Siebel Crm 8.1.1 Sod

Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Planned Features October 2008

PURPOSE STATEMENT

This document provides an overview of features and enhancement included in Oracle’s Siebel CRM 8.1.1 release. It is intended to help you assess the business benefits of upgrading to Siebel CRM 8.1.1, and to plan future business and IT projects. DISCLAIMER

This document in any form, software or printed matter, contains proprietary information that is the exclusive property of Oracle. Your access to and use of this confidential material is subject to the terms and conditions of your Oracle Software License and Service Agreement, which has been executed and with you agree to comply. This document and information contained herein may not be disclosed, copied, reproduced or distributed to anyone outside Oracle without the prior written consent of Oracle. This document in not part of your license agreement nor can it be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. This document is for informational purposes only and is intended solely to assist you in planning for the implementation and upgrade of the product features described. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described in this document remains at the sole discretion of Oracle. Due to the nature of the product architecture, it may not be possible to safely include all features described in this document without risking significant destabilizations of the code.

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Contents

Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Planned Features General Functionality ........................ 6 Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Overview ........................................................................ 6 Industry-Driven CRM.................................................................................. 7 Siebel Contact Center & Service, Multichannel Products ...................... 7 Siebel Customer Order Management ...................................................... 17 Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite ............................................................ 27 Siebel Loyalty............................................................................................... 38 Siebel HelpDesk.......................................................................................... 66 Siebel Partner Relationship Management................................................ 69 Siebel Reports.............................................................................................. 75 Siebel Self-Service ....................................................................................... 89 Industry-Specific Functionality ................................................................... 119 Siebel Communications, Media, and Energy ........................................ 119 Siebel Financial Services .......................................................................... 129 Siebel Life Sciences................................................................................... 132 Siebel Public Sector ..................................................................................137 Oracle Business Intelligence Applications................................................. 143 Oracle business intelligence applications .............................................. 143 Oracle Master Data Management (MDM) ................................................ 151 Oracle Master Data Management (MDM)............................................ 151 Enhanced Siebel Data Quality ................................................................ 151 Data Watch and Repair............................................................................ 153 Platform Support........................................................................................... 158 Siebel Enterprise Server Platforms......................................................... 159 J2EE Application Servers........................................................................ 159 Siebel Web Server Platforms................................................................... 159 Siebel Database Server Platforms........................................................... 160 High Interactivity-Mode Clients............................................................. 161 Standard Interactivity-Mode Clients ...................................................... 161

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Standard Handheld Clients...................................................................... 162 Language Support..................................................................................... 163

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Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Planned Features General Functionality

SIEBEL CRM 8.1.1 OVERVIEW

Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management 8.1.1 release introduces another evolution in Siebel’s industry-leading business applications. This newest release underscores Oracle increased commitment to the Applications Unlimited plan to continue providing enhancements to current Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle EBusiness Suite, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World customers. With Siebel CRM, Oracle plans to introduce major enhancements designed to transform your customer-facing sales and service strategies while realizing increased profitability with customer loyalty and marketing functionality. For organizations wishing to improve business agility, Siebel CRM builds upon the service oriented architecture (SOA) architecture introduced in release 8.0 by supporting more open standards with enhanced Web services and Fusion Middleware platform support. This planned features document provides a preliminary overview of the primary enhancements for Siebel CRM with several themes guiding the development of this next-generation release:


Manage customers consistently across channels and capture increased revenue by extending your Web strategy with new customerfacing enhancements using Siebel eCommerce and Siebel eSupport applications.




Increase customer loyalty and profitability by delivering relevant and timely customer programs with enhanced Web/e-mail tools in Siebel Marketing and Siebel Loyalty applications.




Improve business agility with open standards leveraging Fusion Middleware technology and Web services to develop a true SOA environment for extending your CRM investments.

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INDUSTRY-DRIVEN CRM

Beginning with Siebel CRM 8.1.1, Oracle’s Siebel CRM will be focusing product innovation, research and development, and integration investments on Siebel CRM Industry Applications. Customers of Siebel industry-specific products will benefit from new and deeper, more industry-specific enhancements for Siebel CRM products. Customers who purchase Siebel CRM are encouraged to take advantage of our strategic investment direction by selecting and implementing Siebel CRM – Siebel Industry Applications (SIA) during purchasing, license key selection, and implementation. Existing customers who have purchased Siebel CRM Cross-Industry Applications1, or who seek cross-industry solutions can continue to benefit from rich features and capability delivered in their Siebel Enterprise Applications products up through and including Siebel CRM 8.1.1. In future releases, Cross-Industry Application customers will be able to upgrade to a comparable ‘industry-based’ offering – delivering comparably robust capability along with the advantage of easier uptake of new Siebel CRM products. SIEBEL CONTACT CENTER & SERVICE, MULTICHANNEL PRODUCTS Siebel Advanced Email Agent

Siebel Advanced Email Agent is an enhanced version of the Siebel eMail Response feature. It enables users to effectively manage emails within Siebel application, while focusing on customer information management. It provides an intuitive user interface for agents to work on email-related customer interactions and provides embedded Siebel features for tracking, and attaching customer data from other screens/views. Expanded Email Response Editor View

The new look improves the screen “real estate” available for outgoing mails, and also will have an option of going through related incoming mail in the same view. Users will get a wider outgoing message applet for replying to emails. The next/previous buttons will remain in the inbound applet. The user can navigate to the next incoming mail by clicking the next/previous buttons. The outgoing message applet is displayed below the incoming message applet. Attachments will be displayed at the very bottom.

1

Cross-industry customers are specifically identified as those who have purchased, selected, and implemented Siebel CRM – Siebel Enterprise Applications (SEA), Siebel CRM – Horizontal Applications (HRZ), or Siebel Professional Edition products.

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Fig. 1 – Siebel Advanced Email Agent screen, showing incoming and outgoing emails

Outgoing Attachments

A new outgoing attachment applet has been added to display the outgoing attachment list. Users can easily manage (add, delete, drag and drop from desktop) attachments for an outgoing email message.

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Fig. 2 – Outgoing attachment view

Save and Resume

This feature allows users to save one or multiple email messages as drafts, and users will be able to resume the work at a later time. This will enable agents to compile and research all relevant information for the customer prior sending a message.

Fig. 3 – Resume and Save As Draft features

Contextual Preview

Contextual preview gives the quick and brief information about the particular entity record, which is related to that email, like SR, Opportunity, Contact etc.

Fig. 4 – Contextual preview applet for Siebel Advanced Email Agent Save As Template

While drafting an email, the agent can choose to save the email as a template directly from the outgoing message screen.

Fig. 5 – Save as Template feature in Siebel Advanced Email

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Siebel CRM Chat

For customers, the availability of a chat channel means a near-real time support experience even if live talking to an agent is not a viable option at a given time, for example, because queue wait times are high or because the support center has decided not to offer the voice channel. Siebel Chat also gives customers more time to formulate their issue more clearly, which might explain why many customers choose to use chat, even if the support center offers a voice channel. For support centers, the chat channel means an effective and efficient channel for customer communication, because one agent can deal with multiple customer interactions simultaneously. In Siebel CRM, Oracle delivers a robust and comprehensive chat channel to Siebel’s existing multichannel footprint. Integration with Siebel Contact Center

Siebel Chat is tightly integrated with Siebel Contact Center and leverages many of its features and components, including: Enhanced CTI Tool Bar

The Siebel Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) toolbar is enhanced to handle chat as a new channel to support chat accept, transfer, hold, wrap up and release. Fig. 6 – Siebel Communications (CTI) toolbar Automatic Creation of Service Requests

As a configurable option, Siebel Contact Center can automatically create a new service request for every incoming chat request, except for chat requests in the context of an existing service request. Service requests can also be created manually once the chat session begins by using the Quick Actions drop-down list within the Siebel Chat dashboard.

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Fig. 7 – Agent and customer chat session Siebel Chat

Service request created in this manner pre-populate the new service request form with data pulled from the customer and chat dashboards. Integration with Siebel eSupport

Siebel Chat is fully integrated with Siebel eSupport. A user could be on a Siebel eSupport web site for example and browse Siebel solutions, the knowledge base and use the search functionality before requesting to chat with a Siebel Contact Center agent. While chatting, the contact center agent will be able to view which knowledge articles the customer has already seen in Siebel eSupport before requesting the chat. The agent will also be able to push content from Siebel applications to the customer through the chat channel, either in the form of plain text in the chat window or by pushing URL’s that immediately display in a window on the customer’s desktop. For more detailed information on Siebel eSupport, see the Siebel eSupport section in this Statement of Direction. Integration with Oracle Contact Center Anywhere

Siebel Chat functionality is based on the chat engine of Oracle Contact Center Anywhere. Routing rules that take care of finding the best agent for a given chat request are also set up in Oracle Contact Center Anywhere. To administer and supervise Siebel Chat, the standard administrator and supervisor tools of Oracle Contact Center Anywhere Chat are used. Features include: agent skills ratings, chat queues, real-time load monitoring and balancing and custom reports. The chat connections between customers and agents leverage SSL for secure chat protocol of Oracle Contact Center Anywhere.

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Chat Features “Have You Tried This?”

When requesting a chat session in Siebel eSupport, but before the chat request is actually submitted, Siebel eSupport will execute a search against the knowledge base using the problem description, area and sub-area provided by the customer when they requested the chat session. It will list the results of that search, which will exclude the knowledge base articles already visited by the customer. The customer can then select one of the documents from the list – and if that answers the customer’s question – abort the chat, or decide to continue to initiate the chat request. Chat Dashboard

Extending the idea of the customer dashboard in Siebel CRM, each Siebel Chat session has a chat dashboard inside the chat pane. The Siebel Chat dashboard contains chat request information and displays the knowledge base solutions a customer has already reviewed online as well as the Quick Actions list.

Fig. 7 – Siebel Chat dashboard located on the right-hand side of the Siebel screen.

The chat dashboard refreshes every time the agent switches between active chat sessions. A streamlined version of the chat dashboard is also viewable to the customer. Persistent Customer Dashboard

The customer dashboard also refreshes every time the agent switches between active chat sessions. In the persistent customer dashboard, an indicator icon will signal the agent that the contact information used for the chat session does not match the existing customer information on file.

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Knowledge Base Documents Visited

Siebel Chat remembers knowledge base documents, which have been viewed in Siebel eSupport before the customer requested to chat with an agent. The document list is visible to the Siebel Contact Center agent via the chat dashboard.

Fig. 8 – Documents viewed by a customer are displayed Frequently Used Text

While working on chat interactions, the agent will use many phrases time after time. For example:



“Thank your for waiting, how can I help you?” “Please wait while I research your issue.”

To avoid having the agent type in these phrases every time, a global library of frequently used text is available to the agents.

Fig. 9 – Frequently used text are displayed for the agent in Siebel Chat Search Knowledge Base

An agent can select any portion of text from the chat dialog, and execute a full contextual search by clicking the Smart Search button from the Siebel Chat console. The results of the search query are automatically displayed in the Search Results of the Siebel Search Center.

Smart Share

While solving the issue during a chat session, agents will frequently need to provide customers with existing solutions to known problems. Siebel Chat has made it easy for agents to share relevant information with customers with the click of a button. Smart Share can be used to:


Share selected text by highlighting any text displayed in any Siebel attribute

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Share a solution summary and description for a selected solutions record




Share service request ID and description for a selected service request record

To use Smart Share, the agent selects the text and clicks the Smart Share button. The text will be copied to the section where the agent composes his reply. Alternatively, the agent can also select a solution record and service request record, and click the Smart Share button. A summary of the record (ID and summary description) will be copied to the section where the agent composes his reply. URL Push and URL Library

URL Push refers to the ability for an agent to share the content of a Web page with the customer. The page will be automatically displayed in the chat window on the desktop of the customer The Siebel Chat administrator can set up frequently used URLs that point to pages that will help resolve customer issues. This library of URLs is then available for agents as a list during a chat session. As a configurable setting, pushed pages can be displayed in the same browser instance as the chat session or in a new browser instance.

Fig. 10 – Example of a pushed URL to the customer desktop using Siebel Chat Spell Checker

Siebel Chat integrates with Siebel’s standard spell checker allowing agents to check chat text for spelling errors before sending to a customer.

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Activity Capture and Wrap-Up

An activity record is created for every incoming and transferring chat session. The activity is attached to either a contact or a service request, depending on the customer choice of configuration and condition of an incoming chat. The chat transcript will be available as an HTML attachment to that activity. Siebel Chat is the first channel to integrate with Activity Wrap-up, a new feature introduced in 8.1.1. Releasing a work item ends the chat session and triggers “wrap up” mode. In wrap-up mode, the agent can perform any necessary “call disposition” actions as well as provide an outcome, reason and feedback for the chat interaction. This wrap-up data can be used in Siebel Analytics reports.

Fig. 11 – The wrap-up screen in Siebel Chat allows the agent to detail the chat outcome. Multiple Chat Interactions

An agent can have many simultaneously open chat sessions. Each chat session will be represented by a tab with the customer name in the chat dashboard.

Fig. 12 – Chat session tabs provide faster navigation during simultaneous chat sessions. Persistent Application Workspace

When a Siebel Contact Center agent switches between active chat sessions, the rest of the Siebel application screen will return to the same view where the agent left off before switching to another active chat session. Chat tabs also track the number of messages sent by customers who’s chat sessions are not in the foreground. For instance “John: 3” means John has sent 3 messages while the agent is talking to some other customer. When the agent hovers the cursor above a non-active tab, a yellow frame with text will be displayed containing the last sentence sent in that chat interaction. For example, if the customer just sent a message “OK, I will try that now,” there is probably no need for the agent to make that chat session active. However, if the agent reads “Hello?” in the frame box, the agent will likely need to change to that session to respond. Automatic Sending of Chat Transcripts

As a configuration option in Siebel Chat, a chat transcript can automatically be emailed to the customer as an e-mail attachment once the chat session ends. The transcript will be in HTML format and it will contain everything that took place

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during the chat session. For example, if a URL was pushed, this URL will be captured in the transcript.

Siebel SmartAnswer

Siebel SmartAnswer is no longer sold as part of the Siebel CRM suite of applications. The product is no longer shipped effective for all new and upgrading customers beginning with Siebel 8.1 / 8.1.1. Existing customers of Siebel SmartAnswer can continue to use their products, but will not be able to buy additional seats.

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SIEBEL CUSTOMER ORDER MANAGEMENT

Companies have deployed numerous systems to plan, administer, execute, and enforce commerce policies across the various channels where business is conducted. These companies have found that they are no longer administering this policy data in one comprehensive system; they are challenged with managing these rules across numerous disparate systems. This reduces the ability of the enterprise to introduce new products and prices effectively across channels and results in customers receiving undesired inconsistencies across channels. Siebel Customer Order Management is expected to address these challenges by delivering enhanced set of out-of-the-box pre-built Web services that are intended to expose Siebel Customer Order Management capabilities to various channels and applications. This is expected to enable customers to extend this pre-built functionality further across their enterprises, seamlessly exposing this functionality in real-time through standard Web portals and other Web service-enabled environments that service a significantly broader range of customers and interaction models. Siebel Customer Order Management plans to deliver additional benefits to business administrators and end users; improve product and price administration; and improve the run-time experience through several new capabilities including:


Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) -based Siebel Configurator user interface (UI): The ability to define ADF-based UI themes within a configurator UI option and use them within the new Siebel Self Service application.

Fig. 13 – Siebel Customer Order Management configurator admin screen


Siebel eCommerce that uses Siebel Customer Order Management Web services for all product, price and shopping cart management.




Enhanced configurator debugging capabilities: Request detailed administration log for any product model issue investigation.

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Fig. 14 – Configurator debugging screen


Product configurator sequencing allows the product administrator to define “product attribute” and “product child item” evaluation sequence as part of the configurator product structure.




Enhanced promotion integration addresses several promotion and customizable product rule integration scenarios and resolves them with minimum user intervention.

Fig. 15 – Promotion integration view


Enhanced Order Management and Oracle Real Time Decisioning (RTD) integration for Siebel eCommerce: Recommendations based on out-of-thebox RTD engine policies.

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New automated dynamic pricing enabling process: Pricing customers will no longer have to perform manual steps and make complex repository changes in order to enable Dynamic Pricing.




New configurator grid user interface (UI): Provides the ability to place any configurator control in a grid layout. It delivers enhanced data-driven UI generation and layout support, and allows better use of screen real estate.

Fig. 16 – Configurator grid user interface.

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Price Management

Siebel CRM introduces a number of new capabilities which address a growing set of requirements generally referred to as price management. Price management is defined as an integrated set of business processes that allow an organization to become more efficient at managing price, which allows for the more effective determination of the right price as influenced by internal and environmental conditions. Siebel Customer Order Management represents price management across five process pillars: Analyze Plan, Publish, Execute and Negotiate.

Price management is a closed-loop process whereby:


Analyze provides the oversight of all pricing activities.




Plans are created driven by customer segments and pricing strategies tailored for each segment. Each strategy contains optimal prices and discount guidelines that are used to drive behavior during negotiation.




Publish occurs once strategies have been set. Prices and discount matrices are translated to the media and content required for multi-channel, global distribution.




Execute provides the single system of record required for ensuring the right price and discount guidance is always provided to the requesting systems or users.




Negotiate occurs on the front line where the tools of the trade become price recommendations, price waterfall analysis and customer compliance analysis while being governed by the strategies created during planning.

