer Engagement Centre”

Gartner recently published their latest Magic Quadrant for “CRM Customer Engagement Centre” (CEC), where Oracle Service Cloud is amongst the Leaders.

This magic quadrant, says Gartner, reflects “the growing demand for cloud-based customer service applications to support agents who engage with customers through multiple channels”, but even though there are a few good choices “no vendor offers a suite that meets all global and cross-industry needs”.

The report points out that the selection of SaaS platforms to support complex business processes is increasing, and will become key to all organisations. Gartner envisages “an ecosystem containing at least four types of product will be required to build the ideal CEC, the core of which will be an intelligent system for CRM case management”.

Key, for Gartner, is that this platform has “knowledge-enabled service resolution, social media and community management, interaction assistance tools and service analytics dashboards” as well as tools for both agents and customers, designed on a common platform – and this has Oracle Service Cloud written all over it.

Oracle Service Cloud is amongst the 5 leaders – alongside Salesforce, Pegasystems, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zendesk – and here are the key strengths Gartner found in Oracle Service Cloud:

1. “offer good cost of ownership”
2. “has very good complementary applications, such as for field service, mobile customer service, analytics, co-browsing, policy automation, chat, email and knowledge management”
3. “delivered as a subscription service using a cloud model, is straightforward to set up and configure, and does not require deep involvement from IT staff”
4. “has a strong global presence”

But, for Gartner, not everything is pink when it comes to Oracle Service Cloud, and says that customers “have encountered problems upgrading, performance issues, the need for a Microsoft .NET client”.

The truth is Oracle has addressed these recently, reforming and enhancing their upgrade processes, making it easy and smooth to upgrade, and have invested heavily – since Nov 2014 release – on the Browser UI which will eventually replace Smart Client (.Net client).

Gartner is also worried that it “see no evidence that Oracle is committed to creating more seamless integration with other Oracle business applications”.

Well, the truth is Oracle has not only built seamless integrations between Oracle Service Cloud and other products that are part of the CX Suite (Sales Cloud, Social Cloud), but has invested in the Accelerators (integrate Oracle Service Cloud with CTI, Oracle eBus Suite, Siebel, Sales Cloud), the Cloud Adaptors (integrate Oracle Service Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware/SOA suite platform), as well as Oracle Integration Cloud Service (easy integration SaaS-to-SaaS and SaaS-to-On premise).

Lastly, Gartner says it “has seen only emerging evidence of large deployment teams or configuration teams among the largest SI’s and global consultancies (such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte and IBM) for the CEC or traditional contact centre desktop”.

For that, it would be a pleasure to have Gartner visit Capventis and talk to our team that currently supports and implements Oracle Service Cloud in our client’s Contact and Customer Engagement Centres.

Capventis is not a large SI, but a 30 people company whose mission is “To enable exceptional, sustainable value for all our stakeholders – customers, employees, partners and investors – by delivering brilliant solutions for Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Experience (CX), using our specialist knowledge and experience. By brilliant, we mean Fast, Innovative, Relevant, Successful”.