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Siebel Deal Management

Customers want to extend their pricing and selling policy from a transaction-based price to a more demand and analytics-driven deal management. New deal management will help customers identify deals with “Price Score Below That of Corporate Standards” and recommend a price strategy based on Customer and Segment Analysis. Siebel Customer Order Management includes deal management capabilities that include: Deal Management Administration

New profile framework and pricing segmentation enables companies to define customer attributes and conditional attributes in order to create logical groupings for effective and strategic price planning.

Fig. 17 – New customer profile/segmentation view

New customer profile capabilities enable marketing administrators to assign values to customer attributes in order to facilitate grouping of customers based on similar characteristics and purchasing behavior. New pricing strategy definition and pricing guideline policies enable price administrators to define price range policies in relation to the defined waterfall segments and whether the behavior driven by the guideline policy is constraining or recommended. Guideline terms can be defined at the product or deal level as well as other characteristics (user role, geography, etc).

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Also planned is the ability to assign pricing rules based on price segment and conditional attributes. These rules include association to a price list, a guideline plan, and available adjustments.

Fig. 18 – New discount guideline plan configuration view

Quote and Order/Deal Runtime

The new quote and order/deal runtime capability plans to feature the following capabilities:


Price waterfall enables price administrators the ability to define the organization’s price waterfall for deal assessment, reporting, etc. A price waterfall is provided for individual line items as well as entire transaction to include guideline/target price points.




The price enforcement capability at quote, order or contract times prevents the user from offering a price outside of the current policy with indications regarding price policy compliance.




Pricing workflow provides the ability for a user to seek approval for price points that are outside of policy, but required for a deal.

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Fig. 19 – New deal policy enforcement view Deal Analysis

Deal analysis within Siebel Customer Order Management plans to include:


Enhanced Price Waterfall. Enhanced price waterfall offers the ability to define the organization’s price waterfall for deal assessment which includes individual line items as well as the entire transactions to include guideline/target price points.

Fig. 20 – New deal analysis/price waterfall view.

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Quote Assessment

The ability to compare and analyze the “working” quote against similar quotes across products and customers. This feature provides a set of pricing metrics useful for deal comparison. Deal Management Workbench

The following features enable inline analytical capabilities concerning the current deal, allowing for effective and efficient deal assessment.


New price segmentation scoring algorithm to assess the current deal pricing against similar deals within the price segment.




New ability to view the current requested deal pricing in relation to the price segment.




New ability to perform impact analysis within the price segment.




New ability to gauge price trends within the price segment.

Fig. 21 – New deal analysis/price recommendation view.

Siebel Price Performance Analytics

Siebel customers need to understand, track, and analyze the performance of prices throughout the organizations. They also need the ability to assess the effectiveness of price policies implemented through Siebel Deal Management. The new Siebel Price Performance Analytics functionality includes:

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Price Segment and Deal Desk Analysis

Siebel Price Performance Analytics includes the ability to track and analyze the performance of prices segments using metrics such as contribution margin, discount effectiveness, price yield and price elasticity. The ability to answer questions such as, which segments:


Are performing as planned?




Are lagging behind plan, or other segments?




Are contributing the most margins?




Value my products differently?




Have the most opportunities for improvement?

The ability to manage deal desk activities by understanding:


Where are price exceptions the most prevalent?




Where are my guidelines to tight/broad?




What sales teams are constantly requesting deep discounts?




Where am I losing margin due to end of quarter deals?

Fig. 22 – New Siebel Price Performance Analytics view

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Price Performance Analytic Dashboards

Siebel Price Performance Analytic Dashboards plans to include the ability to look across customers and products to understand globally where opportunities for improvement lie, and the ability to drill down into the customer/product hierarchy to pinpoint areas of improvement.

Fig. 23 – Siebel Price Performance Analytic Dashboard

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SIEBEL ENTERPRISE MARKETING SUITE

The Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite offers solutions covering marketing planning and resource management (MRM), customer analytics and segmentation, campaign management, e-mail and web marketing, events management, real-time decisions and interaction management, partner marketing, loyalty program management, lead management, and marketing analytics. Using the Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite organizations can acquire more profitable customers, cross-sell and up-sell more effectively, retain valued customers longer, accelerate time to market, and drive superior marketing performance. World-Class Lead Management

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite provides an enhanced end-to-end response and lead management process to dramatically accelerate lead follow-through, increase lead conversion, and provide a common framework that marketing and sales can manage together to monitor and improve results. With Siebel lead management your organization can obtain a variety of business benefits including:


Ensuring that all responses across channels are captured and processed on a timely basis




Increased data quality, lead follow-through, and process consistency through a consistent lead development framework shared between marketing and sales




Higher conversion rates from an increased focus on passing better quality, better qualified leads to sales, not just more quantity




An accelerated process of importing leads in the system, qualifying them, and assigning to a sales rep or partner




Providing marketing a better mechanism for nurturing leads and keeping them warm until they are ready to be handed to sales




Less IT dependency, more flexibility and local control for Sales and Marketing operations to define their lead scoring, routing and other policies




Better visibility into the performance of the entire process

Enhanced Import of Leads, Responses, and Customer Lists

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite enables your business to accelerate lead followup by empowering business users to import responses and leads without dependency on IT or a central operations group. Siebel CRM base module includes an enhanced set of features for business users to import customer, response and lead data into the system. The list import framework has been expanded to support a wider variety of data including the ability to import new accounts, contacts, prospects, responses, leads, and offline

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survey results. All imports are fully integrated with data quality services to maintain high data integrity. Siebel CRM also introduces a variety of usability improvements to the list import process. Data errors are collected for the end user with error messages, so the user can quickly correct any data problems and re-import the corrected data. Users can schedule import jobs for a one-time or recurring basis, or import manually. Business users can also monitor the progress and status of an import job directly through the user interface (UI), so they have immediate knowledge when all the data has been successfully added to the system. List import is expanded in Siebel CRM to support both delimited text file types (such as CSV, tab delimited) as well as XML files. In addition, the list import is configurable and extensible for new data attributes and new types of objects, so that the data capture process matches any object extensions in your CRM deployment.

Fig. 24 – Siebel CRM provides an enhanced self-service interface for easily importing responses, leads and customer lists

Accelerated Lead Qualification and Prioritization

Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite provides enhanced lead processing services and business rules to more optimally score, prioritize and route leads across multiple sales channels. The solution leverages the Siebel business rules engine to provide a powerful, flexible set of lead scoring, ranking and routing rules. Scoring, routing and other lead services are exposed as common services across the application so all leads are processed consistently, whether they were imported, entered by a user, or created through automated scripts, workflows or other events.

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Control of lead processing rules is delegated to individual organizations, so that each organization has local control over scoring rules, prioritizing and ranking, and routing logic across their particular sales channels. They can also control other policies such as time-based reassignment, so they can set their own time limits for how long a sales rep is allowed to hold or convert a lead before it is escalated or reassigned. Finally, marketing and sales operations can close the feedback loop by using lead import to update final lead status and outcomes, for example when receiving feedback from third-party call centers, resellers or separate CRM systems. Enhanced Lead Management Usability

With Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite, sales representatives and lead qualification agents benefit from a tailored lead management user interface that enables them to qualify and work leads more quickly and easily. The application provides tailored views for the lead qualification process, including built-in functions for quickly converting, retiring, and rejecting a lead. Data is auto-populated from the lead onto new opportunities, and all leads follow a consistent set of status and qualification values that are used to drive the lead conversion process. To increase feedback to marketing and sales operations, when a sales rep rejects a lead, the rep is prompted to provide feedback comments and justification, and can indicate whether the lead should be re-routed to a different owner.

Fig. 25 – Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite offers new tailored views and built-in functions for telesales and field sales representatives to easily qualify and work leads

Enhanced E-mail and Web Marketing

Siebel E-mail Marketing is a comprehensive permission-based and scalable e-mail marketing solution that is fully integrated with Siebel CRM and multi-channel campaign management. It enables marketers to plan, create, test, execute and track

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targeted, personalized e-mail communications. Siebel E-mail Marketing helps consumer and business marketers personalize communications to ensure that they are building trust through meaningful dialogue with customers, fully respecting customer preferences, applying e-mail best practices, and gaining real-time visibility into e-mail marketing performance. Enhanced E-mail Marketing Usability

Using the Siebel task-based user interface (UI), users can walk through a simple wizard-like flow to setup a new e-mail treatment, modify e-mail content, and test e-mail deliverability prior to building a full campaign. The application automatically parses HTML content and tags URLs for trackability. New e-mail testing features allow the user to easily send a test to a list of several e-mail accounts, and the user can test text-only, HTML-only, or full MIME delivery.

Fig. 26 – A new task-based user interface layout makes it easy to quickly design personalized e-mail messages.

Enhanced E-mail Server System Management

The Siebel E-mail Marketing Server has been enhanced in Siebel CRM to lower the cost of system support, increase fault tolerance, assist with failure recovery, avoid bottlenecks in the e-mail sending infrastructure, and ensure higher levels of e-mail deliverability. The Siebel E-mail Marketing Server now supports the ability to set threshold limits for e-mail throughput so the administrator can define the maximum sending rate as well as the overall rate through the E-mail Sending Daemon (ESD). The system can also be set up to automatically designate failover components in the event that

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the primary component goes offline. In addition, all integration points between Siebel E-mail Marketing Server components and the Siebel object manager have been migrated to standard Web services to ensure standards-based access and eliminate security concerns with proprietary protocols. To assist with installation and troubleshooting, the system includes system test diagnostics so the administrator can quickly confirm that all the connection points between components are successfully connected. Siebel Enterprise Marketing Server includes new job management features to assist marketing operations with job prioritization and job control. The new job monitoring console enables the e-mail administrator to view the status of all jobs across the system, and pause, resume, or cancel any jobs if desired. The Siebel Email Marketing Server also includes automatic job prioritization, so that higher priority mailings are delivered in the queue ahead of lower priority mailings. Web Landing Pages and Surveys

With proliferating product offerings, segments, and advertising messages, many organizations struggle to keep up with the volume of unique Web landing pages that they need to create and deploy for their targeted online campaigns. Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite introduces a new module to enable business users to rapidly design and launch targeted Web landing pages. Using an easy-tofollow task-based UI, a landing site creator can pull from a library of shared, reusable HTML templates, page headers, footers, style sheets, and other content, to rapidly assemble a new site while maintaining corporate branding and style guidelines. The application also provides a simple setup screen to quickly build Web forms and Web surveys. The end user can build a form or survey from a common question library, and quickly create new ad-hoc questions when needed. When a website visitor submits a form or a Web survey, the application automatically captures the survey responses, and ties the data back to the question library and campaign context. All Web responses automatically go through a quarantine and data quality check before populating the data in Siebel CRM, to ensure high data quality for new Web responses and leads. The response capture process leverages the same common services as offline response import, so that you have the option to run online and offline surveys and capture the data in a common response repository and question/answer history.

Enhanced Campaign and Dialogue Management

Siebel Campaign Management, an optional module of the Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite, enables marketing campaign managers to design and execute multistage, multi-channel, recurring, and event-triggered marketing programs. Using Siebel Campaign Management, marketing organizations are able to automate

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a series of communications and follow-up activities over time to ensure faster, higher quality execution of campaigns while delivering more timely and relevant communications that produce better results. Siebel Campaign Management includes a powerful segmentation and campaign targeting tool that helps organizations more effectively target relevant messages to the right person. It offers unique segmentation and list generation capabilities that enable any marketing user to define segmentation and suppression criteria against multiple data sources; get counts interactively; split segments into target cells; and save segments for reuse. It is designed to deliver high performance and scalability against the largest consumer marketing databases for a large numbers of users. Siebel Campaign Management provides an intuitive graphical drag-and-drop designer that makes it easy for a marketing campaign manager to design the elements of a program including stages, schedules, target audiences, lists, and test and control offers. For example, a marketing manager might automate multiple steps or stages for a trade show. The first stage could be used to send different invitations to different audiences targeted for the event. Subsequent stages can be based on a customer response, a lack of response, or any other trigger defined by the marketing manager. The second stage could be used to automatically send reminder notices to any person who has not registered for the event. Subsequent stages might be used to send thank-you messages or sorry-we-missed-you messages or to automate follow-up calls by the telesales organization. The entire program can be automated from the initial customer segmentation, through communication, to response collection and analysis. Siebel Campaign Management includes the following enhancements and new functionality: •

Enhanced Scheduled and Event-Triggered Communications enables marketing managers to more easily build one-to-one, event-triggered marketing programs that significantly improve the timing and relevancy of customer communications over traditional methods.

•

Enhanced Program and Campaign Design Usability improves marketing productivity and reduce the time to create marketing programs.

•

Enhanced Contact Governance improves the flexibility for defining, managing and enforcing contact communication and suppression rules.

•

New Inferred Response Support improves marketing measurement through the use of “inferred response” capture and analysis

•

New Automated Lead and Activity Creation accelerates qualified lead follow-up and activity assignment.

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Enhanced Scheduled and Event-Triggered Communications

Marketing organizations can transform the effectiveness of their marketing activities by improving the timing and relevancy of their communications and follow-up activities using event-triggered marketing, and by shifting from one-off campaigns to ongoing, automated dialogues that more effectively sense and respond to “moments of truth” with the customer. In so doing, organizations can more effectively deliver the right message to the right consumer at the right moment through the right channel. Siebel Campaign Management includes a set of enhancements that make it easier to set-up and execute real-time, event-triggered communications and automated one-to-one dialogues. First, the program flow designer includes new icons to easily add triggers to the communication plan. The trigger icon has been enhanced to enable the user to select one of two modes of triggering: either a realtime customer event or a recurring schedule. The new ‘Wait’ icon enables the user to easily indicate the lag time they want to enforce between two steps in the program flow. This enables the system to automatically ensure that each individual customer receives communications with these lag times based on when each customer’s triggering event occurs.

Fig. 27 – Enhanced program flow designer includes new icons

Siebel Campaign Management now includes an event trigger repository that tracks all of the events that the marketing organization is “listening” for. Since many customer events may not be captured within Siebel CRM, the event system has an open service interface so that event information can be transmitted from other technologies in the enterprise, such as Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), database triggers and stored procedures, or other third-party tools that can communicate using Web services. For events that occur within Siebel CRM, you can also define run-time events which can act as a trigger.

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When a customer event occurs, typically a marketer wants to apply some additional targeting logic to ensure that each customer meets all the required criteria and that the correct treatment/action is taken. Siebel Campaign Management includes enhanced segmentation to enable users to define these eligibility and targeting criteria in the same consistent user interface that is used for batch communications. This offers several advantages including easier user training, the ability to reuse existing segment definitions in both batch and triggered scenarios, and the ability to leverage all the existing customer metrics and attributes that are already defined in the common analytics and segmentation metadata. In some situations, the marketing organization may be monitoring a single event which has the option to trigger multiple dialogues. In this situation, you usually want to select the single best dialogue that will give the customer the best, most relevant experience. The application includes a prioritization workflow that monitors each trigger and applies logic to select which of the associated programs should be executed. For more advanced prioritization of dialogues, this workflow can be extended by adding calls to Siebel Business Rules or Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD). Enhanced Program and Campaign Design Usability

To simplify the creation of multi-stage programs, the program flow provides a new type of connector between flowchart icons called a ‘constrained connector’. This connector enables the user to easily indicate that all the customers targeted in a follow-up step of a program must be filtered only to customers that were touched in the previous step. This enhances usability for end users, since they are no longer required to manually include this filtering logic in their segment criteria, as these constraints are enforced automatically. For easier setup of test and control groups, the campaign allocation view has been enhanced to enable the user to quickly indicate the control group size for each segment. In addition, the enhanced allocation matrix allows users to more easily indicate the desired segment percentage or count for each cell, simplifying the structure of their segment trees. The allocation view also displays the expected cost of the campaign based on the costs of each treatment and the number of targeted customers and indicates how much budget is remaining. Finally, the allocation matrix has been enhanced to show all of the segments, segment trees and internal lists in a single view. Users can use the columns displayed and expand/collapse icons on the tree to expose or hide the desired amount of detail.

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Fig. 28 – The enhanced campaign allocation includes several usability enhancements

Finally, the program flow designer has been enhanced to enable the user to include calls to custom pre-processing and post-processing routines that may be required to fully automate the program. For example, you may want to execute some operations on the segmentation engine, such as running a data mining model or seeding cache, before executing a campaign process. Another example could be a post-processing workflow that runs during campaign launch to manipulate the export files and distribute files to external vendors. These types of custom processes and services can be included by the user directly in the program flow design process. Enhanced Contact Governance

A marketing organization wants to ensure that it does not communicate to its customers too frequently or violate the customer’s preferences, abusing the customer’s attention span. To avoid this situation, most companies establish a set of communication policies that apply to each channel, region, segment, product line and other contexts. To help simplify the management of these contact planning rules, the Siebel segmentation engine includes an enhanced framework to automate filtering rules based on the specific context of the marketing communication. For example, a marketing organization can set up a contact planning rule for each channel, product, region or organization, as well as other parameters. When a triggered dialogue or batch campaign is run, the system automatically applies the appropriate contact planning rules in combination based on the treatment channel, region, and other context to ensure all the appropriate suppressions are applied. The segment designer view also lets the user apply different context filters to simulate the rules’ effect on the audience size while the segment criteria is still being defined, so that

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they know exactly how many customers will qualify for the campaign. The marketer has the option to save each simulation as a saved request for comparison between scenarios. Note: Contact planning capabilities are delivered as enhancements to the Siebel segmentation engine, which leverages the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 10.1.3.4 platform. New Inferred Response Support

Responses to marketing activities are generally categorized as either explicit or inferred. Typically, an explicit response is where an action taken by a prospect (e.g. click on an email link, a returned reply card or a phone call to a telemarketing center) can be directly linked to a campaign or a promotion. However, not every response to a marketing initiative results in an explicit response being captured. A bank may run a promotion to encourage new account openings within a certain time period. If a person exhibited this behavior during this time period, but an explicit response was not captured, an inferred response can be created and associated to the promotion. This allows the marketing organization to more effectively and completely measure the return on marketing investment. Siebel Campaign Management includes new capabilities that allow a marketer to define inferred response criteria and automatically apply these criteria to capture inferred responses. The inferred responses can be used for both campaign performance measurement, and to trigger dialogue actions. For example, you may want to monitor customer activity that occurs outside the Siebel CRM application and automatically create ‘soft’ responses for customers that show the right pattern of behavior. An inferred response can also be a non-event by a customer, such as someone who registered for an event but did not show up. The solution enables the user to explicitly define response definitions and automatically create inferred responses as part of an automated marketing program. The response definitions leverage the Siebel segmentation engine, enabling you to define rich criteria from data and derive customer metrics from across your enterprise. The response definitions can be setup as explicit steps of the program flow, and the user can choose when the response definition should be evaluated by indicating the recurring or triggered schedule. The response step can be used with a preceding ‘Wait’ step to specify specific lag times between steps, such as waiting 30 days after a campaign to look for a change in customer behavior. The Wait step can also serve as a time-out detector for non-events. For example, you might want to monitor customers who did not display any of the desired behaviors within 10 days and log a negative response for them.

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New Automated Lead and Activity Creation

To ensure respondents to campaigns receive follow up on a timely basis, your organization may want to automate the process of creating leads for certain valuable respondents in the program. Siebel Marketing includes enhancements to enable marketing departments to automatically create leads and activities as part of the end-to-end program design. Similar to the response definitions mentioned above, the user can include a Lead icon in their program flow which can automatically create leads for certain segments of your respondents. For example, if a customer displays a series of responses, such as viewing an online demo, downloading a whitepaper and attending an event within 30 days, you might want to automatically create a lead and assign that to sales development for follow-up. Some organizations use activities as the primary way to assign work to their field organization. Siebel Marketing provides new options to define the follow-up activity details for each treatment in a campaign. For example, for the direct sales channel might want to automatically create activities for sales people to schedule an appointment with the customer. For any treatment in any channel, the marketer can indicate activity details such as activity type, due date, priority, and expected duration. Once the treatment details are defined, these activities are automatically created when the campaign is launched, and the activities are automatically linked to the customer, campaign, and treatment. Your organization can use Siebel assignment manager to assign the activities to specific sales users or other employees based on territory, skills and other criteria.

Fig. 29 – Marketing treatments allow the campaign manager to automatically create activities for the sales organization

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SIEBEL LOYALTY

Siebel Loyalty is a comprehensive loyalty program solution that allows organizations to increase the value and duration of its most important customer relationships, acquire rich customer insights, and improve the overall customer experience through dynamic, differentiated and cost-effective loyalty initiatives. Siebel Loyalty offers a unique customer-centric, multi-channel and multi-partner loyalty solution that supports the entire loyalty marketing lifecycle on a common open, standards-based platform and provides flexibility and agility far beyond traditional systems. Siebel Loyalty includes deep industry and loyalty best practices support for member enrollment and management, points accrual and redemption, personalized loyalty promotions and member communications, multi-channel customer care and cross-industry partner management. Unlike other solution providers, Siebel Loyalty is the only packaged solution that is fully integrated with the industry’s #1 rated CRM solution for a unified 360 view of the customer and support for end-to-end processes to drive improved business results. Accrual Management

Siebel Loyalty introduces a variety of new enhancements to accrual management to enable greater program innovation, enforce higher levels of data integrity with partners, and enable richer analysis of the impact of promotions and reward schemes in driving member behavior. Accrual Template

Loyalty programs often work with a partner network that spans a variety of industries, such as retail, hotel, airline, car rental and financial services. Partnership agreements often include unique stipulations to the partner for the completeness and validity of transaction data that the partner submits for processing member rewards. These stipulations can vary greatly from partner to partner based on the industry they belong to and the type of products and services they offer. For example, an airline transaction may require data about operating flight number, date of departure and booking class, while a hotel transaction may require data about room type, rate type, payment, dates of check-in and check-out and property details. As a result, it can be challenging to ensure that the incoming transactions from individual partners are valid and include the required data attributes to process the member rewards successfully. Accrual templates allow loyalty programs to setup automated, configurable data validation rules for each partner and product combination. Templates automatically check for common data integrity issues such as completeness of data, and duplicate transactions to help reduce occurrences of missing and incorrect member accruals. As a result, the organization will spend less time resolving customer issues leading to enhanced customer satisfaction.

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Validation for Adequacy of Data

Accrual templates allow loyalty programs to define what data elements are required in the transactions submitted by a given partner for a given activity to ensure that member rewards are calculated accurately. For example, an airline program may offer 50% of the miles flown as bonus points for flights booked in “full fare economy” with all premier alliance partners and an additional 500 points for booking online. To be able to reward members against these promotions, the transactions submitted by the premier alliance partners must contain information regarding the booking class as well as the booking channel. Another example could be of a retailer, who rewards 500 bonus points for customers shopping between 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., in addition to rewarding members 1 point per dollar spent. This requires the retailer to submit the time of transaction as well as the amount spent by the member while reporting member activity to the loyalty program for processing rewards. Validation for Duplicate Transactions

Transactions submitted by partners need to be “de-duped” to avoid rewarding members more than once for the same activity. Because the information used for identifying duplicate transaction varies from partner to partner based on the nature of member activity, accrual templates in Siebel Loyalty enable loyalty program managers to define a configurable definition of what is considered a duplicate transaction for each partner and type of activity. For example, for a flight activity, a duplicate transaction may be identified based on membership number, date of departure and flight number, while in the case of a hotel stay, duplicate transaction may be determined based on membership number, bill number, check-in/check-out dates and property code.

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Fig. 30 – Accrual templates enforce configurable transaction validations to significantly reduce the time to launch new partnerships, streamline partner communications, and reduce the occurrences of missing or incorrect accruals. Flexible Accrual Rewards (8.1.1)

Siebel Loyalty now supports flexible accrual rewards that enable organizations to differentiate their program more effectively and take their program to the next level of customer centricity. Flexible accrual rewards allow organizations to set-up multiple reward choices for the same promotion. With flexible accrual rewards, customers get to decide which reward best meet their needs and organizations can more effectively drive desired behavior across different customer segments. For example, a retail loyalty program comprising household, individual and corporate members could run a promotion to maximize revenue and profitability as follows: Shop for $5000 or more in calendar year 2008 with average order value of $50 per visit and win a reward of your choice from the following: Option 1: 4 Tickets to Disneyland Option 2: 10,000 Retail Points + 2,000 Swift Air miles Option 3: 5% Discount on all purchases in the year 2009 Option 4: ‘2-Minutes Guaranteed Checkout' entitlement for the year 2009 Flexible accrual rewards enable leading organizations to run customer-centric loyalty programs, aligned to the interests, attitudes, opinions, and way of life of the best customers of their business

This feature enables users to set up multiple incentive choices for each accrual promotion. For a given promotion, each targeted member can choose an incentive based on what he or she perceives to be of the highest value. When a member qualifies for the promotion, the Siebel Loyalty engine triggers an incentive inline with the member’s choice.

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Flexible Accrual Rewards

Figure 31: Flexible accrual rewards allows users to define multiple incentive choiceds for each promotion. Employee-Corporate Joint Rewards

With Siebel Loyalty, loyalty programs can reward both the corporate client and the employee for an eligible business activity undertaken by the employee. The joint reward feature enables loyalty programs to reward based on the following choices:


The employee (enrolled as an ‘Individual’ type member); or




The organization to which the employee belongs (enrolled as an ‘Account’ type member); or




Both employee and the organization.

The joint reward schemes are typically based on the specific agreements between the loyalty program and individual corporate clients. The point type used to reward the employee and the organization can be the same or different. For example, an airline may reward a traveling employee 1 point per kilometer flown and 1,000 business points to his employer for the same activity.

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Individual Member

Reward 1000 Base miles 100 Tier Bonus 25 Status credits

Employment

Flight with King Air

500 BizCredits

Corporate Member Fig. 32 – Employee-Corporate joint rewards enable innovative and tailor-made reward schemes to target corporate customers – one of the most profitable segments in the airline, hotel, communications and car rental industries.

Micro-Tracking of Program Currencies (8.1.1)

Micro-tracking of program currencies allows loyalty programs to track and report member point transactions at a more granular level to allow more meaningful analyses of their earning pattern and the impact of individual reward schemes or promotions in driving member behavior. Users can now define one or more sub-categories referred to as 'point sub-types' for each point type so that each accrual and redemption transaction is linked to a point sub-type in addition to a point type. For example, an airline loyalty program may have the following point sub-types: joint promotion incentive, class of service bonus, recognition bonus, festival incentive, weekend bonus, fare bonus, and service recovery incentives. Point sub-type feature enables Loyalty programs to more effectively analyze member behavior and promotion effectiveness.

Points Sub-types

Fig. 33 – Program definition is enhanced to include user-defined point sub-type setup

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Point sub-types also enable differential partner billing rates for the same point type. For example, a loyalty program can apply different billing rates for a partner for promotional points versus regular points. Siebel Loyalty will allow users to setup billing rates for partners at the point sub-type level rather than at the point type level. Point sub-type feature enables flexibility required to implement differential partner billing rates for points based on the earning basis (e.g. Base Miles versus Bonus Miles)

For example, an airline loyalty program may charge its air partner 1 cent per mile earned as a class of service bonus and 0.5 cents per mile earned as an incentive for flying on the weekend. The point sub-type feature provides loyalty programs the much-needed flexibility to apply differential billing rates for the same point type.

Linking Point Subtypes to an accrual action

Fig. 34 – Point sub-types are associated with Accrual action so that the resultant accrual item is linked to point sub-type for future tracking and analysis Point Effectivity

Siebel Loyalty includes enhanced point effectivity to enable loyalty programs to restrict members from redeeming points earned for a given activity until a specified period of time. This is achieved by assigning effective dates to member accruals with certain partners and maintaining an “effective” points balance separate from the “available” balance. This is particularly useful for points accrued on retail transactions, where the goods purchased can be returned. For example, if a retailer allows goods purchased to be returned within 30 days of purchase, the accrual effectivity can be set to 30 days after the purchase for that retail partner. Loyalty Partner Management

Many loyalty programs seek to increase the benefits and rewards available to members by building a network of partners through which members can accrue benefits and redeem awards. However, setting up and managing the financial aspects of loyalty partner networks can be complex and challenging. Siebel Loyalty introduces a variety of enhancements to simplify billing processes and automate common partner transactions including:


Flexible billing rate setup




Simplified billing through the ability to use a single point type to debit partners even when member accruals span multiple point types.




Configurable cost sharing among partners participating in joint promotions.

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Partner billing controls to enable loyalty programs to systematically track partner balances and initiate the sale of points/partner billing at pre-defined triggers based on the partnership agreement.




Enhanced Partner Billing (8.1.1)

Siebel Loyalty includes enhancements that enable loyalty programs to setup billing rates for each partner inline with their partnership agreement and billing arrangement (i.e. “pre-paid” or “post-paid”). An accrual process in a loyalty program that involves partners typically includes three basic steps: 1.

A loyalty program member undertakes a business activity (say purchase of a product or a service) with a loyalty program partner. The partner notifies the loyalty program or submits the transaction for processing.

2.

The loyalty program rewards the member (typically in points) for the business activity based on accrual rules and applicable promotions.

3.

The loyalty program bills the partner at the negotiated rate as per the partnership agreement.

For example, a member of a loyalty program spends $250 on renting a car with a program partner. The loyalty program rewards the member 250 points @ 1 point per $ spent with the partner and bills the partner at the negotiated billing rate as per the partnership agreement.

Fig. 35 – ‘Loyalty program-Member-Partner’ relationship

A partner is either ‘Pre-paid’ or ‘Post-paid’ (‘pay as you go’) based on the billing agreement between loyalty program and the partner. Pre-paid partners purchase points in advance and maintain certain point balance with the loyalty program throughout their active partnership tenure. Every time a member accrues points for an eligible business activity with a pre-paid partner, its point balance gets debited by a quantity determined by partner debit rules. The loyalty program typically bills pre-paid partners in advance.

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Post-paid partners don’t need to purchase program currency in advance or maintain any point balance with the loyalty program. The loyalty program bills post-paid partners after its members accrue points for eligible business transaction with them, at a frequency mutually agreed between loyalty program and the partners. Billing Rate Setup For Post-paid Partners (8.1.1)

Siebel Loyalty now enables loyalty programs to setup billing rates for post-paid partners to facilitate calculation of partner receivables for a given billing period. Users can setup billing rates for each partner at the “point sub-type” level. Billing rates have date effectivity that allows users to maintain multiple rates for the same point type and sub-type combination for non-overlapping time periods. This feature also allows loyalty programs to determine the proportion of points accrued to be billed to the partner, based on the partnership agreement. It is accomplished by setting up appropriate ‘Billing percentage’. Partner managers can prepare a summary of total points accrued by point sub-type for post-paid partners and use corresponding partner billing rates and billing percentage to calculate the total receivable amount for a given billing period. Partner billing feature enables loyalty programs to implement flexible pricing rules and facilitates streamlined partner billing process, leading to enhanced operational efficiencies and superior partnership management, which is critical in large multi-partner and coalition loyalty programs

Fig. 36 – Partner setup is enhanced to include Billing Rates setup for post-paid partners Pricing Rule Setup for Pre-Paid Partners

Siebel Loyalty now allows loyalty programs to setup multiple pricing rules for prepaid partners. Each pricing rule can have a price range to define a unique billing rate per point based on the quantity of purchase. For example, a billing rate of 20 cents per point applies up to 20,000 points, a billing rate of 18 cents per point applies between 20,001 to 40,000 points and so on.

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Multiple pricing rules for Pre-paid partners

Billing rates setup by quantity

Fig. 37 – Loyalty program setup is enhanced to define Billing rates for pre-paid partners

A pricing rule is associated to each pre-paid partner to determine billing rate and total order value for each points purchase transaction, either done manually or through auto-replenishment.

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Fig. 38 – Partner setup is enhanced to include billing type, minimum order quantity and pricing rule association to drive billing for pre-paid partners. Partner Billing Controls

Partner billing controls enable loyalty programs recruiting multiple partners to automate partner billing process in line with the individual partnership agreements.

To maximize a loyalty program’s profitability, it is important that a program maintains systematic financial controls with each partner. Siebel Loyalty provides new partner billing controls allowing program owners to implement the billingspecific policies based on the partnership agreements. This feature allows users to set-up the following policies for each partner: Re-order Level

When the point balance of a given partner falls below the re-order level, Siebel Loyalty can initiate sale of points and billing to the partner. For example, if the re-order level for a partner is 750,000 points, the loyalty administrator can set automated alerts to trigger notification to the partner relationship manager as soon as the partner’s point balance falls below the re-order level. The reorder level can also be set as a negative number in case a given partner is allowed to overdraw. Credit Limit

When the point balance of a given partner falls below the credit limit, member accruals for the activities done with that partner can be rejected or put on hold. This provides time to investigate and resolve any billing issues before the transactions are processed. Auto-replenishment of Points for Pre-Paid Partners (8.1.1)

Siebel Loyalty now allows loyalty programs to automatically replenish the point balance for pre-paid partners once their point balance falls below the re-order level. This feature uses a workflow to drive the automated point replenishment process and determines:

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a.

The timing of auto-replenishment based on the ‘reorder limit’ defined for the partner

b. The quantity of replenishment based on the ‘minimum order quantity’ set for the partner c.

The billing rate based on the ‘pricing rule’ associated with the partner.

Users can trigger replenishment in real-time or through a scheduled batch process. Tracking Point Purchase Transactions for Pre-paid Partners (8.1.1)

Siebel Loyalty enables users to systematically track each point purchase transaction – manual or triggered through the auto-replenishment process. Loyalty programs can use this information as a basis to generate receivable invoices in their financial systems. Unified Partner Point Type

Siebel Loyalty enables simplified partner billing processes by allowing loyalty programs to use a single point type for partner transactions. Loyalty programs often use multiple point types to reward members for eligible activities such as bonus miles, recognition miles, and regular miles. However, to manage simplified settlements with partners, Siebel Loyalty allows debiting partners in a single (unified) point type. This eliminates the cumbersome task of selling multiple types of points to each partner and tracking their balances by multiple point types. To debit partners in a single point type for member accruals in multiple point types, conversion rates are defined between point types, which are used to reward members and the partner point type.

Fig. 39 – Unified partner point type simplifies partner billing and reduces the complexity of selling multiple point types to each partner.

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Multi-Partner Debit

Multi-partner debit feature enables automatic distribution of the cost of joint promotions among partners, saving the Loyalty program the rigor and complexity of doing this task

New multi-partner debit capabilities enable loyalty programs to easily apportion the cost of joint or packaged promotions with one or more partners. With the new capabilities in Siebel Loyalty, loyalty program owners can define the precise apportioning of accrual costs across the participating partners to ensure that partner agreements are honored for the promotion.

manually, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and accuracy.

For example, a loyalty program launches a packaged promotion, where a member is rewarded 10,000 bonus miles, if she flies with Vision Air, stays at Dream Valley Resorts for minimum of two nights and rents a car from CATZ rentals during Christmas. The cost of the 10,000 bonus points needs to distributed according to the program agreement. The cost may be distributed as Vision Air (40 percent), Dream Valley Resorts (30 percent), CATZ rentals (15 percent), and the host of the loyalty program (15 percent). In Siebel Loyalty, this can be easily achieved through a joint promotion set-up feature. Partner Statements

Siebel Loyalty supports partner statements on a periodic or ad-hoc basis. The statement contains details like batch number, date, number of accrual records in a batch, points accrued to the members and a partner’s opening point balance. This allows systematic communication of transactions, member accruals, partner debits and point balances to partners periodically or on demand. The statement can be delivered to partners using Oracle BI Publisher, Siebel Email Marketing, or any other third party fulfillment tool. Redemption Management

Siebel Loyalty provides new redemption capabilities to enable delivery of superior customer experience through variable redemption pricing. It also supports a wider variety of payment options and redemption pricing capabilities. Redemption Pricing Enhancements

Siebel Loyalty introduces several redemption enhancements including: •

redemption pricing based on distance

•

support for multiple redemption price options

•

dynamic redemption pricing

•

automated point loan

•

bid-driven redemption pricing.

Redemption Pricing Based on Distance

This feature enables airline loyalty programs to set up base prices for air redemption based on pre-specified distance ranges. The price for a given award flight can then be determined based on the distance range it falls in. For example,

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an airline can define redemption prices for distance ranges 0 – 2,000 miles, 2,0014,000 miles, 4,001- 6,000 miles, and above 6,000 miles. When an award flight falls in the distance range ‘0-2,000 miles’ the price set-up for this range will serve as a base redemption price.

Fig. 40 – Example of distance-based multi-currency redemption pricing Multiple Redemption Price Options

Siebel Loyalty enables loyalty programs to offer multiple base price options to members for an award by allowing: 1.

Redemption prices in multiple point types; and

2.

Multiple pre-defined ‘Points + Cash’ price options

All the payment options are made available across all channels used to offer redemption. For example, an economy class, one-way award flight within a distance range 0-2,000 miles can be redeemed using any of the following five base price options: Option

Mode

Point Type

Points

Currency

Amount

1.

Points

Miles

25,000

-

-

2.

Points + Pay

Miles

15,000

USD

100

3.

Points + Pay

Miles

12,000

GBP

80

4.

Points

Points

40,000

-

-

5.

Points + Pay

Points

20,000

USD

120

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Dynamic Redemption Pricing Dynamic or variable redemption pricing allows loyalty programs to effectively drive desired member behavior and differentiate members by offering superior price benefits to targeted members.

Siebel Loyalty allows loyalty programs to dynamically ascertain the price of a given award based on the member as well as transaction attributes such as member status, membership tenure, nationality, date of transaction, transaction channel, origin, and destination. Dynamic redemption pricing enables loyalty programs to define one or more modifications to the base price for an award. For example, a Loyalty program can offer 20 percent off on the redemption price for platinum members flying between LAX and JFK on all the OneGlobe alliance carriers and 10 percent off for booking the award flight online. Automated Point Loan

Automated point loans enable seamless integration between the redemption and loan process, thereby enhancing process efficiency. Setting-up loan limits based on member tier will enable Loyalty programs to ensure that members in higher tiers receive differentiated benefits.

Siebel Loyalty supports the option to loan points temporarily to enable their most valuable customers to redeem an award and enhance their experience. Siebel Loyalty has streamlined the process to automatically loan points to members to cover for the shortfall of points required to redeem a given award. The size of the loan issued to the member is driven by limits set up at the member’s tier level so that members in different tiers may enjoy different privileges. For example, a Loyalty program can allow members in a platinum tier to overdraw up to 20,000 miles or 20 percent of the award value, whichever is higher, and those in a gold tier to overdraw up to 10,000 miles or 10 percent of the award value. Also, the automated point loan feature initiates the issue of a loan automatically as a part of the redemption transaction, thereby eliminating the need to issue loan manually as a separate transaction. Bid-Driven Redemption Pricing

Bid-driven redemption pricing enables Loyalty programs to implement innovative, member driven redemption pricing.

Siebel Loyalty supports bid-based redemptions, where members can bid for an award online by quoting the price that they would like to pay for the award. After the stipulated time given for bidding, the award is given away to the highest bidder. As a result, the loyalty program can better optimize the precise redemption price that members are willing to pay to maximize the usage of outstanding points and minimize liability. Web Services for Redemption Processing

Siebel Loyalty provides an expanded set of Web services to support delivery of redemption capabilities via third party applications and custom interfaces like airline portals and point-of-sale (POS) systems. This capability is an imperative for air-redemptions, where the redemption process involves interaction with the airline systems (GDS/RES) for checking seat availability/bookings; pricing the award flight; performing credit check on a member’s points balance; debiting member’s points balance; issuing award certificate/voucher; creating redemption transaction log for future tracking; and processing partner payments.

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Redemption Request

GDS or 3rd Party Interface

Inventory systems

Web Services

Loyalty

Quote Award Price Check credit & Debit Points Process Payment Issue Voucher Create Transaction Log

Voucher

Fig. 41 – Redemption Web services allow loyalty programs to offer redemption services via third party interfaces with very low integration effort and cost of deployment. Voucher-based Redemption Model The voucher-based redemption Model enables Loyalty programs to track and manage the complete redemption lifecycle.

Siebel Loyalty provides out-of-the-box support for tracking the member redemption lifecycle using a voucher (also referred to as an award certificate) issued at the end of redemption process. The award certificate carries an expiration date and status to track the redemption lifecycle. For example, an award certificate will be in “Available” status when issued at the end of redemption process, and then it will move to “Used” status when the member claims the award. Finally, the voucher status changes to “Expired” if the redemption award is not claimed by the member within the specified timeframe (after the expiration date of the voucher). In the case of air travel redemption, the award certificate is typically associated with the award ticket as a form of payment in the reservation system. For other types of redemptions such as hotel stays and car rental, the award certificate may be sent to the member so that the member can present it at the time of claiming the award (e.g. checking into the hotel). The award certificate is validated for its status (to ensure that it is not already used or expired) and authenticity (to ensure that it truly belongs to the member who is claiming the award). This feature also includes a Web service allowing partners to carry out the validation and debit the voucher by changing its status to “Used” upon successful validation.

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Promotion Management

Siebel Loyalty provides several enhancements to loyalty promotion aimed at enabling organizations to deploy highly innovative promotions to drive real-time rewards and recognition, and differentiated redemption and service pricing. Some of the key enhancements include: configurable based point calculation capabilities; expanded promotion criteria and action types; highly scalable real-time loyalty engine; a de-centralized loyalty engine (ISLE) to support real-time member rewards in a distributed environment; and advanced integration of loyalty promotions with outbound marketing initiatives. Configurable Base Point Calculation Enhancements to the loyalty promotions framework further improve Loyalty program’s ability to implement innovative

Accrual promotions have been enhanced to enable new methods of calculating base points based on any one of the following:


Transaction attributes. This approach is useful when base points are required to be calculated dynamically based on the specific characteristics of the member activity. Examples include: distance flown, amount spent in case of retail transactions or number of nights stay in a hotel.




Product-points set-up. This approach is useful for member activities that carry a fixed number of points as a lump-sum reward. For example, 5,000 points on the purchase of a digital camera.




Custom logic. This approach requires a custom business service for calculating base points and returning the value. The custom business service may use data outside Siebel Loyalty to calculate base points. For example, a telecommunications loyalty program could calculate base points based on the following criteria: 1 point per dollar billed on local calls, plus 2 points per dollar billed on long-distance calls, plus 4 points per dollar billed on value-added services like ringtones and text messages.

reward and recognition schemes.

The base points calculated using one of the three approaches above can then be used as a basis for rewarding bonuses and incentives. This is achieved by making the base points available for all the promotions. For example, a telecommunication Loyalty program could reward 25 percent of base points as a bonus to members in the Gold tier. Vouchers as an Accrual Reward

Siebel Loyalty can issue a voucher as an accrual reward for a given member activity or for certain transactional behavior. For example, two 500-miles domestic upgrade vouchers for flying business class three times in a specified duration. Partner and Product Attributes as Promotion Criteria

The promotions rule framework has been extended in Siebel Loyalty to allow rules to include promotion criteria based on partner and product attributes, in addition to member, transaction, and promotion attributes supported in previous releases.

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For example, a loyalty program could reward 500 bonus points to members for buying a product belonging to a particular sporting goods product line with a retail partner based out of Canada. Range-Based Points Calculation

The range-based points capability in Siebel Loyalty supports calculation of rewards based on a range. For example:

External target list integration with loyalty promotions enables Loyalty programs to leverage Oracle’s sophisticated analytics platform and external lists to effectively target members for rewards and recognition.




For the first 1,000 miles, member earns 1 point per mile flown.




For the next 2,000 miles, member earns 2 points per mile flown.




For 2,000 miles flown, a member would earn 3,000 points as per the rule above.

External Target List Integration with Loyalty Promotion

Siebel Loyalty further enhances integration with Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite to enable loyalty programs to leverage sophisticated segmentation capabilities to implement highly targeted loyalty promotions. Siebel Loyalty allows loyalty programs to run promotions targeted to a specific group of members selected outside the Siebel Loyalty module, including using a marketing segment or an imported list. Since the same segment or list can also be linked to a marketing campaign to communicate the targeted members about the promotion, marketers can easily measure the end-to-end performance of the loyalty promotion. Loyalty Real Time Processing with Interactive Components

Real-time processing enables implementation of next generation ‘realtime Loyalty programs’ and delivery of a superior membership experience.

The Siebel Loyalty real time engine has been enhanced to permit processing member transactions on significantly large transaction volumes, for example, those typically seen in mid-to large-sized retailers and airlines. The enhanced Siebel Loyalty real-time transaction processing capabilities enable retail organizations to calculate rewards and communicate additional loyalty information to the members at the point-of-sale itself (for example by printing loyalty points on a transaction receipt). Enhancements to Siebel Loyalty real-time processing is achieved through dynamic load balancing implemented using the server request broker (SRB) architecture. Loyalty deployments can now benefit from enhancements such as explicit deployment of the transaction processing Web service in the Loyalty object manager, the ability to deploy multiple interactive components per server, and use of the SRB architecture to facilitate intelligent routing of the real-time transaction requests for dynamic load balancing. The SRB architecture also enables horizontal scalability required to support high volume real-time transaction processing. In-Store Loyalty Engine (Decentralized Promotion Deployment)

Siebel Loyalty provides a new decentralized capability to enable loyalty programs to deploy loyalty promotions in a de-centralized environment to calculate member

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rewards in real-time at the point of sale. The decentralized deployment uses a promotion export utility, which extracts the selected promotions definition set-up in the Siebel Loyalty system, in the form of an XML file (Rule metadata) and Java based de-centralized loyalty engine, which facilitates interaction between the POS system and the rule metadata XML.

Reward points or Vouchers info on Transaction receipt

Promotion exported in XML format deployed in-store

Point of sale

Central Loyalty System

Transaction

Reward Points

Processed Transactions Stored in XML files

Fig. 42 – The In-Store Loyalty Engine enables Loyalty programs to reward members in real-time at the Point-of-sale and handle large transaction volumes without the need to invest into high-speed network connectivity, significantly reducing the cost of deployment.

Tier Management Tier Assessment Models

Loyalty programs follow a variety of tier assessment models based on the kind of member behavior they wish to encourage. Siebel Loyalty introduces three new tier assessment models to support tier assessment practices followed by leading loyalty programs. With this enhancement, a loyalty program can have multiple tier classes, each following a different tier assessment model. Rolling period, fixed date and Anniversary based tier assessment models enable Loyalty programs to implement tier assessment practices followed across industries to foster loyalty through recognition of desired customer behavior.

‘Rolling Period’ Based Tier Assessment

Tier assessment based on a ‘rolling period’ typically takes into account the ‘recency and frequency’ aspect of member activities. A member’s tier is determined based on the activities completed/qualifying points earned by the member in the last ‘x’ number of days. For example, a member attains ‘Silver’ tier in a loyalty program, if they have earned 25,000 qualifying points in the last nine months. ‘Anniversary’-Based Tier Assessment

In the ‘anniversary based’ tier assessment, once a member attains a higher tier, they are guaranteed a minimum duration in that tier before being eligible for a

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downgrade. The tier end date snaps to their program joining date, which falls after the minimum guaranteed tier duration. On or after the tier end date, the member is assessed again to check if they can retain their existing tier. For example, a customer joins a loyalty program on January 20, 2007. She is assigned the “Bronze” tier (base tier). On September 19, 2007, she attains the ‘Silver’ tier after accumulating enough points to qualify for upgrade. The loyalty program allows members to be in the ‘Silver’ tier at least for one year and snaps the tier end date to the member’s anniversary date, in this case January 20, 2009. On or after January 20, 2009, the member is assessed again to check if she has earned enough points to continue to stay in ‘Silver’ or be downgraded back to ‘Bronze’. ‘Fixed-date’ Based Tier Assessment

Tier assessment based on ‘fixed-date’ takes into account the activities done by the member or qualifying points earned by the member in a pre-specified duration, typically a calendar year. The tier duration for all the members in a Loyalty program is the same, for example March 1 to February 28 of the following year. For example, a Loyalty program assigns a tier to its members in the beginning of the year, based on the qualifying points earned by them in the previous calendar year. The tier assigned to the members is valid for one year starting from March 1 to February 28 of the following year. Tier Change Approvals

Siebel Loyalty has been enhanced to allow programs to selectively prevent certain members from downgrading to lower tiers until a review and approval occurs. This enables the loyalty manager to review the list of members who are identified for tier downgrade by the normal tier assessment rules and reject the tier downgrade of the members who may be strategically important for the loyalty program, For example, a Loyalty program may want to be sure that the travel manager for a major corporate customer never downgrades below ‘Gold’ tier.

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Fig. 43 –Tier change approvals enable a Loyalty program to ensure that members of strategic importance retain high recognition levels, regardless of their level of activity in the Loyalty program. Automated Tier Upgrades for Relationship

Siebel Loyalty allows programs to recognize members attaining high tier levels by automatically upgrading members who are related to them. For example, a program could automatically upgrade a member’s spouse to ‘Gold’ tier when the member achieves ‘Platinum’ tier. Member Services

Siebel Loyalty offers an extended set of pre-built member service processes and capabilities across the member lifecycle to accelerate Loyalty program deployment, improve customer service levels and member services representative productivity, and reduce total cost of ownership. Pre-configured Member Services for Task-Based UI Pre-configured member services enable Loyalty programs to deploy commonly offered Member services with minimal implementation efforts. Task based UIs significantly enhance member service representative productivity and bring about consistency in service delivery.

Siebel Loyalty includes a set of pre-configured member services and standard fulfillment procedures tightly integrated with Siebel Contact Center for consistent service delivery. Each service is built using the Siebel task-based UI framework introduced in Siebel 8.0, which encompasses a sequence of pre-defined, guided tasks for the member service representative to perform. Each service can include a fee or price in multiple currencies so Loyalty programs can charge members for premium services. Retro-Claim

This service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s retroactive-claim (usually a missing or incorrect accrual), process the retro-claim, and credit the member with the missing or correct accrual. When a partner validation is required, the retro-claim is queued-

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up for approval by the corresponding partner. Once the partner approves the retro-claim, the retro-claim is processed and the member is credited with the missing or correct accrual. Non-Air Redemption

This service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request for redemption of a non-air award, obtain price options, debit the member’s point balance, process payment, issue a redemption certificate and create a redemption log. Redemption Cancellation

This service allows a member service representative to capture a member’s request for cancellation of a redemption; calculate a refund; process the request by re-crediting the points to the member; processing the refund in cash; and changing the status of redemption transaction to ‘cancelled’. Redemption Certificate Re-issue

This service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request for re-issue of a redemption certificate, obtain fee options, process payment, create and issue a new redemption certificate, and change the status of the original certificate to ‘void’. Points Purchase

The points purchase service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request for purchase of points; check the member’s eligibility for purchase based on the points purchase set-up (which defines limits for number of points that can be purchased per transaction and in a given time period based on member’s tier); obtain fee options; process payment; and credit the member with the points purchased. Points Transfer

This service allows a member service representative to capture a member’s request for transfer of points to another member; check the member’s eligibility for transfer based on the points transfer set-up (which defines limits for number of points that can be transferred per transaction and in a given time period based on member’s tier); obtain fee options; process payment; credit the transferee; and debit the transferor with the points transferred.

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Fig. 44 – Point transfer setup in Siebel Loyalty Enrollment

The enrollment service guides a member service representative to capture a customer’s request to enroll into a Loyalty program; obtain fee options; process payment; and create a membership in the appropriate status. Lounge Purchase

This service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request for purchase of lounge membership; obtain fee options; process payment; and create a lounge membership. Membership Renewal

The membership renewal service guides a member service representative to capture a member’s request for renewal of membership; obtain fee options; process payment; renew the membership by changing the status of the membership to ‘Active;’ and setting the new membership expiry date. Membership Cancellation

Membership cancellation service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request for cancellation of membership; select the refund basis (pro-rata or percentage); calculate and process the refund; and change the status of the membership to ‘Cancelled’. Points Re-activation (8.1.1)

This pre-configured member service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request for re-activation of specified quantity of expired points, validates the request, calculates re-activation fee, processes payment and re-activates points by creating a new accrual item. Points Gift (8.1.1)

This pre-configured member service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request to gift specified quantity of points to another member, calculates fee for points gift, and processes payment and gift transaction.

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Promotion Enrollment (8.1.1)

This pre-configured member service enables a member service representative to capture a member’s request to enroll in a specified promotion, calculates fee for promotion enrollment if applicable, processes payment and enrolls member in the promotion.

Fig. 45 – Promotion Enrollment service displays all the active promotion requiring enrollment and incentive choices for each promotion for member’s selection. Dynamic Pricing for Member Services

Member services in Siebel Loyalty now support charging fees to members for rendering a service. The fee can be paid in cash and/or points, and is calculated dynamically using the Siebel Loyalty promotions framework. The fee can vary based on a variety of member and transaction attributes. For example, the points transfer service might be free to ‘Platinum’ members but might carry a $20 fee for all other members. Web Services for Member Services

Siebel Loyalty provides an expanded set of Web services to support delivery of member services capabilities via third party applications and custom interfaces like airline portals, point-of-sale (POS) systems. These include: •

Accrual Simulation

•

Accrual Processing

•

Member Enrollment

•

Redemption

•

Voucher Validation

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•

All member services

Loyalty services

Call Center Loyalty

Loyalty services

3rd Party Interface

Web Services

Fig. 46 – Member services provide both pre-built contact center processes for Siebel Applications as well as web service enablement for 3rd party applications.

Member Management Membership Schemes

With Siebel Loyalty, Loyalty programs can offer multiple membership schemes, each with different membership durations and fees, and can be targeted to different member types (individual, corporate and households). A member chooses a particular membership scheme when they enroll in the loyalty program. The enrollment process calculates the membership expiration date based on the membership duration for the membership scheme opted by the member. Membership does not expire if the member enrolls into the membership scheme with a ‘lifetime’ duration. Siebel Loyalty also allows an ‘individual’ membership to be linked to their employer’s membership. This set-up rewards the corporate member and the employee jointly for the eligible activities undertaken by the employee. A member can also have an option to align their membership duration with that of the corporate membership they are linked to by choosing the membership scheme with ‘corporate aligned’ as the membership duration.

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P1

Annual 3-Year 5-Year Lifetime Corp-aligned Membership Duration

P2 P3 Membership Fee

Enrolment Pricing Rules

Variable Pricing

Member Type Membership scheme Fig. 47 – Siebel Loyalty enables Loyalty programs to offer innovative membership schemes with variable durations and to charge customers/prospects for membership. Dynamic Membership Pricing Dynamic pricing for membership enhances Loyalty program’s ability to effectively acquire targeted customers/prospects for Loyalty program membership.

Dynamic membership pricing enables Loyalty programs to charge variable fees for different members. For example, a retail Loyalty program can offer a 20 percent discount on the membership fee for senior citizens or customers with three or more children. Member Data Model

The member data model has been enhanced for capturing critical information about members, with an emphasis on common information used by airline loyalty programs. This information is valuable to derive deeper insight on member preferences and behavior, and to enhance segmentation for better targeting. The member data model enhancements enable capturing of information such as:


Most frequently traveled destinations and most favorite travel destinations for individual members. This enables airlines to effectively target members for selling distressed inventory, promoting certain routes, and so on.




Annual travel budget for corporate members. This information helps airlines understand the potential value of a corporate member to their business and devise strategies to enhance the affinity/loyalty of the corporate members.

Pre-Created Memberships

Loyalty programs can acquire new members at the point of sale by offering the customers/prospects pre-created (unassigned) memberships and allowing them to start earning rewards instantly.

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Members can submit the completed application form at a later point of time and the corresponding member data is updated through batch processing. Batch Enrollment Process Batch enrollment enables Loyalty programs to avoid manually entering thousands of enrolment applications received from several channels/sources, improving productivity and data quality.

Loyalty programs typically offer customers multiple ways to apply for membership. Some of the popular methods include hand-filled paper applications, partners and travel agents. The applications received through these offline channels are very large in number and require entry through an automated batch process. The Siebel Loyalty batch enrollment process performs the following functions for each application:


Computes fee for membership.




Processes payment towards the membership fee (using the credit card information supplied in the application).




Creates a membership in the appropriate status and assigns membership expiration based on the membership scheme opted by the member.

The batch process can run in two modes: ‘Create’ mode for new enrollments and ‘Update’ mode for pre-created memberships. Membership Status User-defined membership status enables Loyalty programs to effectively track and influence member behavior and manage the overall membership lifecycle.

This feature allows Siebel Loyalty program owners to set-up user-defined membership statuses, which can be assigned to the members based on their level of activity and behavior. A member’s eligibility to accrue or redeem points can be controlled based on the status of his membership. For example, a Loyalty program can put all the members with payment towards the membership fee pending in ‘Payment pending’ status and allow members in that status to accrue but not redeem. Similarly, members with no activity in the last 18 months can be assigned ‘Dormant’ status. The Loyalty program can then launch a promotional campaign targeting members in ‘Dormant’ status to encourage them to start transacting with program partners. Bulk Member Administration

Bulk member administration allows Siebel Loyalty program owners to carry out administrative transactions on a group of members for various purposes such as service recovery. For example, 5,000 miles are rewarded to all the members in ‘Executive Platinum’ tier who flew flight KX203 on October 24, 2007, as a compensation for a severe flight delay due to mechanical issues. The bulk member administration supports tier change, point adjustments and membership status change actions.

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A marketing segment or a file containing the list of members in XML or CSV format can be linked to a bulk administration transaction.

Fig. 48 – Bulk member administration enables Loyalty programs to implement an effective service recovery and compensation system for targeted members.

Integration With Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems Web Services for POS Integration

Web services for PoS integration enable loyalty programs to integrate with any PoS system to facilitate real-time member transactions at minimum cost and effort.

Siebel Loyalty provides new web services to enable seamless integration with point-of-sale systems. These services facilitate several types of member transactions in real-time at the point of sale, including:


Accrual processing




Redemption processing




Voucher Validation




Enrollment




Membership Inquiry & Update

Communication Management Triggered Outbound Communication

Loyalty programs issue a variety of communication to their members. Siebel Loyalty allows loyalty programs to initiate an outbound communication to member(s) on the occurrence of pre-identified loyalty events, such as enrollment, tier change and redemption. This feature generates a message in an XML format when an eligible event occurs. Loyalty programs can leverage out-of-the-box integration between Siebel Loyalty and Oracle BI publisher for formatting and delivery of the message. Loyalty programs can also use any third-party outbound communication fulfillment tool to leverage existing investments.

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Fig. 49 – Triggered outbound communication enables loyalty programs to deliver a superior membership experience by ensuring timely and relevant communication to members upon the occurrence of important events.

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SIEBEL HELPDESK

IT organizations use a variety of tools to manage their systems. For example, network administrators use their own network management software to manage domains, while database administrators (DBAs) use separate software tools to manage the database servers. As companies adopt the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework they are standardizing service level management, change management, incident management, and problem management processes around a configuration management database (CMDB). In order to holistically maintain standards, improve root cause analysis, and capture metrics, the systems management and service management software must be integrated. Siebel HelpDesk and its out-of-the-box bi-directional integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager meet these needs. The Oracle Enterprise Manager Connector for Siebel HelpDesk integrates Siebel Helpdesk 8.0 and 8.1.1 with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. Using this connector, companies can auto-create a Siebel Helpdesk service request, update an existing service request, or close a service request based on metric alerts in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g.

Fig. 50 – Auto-generated Siebel HelpDesk service request with Oracle Enterprise Manager alert information.

Siebel HelpDesk provides a vital day-to-day contact point between employees and IT support organizations. With embedded ITIL best practices for managing incidents, problems, change requests and other IT service processes, this product suite delivers a complete, integrated IT service and support solution. It helps organizations make better use of scarce resources while improving the speed and quality of service response.

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Fig. 51 – Auto-generated Siebel HelpDesk service request with Oracle Enterprise Manager alert details.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is Oracle’s integrated solution for administering and monitoring software and systems, including applications, middleware, databases, storage devices, servers, routers, load balancers, and firewalls. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control provides application performance management, distributed database and application server administration, automated tuning of Oracle environments, and an internet-enabled architecture that allows administrators to manage systems from anywhere.

Fig. 52 – Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g console with alert details and hyperlink to Siebel HelpDesk service request

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Benefits of Siebel HelpDesk Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager

With the Siebel HelpDesk integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager, customers can proactively manage IT infrastructure to meet business expectations for system availability. The integration improves the quality of IT service management and service level agreement (SLA) commitments through automated case/service ticket generation, reducing manual support processes. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g and Siebel HelpDesk are synchronized so agents have access to the real-time information about the status of an issue in order to properly assess and troubleshoot these issues and to keep the enterprise informed on the status of critical issues.

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SIEBEL PARTNER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

This section provides an overview of the new capabilities and key enhancements planned for Siebel Partner Relationship Management (PRM). Increase Partner Sales and Collaboration

Siebel PRM provides significant improvements that enhance partner sales and collaboration with enhanced features in design registration, deal registration and special pricing authorization. Design Registration

Design registration is the process where a partner of a component supplier works with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) on a specific design project (also referred to as a design program) and locks in the exclusive right to supply components for the particular project. Because several parties work with OEMs at all times, this process safeguards against duplicate work and protects the registered party from losing financial incentives when the project is subsequently won and begins to produce revenue. In Siebel PRM, design registration enhancements provides some key capabilities that are aimed at improving the user experience by providing more automation in sales opportunity management and quicker access to information. Such enhancements include the following:


Enables partners to create design programs online through the partner portal and submit design registrations against them.




Enables partner managers to create and submit design registrations on behalf of a partner.




Provides the ability to capture Accounts, Partners, Products, Revenues, Contacts and other attributes that are associated with a design program.




Provides automatic creation of revenue template and forecasting series for easy forecasting of revenue associated with the design program.




Provides a configurable approval process for design opportunities and design registrations.




Provides the ability to request special pricing authorizations for design programs.




Enables auto-quote of associated products.




Provides ability to track the orders associated with a design program.




Supports collaboration between brand owner and partners.




Provides an explorer view of the design programs for enhanced usability.




Supports de-duplication of design registrations for improved data quality.

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Supports renewal and automatic expiration of design registrations.




Provides an audit trail on salient design program and design opportunity fields.

Fig. 53 – Design Registration – Single page view Deal Registration New in Siebel PRM, deal registration provides the brand owner with visibility into channel partner deals and gives financial incentives to the partner to register a specific deal.

Deal registration is a new feature to be introduced in Siebel PRM. It is the process by which a partner registers an opportunity with the brand owner. Deal registration provides the brand owner with visibility into channel partner deals and gives the partner financial incentives to register a specific deal. Deal registration provides the following planned capabilities:


A configurable approval process to enable the deploying customer to define the approvers of a deal registration transaction.




Automatically expire deal registrations as appropriate.




Provide approvers with a list of other deal registrations which might be potential duplicates of the current registration, so that an informed decision can be made regarding approval.




Built-in logic to prevent the existence of more than one approved deal registration for an opportunity at any given point in time.




A single page that displays all the information of a deal registration.

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Fig. 54 – Deal Registration – Single page view Special Pricing Authorization (SPA)

Special pricing authorization is required when a brand owner’s partner (e.g. a distributor) submits a request for a special price on a specific customer transactions based upon market requirements (e.g. competitive pressures). This planned feature provides the following enhancements:


Enables partners to request an SPA online.




Enables partner managers to create SPAs on behalf of their partners.




Offers configurable approval processes for SPA.




Supports approval at a line-item level.




Enables approvers to return a specific line-item (or, the entire SPA) for additional information.




Enables easier compliance with the Robinson-Patman Act by providing approvers with a list of potential duplicate SPAs.




Provides the ability to associate SPAs with design programs.




Enables partners to file claims against approved SPAs.




Supports integration with the Siebel Pricing Engine.

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Fig. 55 – Special Pricing Authorization- Line items view

Improved Usability and Customer Experience

Siebel PRM provides additional enhancements to improve the productivity of channel managers and streamline operations by providing greater visibility into market development funds (MDF), business plans and partners. Enhanced Visibility of Marketing Development Funds (MDF)

Planned visibility enhancements for MDF includes: My Fund Designs, All Fund Designs, All Fund Designs Across My Organizations, All Fund Designs Across Organizations views. In addition, new features include: My Fund Requests, All Fund Requests, All Fund Requests Across My Organizations, All Fund Requests Across Organizations views. All these views are only available to channel managers and operations of a brand owner company who are using Siebel PRM.

Fig. 56 – Siebel PRM: MDF – All fund requests view

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Visibility Across Organizations for Channel Alliance Management Process (CHAMP) Plans

The second visibility enhancement is for CHAMP Planning. It introduces My Partner Plans, All Partner Plans, All Partner Plans Across My Organizations, All Partner Plans Across Organizations views. In addition, it also introduces My Plan Objectives, All Plan Objectives, All Plan Objectives Across My Organizations, All Plan Objectives Across Organizations views. All these views are only available to channel managers and operations of a brand owner company who are using Siebel PRM.

Fig. 57 – CHAMP Planning: Plan Objectives for All Organizations view Enhanced Visibility of Partners View

The third visibility enhancement is for the Partners List views. It introduces a new view called All Partners Across My Organizations. This view is only available to channel managers and operations of a brand owner company who are using Siebel PRM.

Fig. 58 – Partners View: All Partners Across My Organizations view

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Easy Integration

Web services provide a flexible and extensible interface for other applications to access basic PRM flows. The Web services planned for release in Siebel PRM allow customers to implement partner locator and partner alerts independent of the partner portal, and increase customers’ options when deploying Siebel PRM. Web Services for Partner Locator and Alerts Enable users to search for partners more effectively and provide access to alerts using the new Web services for Partner

The Partner Locator Web Service allows users to look for partners based on location and/or partner profile attributes. The Partner Alert Web Service provides a list of all available message alerts for partners.

Locator and Partner Alerts

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SIEBEL REPORTS

Oracle is committed to providing best of the breed solutions for its application suite of products. With the integration of Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher for Siebel Reporting needs, customers will find the new solution greatly reduces the development costs for creating Siebel Reports. Oracle BI Publisher allows reports to be designed within Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and other desktop applications, therefore removing the requirement of having specific reporting skills. Users can choose among a variety of different output formats such as Word Rich Text Format (RTF), Microsoft Excel (XLS), Adobe PDF, and HTML before the report output is generated. The architecture of BI Publisher is structured so that reports can be produced in multiple language translations with Unicode support. Siebel Reports Architecture

Siebel Reports 8.1.1 is based on a loosely coupled architecture where Oracle BI Publisher runs as a standalone server. The integration point for Siebel Reporting will be through standard Web services integration using Siebel EAI. Reports will be submitted and rendered within the context of the Siebel user interface. The reports can be saved within the Siebel file system. The high-level architecture diagram below shows the touch points between the Siebel server, Oracle BI Publisher server and the components that run within the Siebel server.

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Siebel Server Siebel UI

BI Publisher Server

Object Manager Component Web Services

Report Service

XMLP Server Component

Siebel Database Report Output

Saved Reports on Siebel File System

Fig. 59 – High-level architecture diagram for Oracle BI Publisher integration with Siebel CRM

For the Siebel Mobile client, the BI Publisher engine is embedded within the Siebel application. The packaged engine consists of the BI Publisher integrated libraries and runs within Siebel XMLP business service on the mobile client. The high-level architecture diagram below shows that all the services run within siebel.exe to render the generated report

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Siebel UI

Siebel.exe BusComps

BI Publisher Engine (Embedded)

Siebel Database

Saved Reports

Report

Fig. 60 – High-level architecture flow diagram for BI Publisher on the Siebel Mobile Web client

Additional planned features for Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher integration for Siebel Reporting: •

J2EE-compliant BI Publisher Report server that can be integrated with Oracle Fusion Middleware, BEA Weblogic and IBM Websphere.

•

SOA-compliant Web services-based integration between Siebel and the BI Publisher server.

•

Ability to generate reports from a centralized BI Publisher server or the Siebel user interface.

•

Deployment of report files can be performed by the Siebel application administrator.

•

Recompiling of reports is not required when upgrading to newer versions of the chosen development software (examples: Word, Acrobat)

•

Actuate to BI Publisher conversion tool provided as part of the BI Publisher server product.

•

Quick solutions for end-users to generate simple, short reports with flexible distribution formats.

•

Issue reports in multiple languages, or containing mixed data from different scripts (e.g. English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese in the same report).

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•

Flexibility to create custom based report templates for easy report generation, existing standardized corporate documents.

•

Easily configurable data abstraction from the repository using integration objects.

•

Reports that have complex data requirements like multiple business objects.

•

SRF compilation not required for new report generation.

•

Approximately 150 out-of-the-box report templates

Development Guidelines for Siebel Reports

A BI Publisher report can be created using a Microsoft Word plug-in.

Fig. 61 – Oracle BI Publisher plug-in for Microsoft Word

The report template is designed using Microsoft Word and can be tested and previewed without connecting to the Siebel application by using example extracted XML data. When completed, the finished report is easily imported and associated to a view in the Siebel application without the need for Siebel Tools changes or compiling a new SRF. The report(s) can be associated and generated within the context of the Siebel user interface.

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Fig. 62 –Report list associated with a Siebel view

Actuate to BI Publisher Migration Tool

•

A conversion tool to convert existing Siebel Reports from Actuate to BI Publisher will be provided as part of the Oracle BI Publisher server product.

•

Reports migrated to BI Publisher reports will be compatible with future versions of BI Publisher.

•

Preserve the XLIFF contents for the generated reports.

•

The Tool converts the layout and also creates integration objects.

Actuate versus BI Publisher Comparison

Feature

Actuate

Oracle BI Publisher

Report Authoring Tools

- Proprietary development environment

- Microsoft Word plug-in

- IT skills required Report Localization

- User-friendly navigation - Business Analyst skills

- Proprietary file formats.

-Standards-based (XLIFF)

- Localizable content embedded within report

- Localizable content decoupled from report

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Report Deployment

Business Objects

template

template

- Requires SRF compilation

- No SRF changes

- ROX deployment on Report Server by IT

- Deployment in Siebel application by administrator

- Supports reports on single business objects

- Supports reports on multiple business objects

Siebel Proposals with embedded Reports

Post 2009, Proposal documents with embedded reports will not function. Alternatively, BI Publisher should be used to create mixed content documents. BI Publisher is planned as the long term solution for Siebel Proposals containing embedded data sections. The conversion tool can be used to convert reports used with Proposals into BI Publisher template. Migration Strategy for Existing Siebel Customers Siebel Version 6.x 7.5.3 7.7.x 7.8 8.0

Comments Currently not supported by Actuate with Actuate Reports Server version 6.x. Apply patches to support Actuate 8. Post-2009 need to apply BI Publisher patch. Apply patches to support Actuate 8. Post-2009 need to apply BI Publisher patch. Post-2009 need to apply BI Publisher patch.

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SIEBEL SALES

Oracle’s Siebel Sales application introduces the next major evolution of Siebel’s industry-leading CRM application. Siebel Sales plans to include a broad set of new and improved capabilities focused on accelerating the definition and execution of processes to meet the ever-changing needs of the business. Moreover, Siebel Sales will offer powerful enhancements that make end-users more productive in carrying out these processes. Improved User Interaction with Global Accounts

Siebel Sales will enhance the look and feel of the user interface for the global account hierarchy functionality, as well as the management and administration processes that maintain the complex business relationships that support this capability. The new interface enhancements for the global account hierarchy functionality provide a more intuitive, easier means of navigating to customer account-related information. A context-sensitive, hierarchical tree structure allows sales users to quickly navigate to account-related information such as contacts, opportunities, activities and account team members using a Microsoft Explorer-like interface.

Fig. 63 – The global account hierarchy explorer interface provides quick and easy navigation. Ease of Navigation and Usability .

Navigating from a parent or child account to related customer information gives sales users a flexible way to traverse their customer relationships. This enhanced interface also provides an intuitive way to drill down on account objects. As users move through the list of their accounts, the hierarchical tree applet refreshes to show the data for each selected customer account. This allows for ease of

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navigation to access sub-account, Contact, Opportunity and Activity-related information using a Microsoft Explorer look and feel. Ability to Expand the List of Account Related Items

Siebel Sales users will also have the ability to customize the contents of the global account hierarchy interface to include additional account-related child objects as needed. Through a user-defined profile, each sales user will be able to include account associated business objects including:


Assets




Quotes




Orders

•

Service Requests

Fig. 64 – The global account hierarchy tree object visibility Interface Performance Enhancements

Global account hierarchy maintenance and administration has also been enhanced to include increased performance and scalability. Batch processes that populate the account hierarchy have been significantly improved and take advantage of faster algorithms, reducing the time to rebuild complex account hierarchy structures and relationship. In addition, a specific global account log and logging level with messages that inform the user of the error and specify corrective action that needs to be taken will be introduced in this release

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Enhanced Sales Forecasting

Oracle plans to increase the capabilities of the sales forecasting module to include customer adaptive forecasting, allowing sales representatives to roll-up and submit their forecasts to managers outside of their reporting organizations and allowing sales managers to view forecasts from cross-functional teams across organizations. Enhancements to sales forecasting also include the ability to perform ad-hoc revenue line items adjustments and a mechanism for senior managers to specify additional revenue to their forecasts that will improve quota attainment. Plans also include a new “standard” forecast series type that eliminates the need for creating multiple forecast series, allowing for more flexible adjustments and forecast rollups. And finally, a Web services forecast-driven API is planned with the ability to create forecasts through background tasks such as a workflow – removing the need for creating forecasts manually.

Fig. 65 – Pipeline management identifies those opportunities that make up the sales forecast. Customer Adaptive Forecasting

Forecast participants in large enterprises are often part of a matrix organization where the reporting structure might not necessarily match the forecast rollup hierarchy. As an example, let's take a company with a sales model that comprises both direct and indirect channels. Direct sales representatives will report to their respective management (regional sales manager, sales directors, etc.) while the channel account representatives report to a different chain of command in a separate organization. However, when they both forecast, their pipeline revenue projection will be a part of the same forecast, and the total revenue will be rolled up to the same sales manager (although both don't directly report to that manager).

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Fig. 66 – Customer adaptive forecasting single forecast series

Customer adaptive forecasting in Siebel Sales increases sales management productivity and effectiveness by eliminating the need for creating multiple forecast series and by allowing for flexible adjustments and rollups. This will be accomplished using a single consistent interface which will allow for quick and effective use of an individual’s time. By creating a single forecast series customer adaptive forecasting will improve forecast accuracy by ensuring that forecasts are rolled up according to business needs not as dictated by sales reporting structures. The proposed changes will eliminate the need for “shadow forecasts” which were once used as a means to accomplish this capability to support sales overlays. Overall, the proposed feature improves user adoption of Siebel forecast capabilities as it allows users to roll-up forecasts outside of the reporting hierarchy, has a single point of entry and reduces data entry. Ad-Hoc Revenue Line Item Forecasting

Senior managers who are responsible for sales forecasts that span large territories, product lines and quotas often have the need to input an “ad hoc” revenue line item as part of their forecast. This forecast, which is against a product line/product, is not part of any of the forecast submissions already in the system; however, it needs to be part of the roll-up of revenue projections. With this new Siebel Sales feature, senior managers will have the ability to add their own figures to the forecast. The forecast lines added will be factored into forecast roll-ups and forecast summaries. Adding ad-hoc revenue line items will help improve quota attainment since it provides a mechanism for senior managers to specify additional revenue to their forecasts. Standard Forecast Series

Traditionally, sales representatives and managers who participate in the forecasting process would typically need to see detailed revenue projections over a period of time, line by line and with aggregated revenue (based on some pre-defined dimensions such as product line by product) in the summary view where they can

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make appropriate adjustment and rollup to their management from either view. Planned Siebel Sales functionality will allow a sales representative and manager to view, adjust and roll up their forecasted revenue from either details or summary views in a given forecast.

Fig. 67 – Standard forecast series displays the ‘Total Adjustments by Subordinate’ forecast. Increased User Adoption

Through the use of a standard forecast series, sales representatives and managers can view, adjust and roll up their forecasted revenue amounts from either detail or summary views. This capability will introduce the standard forecast series, and will include the features of both Revenue Detail and Summary Only Forecast Series types. This means when a forecast series is generated, selecting the forecast series type as “Standard Forecast Series” will take on the behavior of the automatic rollup from summary view and manual rollup from detail view. This planned forecast series type will improve user adoption by eliminating the need of creating multiple forecast series and provide for a consistent interface to complete the forecasting task. Increased Reporting Flexibility

Siebel Sales will provide a new reporting engine called Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher, which is an infrastructure that reduces the high costs associated with the development, customization and maintenance of business documents. Traditionally, the cost of maintaining a reporting infrastructure is expensive. A true reporting infrastructure, which provides a central architecture for generating and delivering information to employees, customers, and business partners—both securely and in the right format would be beneficial.

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Fig. 68 – Oracle BI Publisher product topology Oracle BI Publisher

Oracle BI Publisher provides a central architecture for generating and delivering information to employees, customers, and business partners—both securely and in the right format. Utilizing a set of familiar desktop tools, users can create and maintain their own report formats based on data extracts from diverse sources. Utilizing a set of familiar desktop tools such as Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Office, users can create and maintain their own report formats based on data extracts supplied by a multitude of sources From an end-user interface perspective, Oracle BI Publisher is expected to:


Provide sales users and business analysts with a means of selecting the report output type to PDF, RTF, EXCEL, or HTML formats.




Have the capability to manage reports and delete generated reports




Deliver the ability to print the generated reports at runtime




Include full I18N and localization support for Oracle BI Publisher reports




Enable the ability to launch both Actuate and Oracle BI Publisher reports from a single report icon

This release will ship with many of the existing Actuate reports to run under the Oracle BI Publisher reporting tool. These reports can be selectively granted to sales representatives or sales managers based on the views that these users have access to in Siebel Sales.

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SIEBEL SEARCH

Enterprise search is quickly becoming a foundation component for any successful enterprise. Every information system needs a robust, comprehensive knowledge retrieval solution that can deliver accurate information real-time by means of an intuitive user interface. A desirable search solution is also inexpensive to maintain and easy to install and administer. In 8.1.1, Siebel Search, with its integration with Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search, delivers these exact capabilities and more. It provides a framework and a promise to deliver the next generation knowledge management system with a robust search technology. Siebel CRM 8.1.1 provides three ways to retrieve information. First, Siebel Query tool provides an easy way to conduct a query from within a single business component. Second, Siebel Find is a mechanism to conduct a query by leveraging the Search Center [Pane] and provides ability to customize and extend FIND objects. Both solutions are used for searching structured, transactional data residing inside Siebel database and do not require indexing. Third, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is an enterprise-grade search engine for indexing and searching both structured and unstructured data such as external file systems. Beginning with Siebel 8.1.1, Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search is the only default search engine of choice for Siebel applications. This makes Siebel Search a complete single-vendor solution and promises a very short turnaround time to deliver maintenance and enhancements. Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search has significant and distinct advantages for Siebel applications. It boasts a robust Federated Architecture which can be enabled to search information located in various knowledge and content management systems. It includes a superior security model and it can be deployed in a clustered environment. For Siebel Search, significant enhancements to the user interface as well as several new features are planned. Customers will also see significant improvements in performance scalability and reliability of the overall solution. Enhanced User Interface

Siebel Search can be configured to display search results inside the Search Pane in addition to the web-like interface with highlighted keywords and teaser text. The Associate functionality will allow a user to associate one business object to another; for instance, associate Service Requests to a Contact record. With Preview functionality, users viewing search results inside the Search Pane can, with a click of a button, preview details of a record in a pop-up.

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Indexing

With the help of Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search, Siebel Search offers fast Incremental indexing and real-time indexing capabilities. Adding and Extending Search-able business components

Popular business objects are pre-configured for search out of the box. These business objects and their pre-selected attributes can be added and removed for indexing and searching without using Siebel Tools. This saves time required for recompiling and re-deploying of customer’s Siebel repository. Additional business components can be added with simple steps performed inside Siebel tools. Logical Collections

With Logical Collections, administrators can custom-create virtual business object that fit their business needs. For instance, a logical collection called “Service360” may combine attributes from Service Request, Contacts, Accounts, and Assets business objects. Siebel Search Open API

With Siebel Search Open API in 8.1.1, search engine vendors can develop their own integration for Siebel Search in Siebel Contact Center. The Search Open API ensures consistent user experience irrespective of the underlying search engine technology.

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SIEBEL SELF-SERVICE

Siebel’s eSupport and eCommerce self-service applications extend organization’s CRM solutions to the Web, creating a single transparent multi-channel solution. Architected as loosely coupled to Siebel CRM over Web services, the Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce applications enable companies to continue to reap benefits from their existing Siebel CRM applications. Because the new Siebel Self-Service applications are native Fusion Middleware 10.1.3 applications, companies immediately benefit from Oracle’s investments in a flexible, standards-based development environment. Siebel eSupport

Siebel eSupport is a newly re-architected product and its product development is a culmination of years of effort in opening up Siebel Service and Siebel Contact Center processes as Web services and leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware technology to deliver the next-generation Web application that is easier to extend and brand within a company’s Web portal. Siebel eSupport ships with out-of-the-box UIs that satisfy today’s high expectations for a superior online experience. Siebel eSupport utilizes Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) components that are based on Java Server Faces (JSF) standards, and consumes Web services from Siebel CRM to support functionalities such as site management, user management, search and knowledge management, service request management, branch locator, Web survey, e-mail, and Web chat. Site Management

The planned Siebel eSupport site management tool is an editor designed for the Web site administrator or business analyst to create and configure multiple customer service or technical support sites quickly and without coding. For each Web site, the Web administrator can choose a style sheet to define the look and feel, supported locales, home page template, and many tailored configurations to deliver personalized site experience. For example, a company may choose to have a fun, contemporary look and feel on the consumer customer service site, but a streamlined and simple business look and feel on the technical support site. A company may also choose to create a Spanish-only customer service site to improve service in specific geographic locales. Site management functionality is available in Siebel eSupport, as well as in the Siebel eCommerce product discussed later in this Statement of Direction.

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Fig. 69 – Siebel eSupport - Self-Service Site Administration Setup

Registration & User Management Registration

The registration features are designed to address a variety of business scenarios ranging from simple business-to-consumer (B2C) user registration to complex scenarios in business-to-business (B2B) contexts.

Fig. 70 – Self-registration options

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B2C vs. B2B Registration

Several registration flows have been provided to meet the different needs of B2C and B2B customers. B2B customers must be associated with an organization account to enable them to interact on behalf of their organization. An organization may have multiple customer contacts permitting flexibility in billing and shipping. For cases where companies wish to review registrations before allowing users to transact, approvals can be setup as part of the registration process.

Fig. 71 – Siebel eSupport – Delegated Administration user registration Self-Service Registration Flows for Existing Customers

Existing customers can acquire a username and password in a self-service manner to transact on a company website. Organizations may validate their identity using an earlier order or Service Request number before granting them access. This also allows a seamless integration of the selfservice channel with other channels such as call center, mail order and others. B2B Delegated User Administration

Reduce user management efforts by delegating user management activities to certain B2B delegated user administrators or B2B primary users within the B2B organization.

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Company Accounts and Hierarchies

B2B users transact on one or more accounts that identify their company to the merchant. Accounts and account hierarchies created in Siebel Contact Center are available for assignment to B2B self-service users. B2B users with access to a particular account can view orders and service requests created in child accounts as well. Profiles and Preferences

This Siebel eSupport feature allows users to manage their own profiles and preferences. This helps limit liability arising from exposure to confidential customer information in your contact center. B2B delegated administrators are also empowered to manage their organization’s profile. The integrated password management feature enables users to change their password and reset forgotten passwords. Address Book

Users can store frequently used addresses in their address book. B2B users can create multiple billing and shipping company addresses in a shared company address book. The address book helps online customers to quickly complete their transactions. Single Sign-On (SSO) Deployment

Siebel Self-Service applications allow organization to leverage their existing SSO solution (Siebel SSO infrastructure, Oracle SSO or 3rd party SSO solutions) to manage user authentication. My Account

Siebel eSupport leverages Siebel account, contact and user management functionalities as Web services, allowing companies to present customers with their latest account information, contact profile and addresses, and user online access information. When a user is logged in to the Web site, the “My Account” section is available with the following areas: Contact Profile, Change Address, Update Password, Check Status on an Order or Service Request, View Owned Products (also known as Assets in Siebel CRM), or Create a Service Request. A user has a complete view of his or her portfolio - accounts, orders, service requests and assets – regardless of the channel where the transaction was initiated. If the user is identified as a business user, they can also see all the orders, assets and service requests that belong to their company accounts, provided that they have been given access to these accounts. Because Siebel eSupport retrieves the account, contact and user information via Web services, users are guaranteed to get the latest information online, as they would by calling the contact center or accessing the interactive voice response

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(IVR) system. There is no data synchronization overhead because there is a single CRM data source. User Management and My Account functionality is planned for the Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce products. Knowledge Management

Exposing appropriate and helpful knowledge and content online is a key component to providing quality service in any self-service application. Online users have come to rely on the convenience of searching through online frequently asked questions (FAQs), user guides, literature, product news, guided troubleshooting steps, alerts, or promotional offers anytime and anywhere. However, many companies have outdated or incomplete information online and the Web site is not using the same knowledge base as that for the contact center, making it challenging to keep the knowledge data up-to-date. This can often lead to customers receiving inconsistent information between channels. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

While Oracle recommends the best practice to have the same Siebel Solution knowledge base across channels, we recognize that many companies have invested in best-of-breed knowledge management solutions or built their own content or knowledge repository. Siebel eSupport provides several options to help with the knowledge management integration issues. Siebel CRM uses the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) engine that can aggregate data from Siebel solutions and other custom repositories such as third-party knowledge management systems, document systems or an intranet. The Siebel eSupport application calls the Siebel Search Web service that calls SES engine to index, search, retrieve, and aggregate the matched solutions and resolution documents that are accessible to external/Web users, as well as contents from the external sources setup in Siebel Search Administration.

Fig. 72 – Siebel eSupport – Knowledge management view

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Another integration approach is calling a third-party knowledge management Web service from Siebel eSupport application taking advantage of the SOA-based architecture in Fusion Middleware. Knowledge Management Web Service Integration

Siebel eSupport provides two knowledge management web service integration interfaces – one to the Siebel CRM Solution module and one to a third-party Webservice-enabled knowledge management system. During implementation, the company can decide which interface is best suited for their deployment and select the corresponding data binding. Regardless of the interface that is chosen, Siebel eSupport provides a complete set of UI components to facilitate searching and browsing knowledge management, as those commonly seen in popular Web sites today. The UI components include FAQ, Product News, Alerts, Keyword Search, Expand/Narrow Search, Search Results, Solution Detail, Rating and Feedback, Related Solutions or Documentation, and Recently Viewed Solutions. Coupled with Oracle JDeveloper, companies can extend these provided components or easily create new UIs. Knowledge management functionality is also leveraged in Siebel eSupport service request and chat navigation flows, where companies can auto-search knowledge management to retrieve contents matched to user’s inquiry. This provides another opportunity to show the updated contents to users, possibly eliminating a service or chat request to your contact center. Users may also want to leverage the same Siebel eSupport knowledge management functionality in Siebel eCommerce that may address any support questions upfront during the sales cycle, which could help users to make the correct purchase decision. Service Request Management

Checking the status of a service request is a common function offered on most Web sites. Users today can log in to their internet provider’s Website to check the status of a reported problem. They can also log in to their local or state government’s Web site to file a passport application or check the status of a childcare support case. Companies are expected to have service request management as part of their customer service or technical support Web sites to serve their customers more effectively.

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Fig. 73 – Siebel eSupport – Create service request view

Service request management in Siebel eSupport provides configurable process flows to guide customers to identify a product or service problem online, autosuggest solutions, capture necessary contact and account data, allow attachments to describe the problem further, and provide the user with a reference number to track the request. For example, a single page is used for “Request for Information” to capture the essential contact information, versus a multi-step process flow for an “Installation Problem” request to ensure that complete account information, asset data, and error logs are included in the submission. Siebel eSupport provides flow templates and site administration configurations that allow for easy extensions. In several service request UI pages, partial-page rendering is an AJAX-enabled component added to allow portions of a Web page to be refreshed without redrawing the entire page. This achieves a more satisfying user experience and improved performance on the Siebel eSupport site.

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Fig. 74 – Siebel eSupport – Create service request guided process

There are additional functions built for better business-to-business service request management. For business users, they can log service requests on behalf of another user within their organization, and be able to check the status of all service requests that are associated with the accounts that they can access. They can also search service requests by wildcard or exact number match, by account, by contact, by product, by keyword in description, or by date range when the requests are created, etc. The design of all of these features is based on requirements learned from many Siebel CRM customers who have Siebel eSupport Web sites dedicated to their large business customers. When customers return to the Web site to check status, they can read the support agent update and any solution or documentation that is attached to resolve the issue. The user is also presented with a survey to provide quick feedback on the resolution experience, and this feedback can be used by the contact center supervisors to measure and improve support. If the user wants to expedite the service request, they can do so by updating the service request, or they can click on the “Chat” button to request immediate assistance from a support agent. The service request data is submitted along with the chat request to the support agent, so the agent can better help the customer during the chat interaction.

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Fig. 75 – Siebel eSupport – Service request tracking

Contact Us Contact Us – E-mail

When users cannot find the information they are looking for in the online knowledge management repository, they don’t always phone the support agent immediately. Instead, they click through the customer service Web pages to find email, chat or call back options as the next alternative. Siebel eSupport is integrated with Siebel Contact Center and Oracle Contact Center Anywhere (CCA) to provide complete e-mail, Web chat and Web call back options to transition Web users from self-service to assisted-service support. The configurations for Siebel eSupport e-mail allow organizations to route Web emails to appropriate agent groups with Siebel Email Response. Companies who have Siebel eMail Response can setup an email response group to receive emails from Siebel eSupport users. Siebel eMail Response is a complete email response management system (ERMS) featuring converting incoming emails into service requests and sending the service request confirmation email to the eSupport users.

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Fig. 76 – Siebel eSupport – Send email view Contact Us – Siebel Chat

Internet chat popularity has increased in recent years, with more users becoming comfortable communicating with each other using instant-message and text message tools. Internet chat allows users to continue to surf the site while in conversation with the support representative. Siebel CRM provides complete integration of Siebel eSupport, Siebel Contact Center and Oracle Contact Center Anywhere Chat, called Siebel Chat, where the contact center representatives can handle multiple chat sessions; access the URL library to push a Web page to the customer; use shortcuts to access customer information within the Siebel application; and leverage the frequently-used-responses to facilitate the chat interaction.

Fig. 77 – Siebel eSupport – Request chat view

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For more detailed information on Siebel Chat functionality, see the Siebel Chat section in this Statement of Direction and in the Siebel eCommerce section. Contact Us – Web Call Back

Oracle Contact Center Anywhere (CCA) also has several call back options, such as automatic call distribution (ACD) voicemail, IVR call back and Web call back. Company may choose to integrate Siebel eSupport with CCA Web Call Back, so that Siebel eSupport users can click on “Web Call Back” and enter a contact number to be reached. The call back request is then routed to Contact Center Anywhere to connect to an agent immediately. This feature is frequently leveraged in both Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce web sites. Contact Us – Branch Locator

Many sales and support interactions continue to require in-person assistance. Siebel eSupport branch locator functionality provides a simple interface for users to lookup physical addresses (for example, retail stores or customer service centers) by proximity or by offered services at that location. Customers can find the organization business hours and phone number, and get driving direction and map to the location. When organizations add new locations and services, the new location’s information is captured once in the Siebel CRM application and is made available real-time over the Web. Siebel plans to integrate with Yahoo, MapQuest and Google Maps tools. Branch locator functionality is available in Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce.

Fig. 78 – Siebel eSupport – Branch locator with Google Maps integration.

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Web Survey

Surveys are a useful tool to monitor customer satisfaction. The secret to encouraging customers respond to these online surveys is to present the relevant survey questions in a timely fashion. Siebel eSupport plans to leverage the Siebel Marketing landing site and survey library so marketing and customer support managers can use the same tool to create various types of sales and service surveys online. Siebel eSupport provides surveys to measure customer satisfaction for a service request resolution and for Web chat assistance. The response feedback to the survey is stored in Siebel CRM application. Organizations can use Oracle’s Business Intelligence tools to analyze these feedback data, assess the areas they can measure and improve customer satisfaction across channels.

Fig. 79 – Siebel eSupport – Service request and Web survey view

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Siebel eCommerce

Siebel eCommerce has been designed to enable companies to manage multichannel interactions with consistency and agility. Sophisticated selling rules such as pricing, eligibility, compatibility, and configuration can be managed once within Siebel CRM and deployed anywhere across the enterprise. All customer interactions transition seamlessly from self-service, to assisted care, into the call center, and back out to the self-service channel while giving customers transparent access to the real time information they need to do business. Browse Product Catalog Context Aware Navigation

Each Siebel eCommerce page is designed to guide customers through common paths as well as to make it easy for them to explore related information they may need to make a buying decision. Users navigate through an intuitive user interface, drilling down into catalogs and catalog categories to find products. Steps can be quickly retraced by clicking on any point in the “breadcrumb” path. Context is maintained across multiple workspaces so that the users can easily toggle between pages for catalog categories, their latest product search result, product or promotion details, or product comparisons. Related promotions, products, services, knowledge management documents and a list of recently viewed products are viewable with one click.

Fig. 80 – Navigate the online product catalog in Siebel eCommerce Context-Aware Template Views

A logical indirection framework has been woven into the application page flow so that for one logical page the system dynamically chooses from multiple page templates to display the page layout designated for the product category the user has selected. This approach goes beyond the design best practice of creating a clean separation between logical and physical pages and actually sandwiches simple dynamic business logic between two logical layers. This means that the product

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detail page can look totally different for a physical product versus a service, and the business logic to designate which template to use can be maintained by a nontechnical business user and updated without restarting Web servers. End-user customer can personalize their browse pages by selecting from different templates, such as gallery, paragraph or list view. Logical (meta data) Page Product Details Page Prod Category = Insurance Template Product Details: TemplateInsurance ProductTemplate Details: Apparel Product Details: Phones

Prod_Det_Insurance.jspx Physical

Fig. 81 – Dynamic templates logical model Centralized Sales Product Catalog

Product-related sales information is managed once in Siebel CRM 8.1 and consistently deployed anywhere across the enterprise. This includes:


Rules: pricing, eligibility, compatibility, entitlement, complex product and promotion configuration constraints, and product relationships.




Product Structures: simple product bundles, simple products with editable attributes, editable & non-editable promotions, and complex products.




Informational: product catalogs, categories, descriptions, attributes, and features.

Fig. 82 – Siebel CRM centralized product administration.

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Siebel eCommercie has been designed to take advantage of the power and flexibility of product information managed within Siebel CRM. CRM data is exposed through Web services to the various e-commerce sites managed with Siebel eCommerce and is cached to deliver a high-performance end user experience.

Fig. 83 – Siebel eCommerce catalog administration. Content Management System Integration

To create a more compelling visual experience, multiple media files such as Macromedia Flash can be linked to product catalog images to create a more compelling and visually appealing user experience. These files can be stored in any content management system using the WEBDAV protocol (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning).

Fig. 84 – Content management integration in Siebel eCommerce

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Keyword and Faceted Product Search

Keyword and faceted search are integrated into a single experience so customers can continuously narrow and expand their search results by entering/removing keywords and selecting/removing categories and product attributes.

Fig. 85 – Incremental search capabilities through keyword and faceted Search

The searching experience in Siebel eCommerce has been seamlessly integrated with catalog browsing so users can perform a search at any point in their drill- down process and choose to narrow their search results based on any attributes common across the product classes within the search result. Site administrators control what attributes within each product are searchable and at anytime a non-technical user can change those attribute selections with a few clicks of the mouse. As illustrated in the diagram below, the service-oriented architecture of Siebel SelfService applications allows it to fit neatly into a composite application of Siebel CRM and 3rd party business services. This architecture allows organizations to choose from multiple search engines and to build on a solid SOA for companies wishing to extend the application.

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eCommerce View 1.Keyword / attribute search

Search Interface 2.Call Siebel search web service

Product Search Web Service / Business Service 3.Call search engine API to execute search

Search External Business Service

7. Retrieve product Details

Product Cache 6. Return product IDs

Product Details WS / Business Service 5. Filter results by eligibility

Eligibility Business Service

Siebel Server

Product Index BusCom

4. Return list of product IDs Index SES Search Engine

Fig. 86 – SOA search architecture in Siebel eCommerce

Ensuring consistency across the enterprise, both the search engine index and the self-service cache are populated by the same product information managed within the Siebel CRM system. The search [1] is invoked by calling a CRM Web service [2] which calls the appropriate search engine [3], also used for knowledge management searches. The search engine returns a list of product IDs [4] which are filtered by the eligibility business rules maintained in CRM [5] before passing them back to the Self-Service tier [6]. The product details for the page are then pulled from the cache [7] to ensure a more responsive and quicker user experience.

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Compare Products

Fig. 87 – Siebel eCommerce product comparison table.

To enable customers to quickly understand the differences between products, customers can add them to a comparison matrix which contrasts their descriptions, attributes, and features. To increase the likelihood that customers find what they are looking for, similar products are also listed on the comparison page so that the customer can optionally add any of these up-sell products to the matrix. The comparison page is saved throughout the session so that products can be added to or removed from the matrix at any point in the shopping experience. Related Products

To more effectively up-sell and cross-sell customers, the product details page is designed to entice customers to explore related products and services.

Fig. 88 – Up-sell and cross-sell related products such as accessories and services.

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The following bins are displayed in the right contextual area so customers can easily explore other buying options by drilling into and out of these related products


Promotions: Any promotion in which the current product is listed.




Similar Products: Up-sell products




Accessories: Cross-sell products




Services: Cross-sell products which are services

Real Time Decisioning (RTD) Product Recommendations

Oracle’s Real Time Decisioning (RTD) platform is planned for integration with Siebel eCommerce to leverage closed-loop and predictive analytics to generate offers in real time that are most likely to increase sales and/or promote retention. RTD is the same engine used in Oracle Intelligent Offer Generation (IOG) which integrates to Siebel Contact Center by recommending a next best action.

Fig. 89 – Relevant, personalized product offerings through Oracle’s Real Time Decision (RTD) platform.

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As customers browse a Siebel eCommerce website, Oracle RTD makes personalized product offer recommendations and tracks whether they are selected. Self Service

Login

Browse Categories

Browse Products

Select Offer

Eligibility RTD

1.Send Customer ID

2-n.Send Context 3-n.Return Offer

4-n.Learn

Fig. 90 – RTD flow in Siebel eCommerce

In order to effectively score and make more intelligent offers, Oracle RTD pulls input from the following sources:


Siebel CRM: If the user has logged in, any information in CRM can be used, such as previously purchased assets and customer segmentation information.




Browsing history: Based on the catalog categories visited over a defined time period, Oracle RTD can infer the types of offers the user is most likely to accept.




Offer history: Learns which offers were previously presented and any actions taken on those offers.




Learning from random sampling: Oracle RTD learns from random experimenting against control groups and uses this experience to score offers more likely to be accepted.




Business objectives: Oracle RTD allows companies to define multiple objectives for offer scoring and to define customer segment weighting that should be given to the different objectives. For example, this would allow a company to focus more on message consistency for important established customers but to focus more on maximizing revenue for first-time visitors.

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Fig. 91 – Setting objectives using a sliding scale in Oracle RTD

Oracle RTD is a self-learning tool whose predictive models continuously and automatically adjust based on customer responses and marketplace changes. Knowledge Management

The “Learn More” bin appears in the right contextual area of the product details page to easily display documents relevant to the current product. As customers drill into various knowledge base documents they can view the detail, see documents related to the selected one, and refine the search used to suggest knowledge management documents.

Fig. 92 – Contextual knowledge base documents Chat

If customers want to talk to an agent before finalizing their buying decision, they can initiate a chat session. The agent chat is integrated into Siebel Contact Center so that other relevant customer information is at the agent’s fingertips. Agents can “push” customers Web pages which are likely to aide the shopping experience. Since the customers’ carts are the same object as the Siebel Contact Center quote object, agents can add and delete items from customer carts in real time as well as help complete the checkout.

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Fig. 93 – Siebel Self-Service applications provide online chat capabilities.

For more detailed information on Siebel Chat functionality, see the Siebel Chat section in this Statement of Direction. Configure Product

Complex product configurations are exposed to web visitors through an intuitive user interface that always shows the running total and current selections, and guides customer with a multi-step process train and contextual messages.

Fig. 94 – Online product configuration exposed in Siebel eCommerce

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Multichannel Consistency and Flexibility with Configurator

Siebel eCommerce shares the same configuration administration as the agentfacing Siebel CRM application. By using the same configurator, the product information exposed to end customers reaps the multi-channel consistency benefits of shared product structures and constraint rules, while at the same time gives companies the flexibility to tailor the configuration experience to the unique needs of the end customer. Administrators can choose to use the same page and UI controls in Siebel eCommerce pages as the agent-facing configurator in Siebel Contact Center or define different structures and views.

Fig. 95 – Centralized product configuration administration with channel-specific user interfaces. Configurator as a Service

Siebel eCommerce uses a service-oriented architecture by calling the Siebel CRM configurator as a service and rendering the end-customer UI within the Siebel eCommerce self-service application.

1.Click the configure button for a product eCommerce Interface Cache

2. Retrieve product Structure Product Structure Web Service

3. Retrieve product UI definition Product UI Web Service

4.Display the Configurator UI Self Service JSPX UI Templates 1.SS Definition 2.CC Definition Map 3. Default

Siebel Configurator

Fig. 96 – SOA configuration of Siebel eCommerce

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If an organization is managing multiple commerce sites, each with its own unique look and feel, this consistent visual experience is easily maintained throughout the customer’s shopping experience. Administrators can control and extend this experience using Oracle JDeveloper – the same Fusion Middleware IDE (integrated development environment) used to manage Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce. In addition, if one of the child products of an aggregate promotion is a complex product, the configurator process train and running total can be merged with the promotion to create a more seamless experience. High-Performance Configurator

Leveraging the reduced memory footprint and enhanced multi-threading configurator capabilities delivered in Siebel CRM 8.0, Siebel eCommerce has been architected with performance top of mind. To ensure a responsive user experience, the most common Web service information is cached in the Siebel eCommerce application. Additionally, the administration controls allow companies to choose for each product the user actions that trigger a price calculation. Modify Configuration

From the shopping cart, customers can expand configurable products to see their current selection and modify them if necessary. In addition to complex products, this functionality also applies to editable promotions and simple products with editable attributes. Consistent UI Across Product Structures

For less complex configuration requirements, companies can choose to use other product structures such as simple products with editable attributes and configurable promotions. To ensure a consistent experience to end customers, Siebel eCommerce recognizes the different characteristics of these product structures yet exposes them with an intuitive user experience nearly identical to that of complex product configuration. Shopping Cart & Checkout Manage Shopping Cart

Siebel eCommerce plans to deliver a fully functional shopping cart that can be managed across the boundaries of multiple sales channels. For convenience, the shopping cart is exposed as a mini-cart on all online browse pages and as a full page shopping cart to access advanced functionality. Customers can view and remove the products in their carts; expand and modify their configuration selections; add cart items to their comparison matrix; rename their carts; create multiple carts; save their selections for any period of defined time; or checkout to complete their purchases.

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Fig. 97 – Advanced shopping cart functionality in Siebel eCommerce Agent-Shopping Cart Collaboration

The service-oriented architecture of Siebel eCommerce creates a true multichannel shopping experience. When online customers request help from agents in a chat session or phone call, Siebel Contact Center agents can collaborate with the shopper with real time efficiency. Because customers’ Web service calls to their carts are the same objects as Siebel Contact Center quote objects, agents will have real time access to the contents of customers’ carts; can interactively add or delete items from these carts; and if necessary, can assist with the checkout process. Anonymous Cart Management

Anonymous users can browse the online catalog and save items in their shopping carts. Pointers to the carts are saved in users’ cookies so they can be accessed in the future from the same computer. Because the carts are saved on the server, agents can assist anonymous users as described above in “Agent-Shopping Cart Collaboration.” If an anonymous user logs in, the anonymous cart is merged with the logged-in user’s last modified cart. Unlike anonymous users, logged in users can access their carts from any computer. Multiple Shopping Carts

B2B and B2C customers can create multiple shopping carts to manage multiple purchasing projects. These carts can be renamed at any time.

Fig. 98 – Manage multiple purchasing projects with multiple shopping carts.

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Multi-channel Quotes

The shopping cart enables companies to extend customers’ self-service experience into the traditional offline quoting process. Because quotes and carts are the same business object, customers can view online any quotes created for them by sales representatives and agents through any channel. Customers can drill into the details of the products on these quotes with all the robust functionality of the catalog browsing experience and, if desired, make changes and submit them as orders. Checkout

At any point in the shopping experience customers can choose the checkout action to purchase their products using Siebel eCommerce. All checkout information is defaulted with customer account information so customers can quickly complete their transactions. Customers can modify this information to meet specific shipping, payment, and tracking needs, or to contact the company through another channel to complete the transactions.

Fig. 99 – Checkout process in Siebel eCommerce Asset-Based Orders

With Siebel eCommerce, B2B and B2C shoppers can designate any product to be tracked as an asset so the merchant and purchaser can at anytime view information about these assets; see the configuration choices made; and if applicable, modify the asset configuration (see the View & Modify Assets section below). These assets can be associated to contract agreements, commitment terms, and entitlements. Service requests can be logged against specific assets so customers have easy access to service request history by asset. B2B customers have the added flexibility to associate assets to different employee contacts and accounts, and if not already in the system, add the new contacts during the checkout flow.

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Ship to Multiple Locations

B2B and B2C customers can ship each line of their order to a different address by selecting from previously saved addresses or creating new ones. B2B customers can also easily search for and select from shared company contacts and addresses. Gift-To Addresses

To prevent shared company addresses from being cluttered with personal address, B2B customers can create private gift-to addresses that aren’t exposed to other company employees. Payment Methods

Customers can save multiple credit card and bank account payment methods to be used in any channel and choose their default method for new online orders. Other payment methods such as purchase order and invoice can be made available for B2B customers. Tax Calculation

Siebel eCommerce shares the same tax calculation integrations as Siebel CRM so taxes can be calculated in real time and displayed on the order. Save Partial Checkout

If customers are interrupted in the middle of their checkout process, the information entered is saved for the future.

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View & Modify Assets

Siebel eCommerce leverages the same asset-based ordering (ABO) functionality as Siebel Customer Order Management and can be exposed to online Web visitors.

Fig. 100 – Seamless asset modification between Siebel Customer Order Management and Siebel eCommerce Filter and Search for Assets

Regardless of the channels in which they were created, customers can easily view a list of all assets associated with the contacts and accounts to which they have access. If this is a long list they can filter the list based on asset ID, product name, status, install date range, account, and contact name. Asset Details

For any asset, customers can drill into the asset details page to see more information about the purchased product. This information includes descriptive information; install date; commitment terms/penalty amount/grace period; configuration choices selected; and sold-to/bill-to contact and account information. In-Flight Open Orders

To make sure customers have a real time understanding of the latest state of their assets, they can click on the Open Orders tab to see the details and status of all open orders against the current asset being viewed. Sell Related Products

In order to generate additional up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, the right contextual area of the asset details page contains bins to suggest similar products (up-sell), accessories (cross-sell), and services (cross-sell services). These are the same bins that are displayed on the product details page and allow customers to quickly drill into the catalog to explore other purchases.

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Modify Asset Configuration

Customers are empowered to easily change the configuration of their assets by selecting the modify action on any complex product, editable promotion, or simple product with editable attributes. The modify asset process train will be merged with the appropriate configuration process train to guide customers through the steps required to complete the asset-based change order. If there is a financial impact to the change or a tangible product needs to be shipped, Siebel eCommerce administrators can define the flow to just use the asset defaults or enable it to give customer an opportunity to change the payment method or shipping address. Modify Bill-to and Sold-to Information

With Siebel eCommerce, customers are empowered to keep their asset records accurate. If they wish to change the asset tracking or billing information they can modify the sold-to contact, sold-to account, or bill-to account associated with the asset. Multiple Product Structures

Complex products, promotions, simple products with editable attributes, and simple product bundles are all displayed in the same manner, showing only the root product in the product list and then enabling customers to drill into a consistent asset detail page to view the child products under the root. View Order Status

Customers can easily view real time order status and history for orders entered by them or for a contact or account to which they have access. This includes both new orders and asset-based change orders entered through any channel. Search for and Filter Orders

Customers can search for specific orders with a robust search tool planned for Siebel eCommerce that filters orders based on date range, order status, order number, account name, and contact name. Order Details

When customers find the orders for which they are searching, they can drill into the same details as are displayed on the order confirmation page. Copy Order

To make it easy for customers to re-enter similar orders, any previously submitted order can be copied into the shopping cart so that it can be edited and submitted again.

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Cancel Order

Administrators can define the status for which the company will accept an online order cancellation so that customers can cancel orders through the self-service channel. Administrative Settings

Website administrators can create, configure, and manage multiple sites through the site administration tool. Site administrators can define the look and feel of sites and personalize them to target different customer segments. Sites can also be configured to support multiple locales, payments, and shipping methods. Comparison to Siebel eSales

Compared to Siebel eSales, the new Siebel eCommerce product contains many new and improved capabilities as highlighted in the below chart. The chart identifies for each feature whether the out of the box eCommerce (eC) or eSales (eS) products include the feature (Y), partially address the feature (m), or does not include the feature (N).

eCommerce 8.1 vs. eSales eC eS Functional • eAdvisor • Favorites • Quick Add

N N N

• RTD Prod. Recommendation Y • Chat Y • Content Mgmt Integration Y (WebDAV, extend to WebCenter) • Integration to KM Search Y • Robust Prod Search Y (SES, keyword, narrow/expand) • Promotions Y • Asset Based Ordering Y • Robust Compare Y (persist w/in session) • Configurator – User Friendly Y

Y Y Y N N N N N N N N m

• • • • • • • • •

B2B & B2C Checkout B2B Co./User Registration Multiple tabbed workspaces In context mini-bins Related Products Multiple Sorts Multiple Browse Views Indirection framework Site Management

Technical • Extensible UI • MVC Standards Based • Caching • SOA Composite App • Fusion Middleware…

eC eS Y N Y N Y N Y N Y m Y N Y N Y N Y N

Y Y Y Y Y

m N N N N

Key: eC = eCommerce, eS = eSales Fig. 101 – Comparison of Siebel eSales and eCommerce

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Industry-Specific Functionality

SIEBEL COMMUNICATIONS, MEDIA, AND ENERGY

Siebel Communications, Media, and Energy (CME) release introduces the next evolution of Siebel CRM applications for the communications, media, and utilities industries. Continuing Oracle’s commitment to these industries, this release improves CME organizations ability to increase their most valuable customer’s loyalty and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) through enhancements in Siebel’s loyalty solution outlined in earlier sections. In addition to enhanced loyalty, CME companies can leverage the enriched integration with the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere solution detailed earlier, to drive a seamless multichannel communication experience with robust chat, call back and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) channels. In addition to these enhancements, there have been a number of CME specific enhancements made as a part of the CME application suite including a nextgeneration self service application tailored to the needs of the CME industries and greater out of the box support for the most common pre-paid support processes. Siebel Self-Service for Communications, Media and Energy

Siebel CME plans to offer a next generation self-service application which takes advantage of the rich capabilities delivered as a part of the Siebel eCommerce and Siebel eSupport base offerings. This solution has been built to work seamlessly with the Siebel CME applications and the Web services that have been exposed in those applications. Enabling Location-Based Product Eligibility Ensure a consistent and seamless customer experience across channels for your mission critical sales and service processes.

Siebel eCommerce for Communications will leverage the core eligibility and compatibility capabilities delivered with the Siebel Customer Order Management 7.8 release and enable service providers to leverage the same product rules defined for their contact center within the self-service channel. Shared products and product rules ensure that the right product is offered to the right customer in a consistent manner, therefore increasing customer satisfaction while at the same time driving revenue. Product eligibility can be used to restrict the set of products to which a customer has access. The most commonly used form of eligibility is geographic-based eligibility where customers in certain states, countries or postal codes are not eligible for certain products.

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Siebel Self Service for Communications provides the out of the box views and logic to enable a user to enter their postal code so that only their eligible products are returned. Alternatively, a user could choose to bypass this entry and the full set of products would be available for their selection. In addition, the user can choose to change their location at any point during the browsing experience. The use of a geographic based eligibility rules adds an additional user paradigm to those offered through the Siebel Self-Service base offering which includes anonymous users and logged in users. Requesting a user-entered postal code allows CME organizations to offer a third user paradigm which allows the customer the benefits associated with anonymity while at the same time restricting the set of products presented to the customer.

Fig. 102 – Enter zip code page enables location-based product eligibility for self-service users. New Service Activation – A Guided Flow New service activation enables a complex process to be simplified and streamlined reducing the number of abandoned carts and increasing order completions and customer satisfaction.

Purchasing a new service plan and the corresponding equipment can require a complex series of steps and decision points which has traditionally limited the percentage of new orders placed through self-service sites within the CME industries. As CME organizations look to drive business to their Websites to leverage this low cost to serve, they need a guided selling flow, similar to the taskbased user interface offered as a part of the Siebel CRM 8.0 release. In Siebel CEM, new service activation provides the following capabilities:


Ability to choose preferred purchase path by selecting the desired device or service first, or selecting from a set of pre-defined packages.




Browse for a specific category of product, such as devices and services.




Decision steps allowing, for example, a customer who has elected to choose their service first, to indicate whether they would like to purchase a new device to go with the service or use an existing device.




A process-based approach enabling up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, such as presenting the relevant accessories to be built into the customer experience.

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Fig. 103 – New self-service activation view in Siebel Self-Service for Communications Changing Billing Preferences

As service providers look to drive costs out of their business and drive stickiness amongst their customer base, they are increasingly looking to online presentation of billing data and analytics/reporting data that can be offered as a part of that bill presentment. This set of functionality allows a customer to update their account to choose to receive their bill online. This capability has been built to work seamlessly with Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management. This feature provides the following capabilities:


Ability to change billing preferences.




Ability to change payment method.




Ability to add a new billing profile which contains the user’s billing preferences and preferred payment method.

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Fig. 104 – Change billing preferences online using Siebel Self-Service for Communications

Self-Service Change Order Support

Given the constantly evolving service offerings from provider, change orders represent the most common type of order within the CME industries. To fully realize the cost savings associated with the self-service channel, CME organizations must support both new and change orders within their online solution. Siebel Self-Service for Communications has a series of views, processes and logic to support the most common change orders leading to a lower total cost of ownership and a consistent customer experience across channels. Modify Service

The modify service set of capabilities represents a guided flow supporting a series of different types of changes to different types of services or promotional packages. The purpose of the guided flow is to offer a fully functional set of change order capabilities while hiding the complex logic, product rules and different product models from the user. Modify service supports basic changes to a service plan, like moving from a 200minute plan to a 400-minute plan as well as the pricing recalculation that is associated with the change in plan. Modify service also supports a scenario where a customer has purchased a promotional package that includes multiple services. The self service application supports the ability to add an additional add on line to

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an existing promotion or to make any other changes that fit within the promotional rules as defined within the Siebel application. The modify service flow contains a series of decision steps prompting the user with simple decisions or questions that enable the modify service process to contain a series of paths depending on the type of service the customer has; the type of product model used to define the service; and the type of change that the customer is trying to make. In addition to changes to their selected service, this flow includes the ability to move from one promotional package to another, enabling a customer to upgrade to a new promotional offering, thus driving increased revenue.

Fig. 105 – Modify service online using Siebel Self-Service for Communications Change Equipment

The change equipment process flow encompasses another common type of change order – moving from one piece of equipment or device to another. Similar to the modify service process flow, the change equipment process supports a number of different types of product models and types of changes. For example, change of equipment could be represented as the purchase of a new handset in a wireless example or a request for a new set top box for a cable provider. The guided flow allows the user to select the asset for which they are changing their equipment and then browse to select the new device. The change order representing both the old equipment and newly ordered equipment is created and the appropriate price and costs are associated with the order. Suspend Service

The suspend service process flow allows a user to select the service that they would like to suspend and then enter the suspension date, resumption date (if known) and any relevant comments. The self-service application then creates the suspension order and submits it to the Siebel Communications. Resume Service

Similar to the suspend service capabilities, the resume service process flow enables a user to request service resumption. This resumption order is passed to Siebel

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Communication, where it can go through further routing to ensure that it is passed to the appropriate activation and billing systems. Change Payment Method

Siebel Self-Service for Communications has also provided a set of views and logic to enable CME organizations to offer self-service capabilities around changing payment methods so CME organizations have accurate credit and debit card information on file. Shopping Cart and Checkout

Siebel Self-Service for Communications offers two distinct checkout experiences: one for a business customer and another, more streamlined checkout process for a consumer customer. By offering these two set of process flows and user interfaces, CME organizations can tailor the user experience while leveraging the same underlying Siebel CRM functionality. This approach of combining the robustness of the Siebel CRM application with the flexibility of a J2EE-based user interface underlines the direction that Oracle has taken in creating a best of breed self service application. B2B Checkout Preferences

The B2B checkout enables a simplified process with robust flexibility to decrease the amount of time that it takes administrative users of CME organizations’ largest customers to accomplish their most frequent tasks. At the same time it offers the flexibility to meet the diverse scenarios that large corporate customers require. The checkout capabilities allow B2B administrators to purchase new services for groups of users while having the relevant equipment shipped to one or many locations. By enabling locations to be specified at the individual line level, business customers are able to have equipment, such as a new mobile handset, delivered to individuals at their homes or at their office, or to a central location for distribution by the corporate administrator. The checkout flow also allows a business customer to place an order that is billed to a single billing account or department, or for each individual item to be billed separately. This flexibility helps CME organizations place a single order for individuals whose expenses span different billing departments or organizations, and as a result, support whatever type of billing and accounting practices their customers choose to implement. Similarly, the B2B checkout flow allows subscriber information to be captured, allowing a single corporate administrator to be represented as the subscriber for all services; the individual end users to be represented as the subscribers; or some combination of the two. The checkout process also allows customers to choose whether they would like to be assigned a new number or port an existing number.

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B2C Checkout Preferences

In contrast, the B2C checkout flow has been built with simplicity in mind. While the shipping, billing, and subscriber data can be changed and specified, the user interface has been simplified and the number of steps has been reduced to move toward a one-click checkout process.

Fig. 106 – Shopping cart and checkout screenshot in Siebel Self-Service for Communications

Pre-Paid Service Support Prepaid services represent a large and growing market segment and Siebel’s out of the box support allows providers to drive down their total cost of ownership

Siebel CME offers new functionality for managing pre-paid services – a large and growing segment that has historically been defined as a high-volume, low ARPU market segment. As a result, the pre-paid features were built to execute in a highly performant, scalable and cost effective manner. The inclusion of out-of the-box support for the most common pre-paid service processes represents additional opportunities for business process optimization on the part of service providers. This is manifested through an elimination of the need to switch between applications; increased automation of critical steps; and ultimately the end-to-end sales and service processes are further streamlined for efficiency and consistency. Pre-paid transactions may take place through a number of different channels: •

Contact Center: Agents require visibility into all relevant customer profile, account, and usage information. To enable full support of all sales and service issues via Siebel CME, the application was extended to include the views, processes and logic required to support service activation, top-ups, credits, service requests, balance information, account management, and orders for all pre-paid and value-added services.

•

Retail: Retail sales and service representatives need access to the same customer information as contact center agents enabling the retail outlet to support all appropriate sales and service transactions using Siebel PRM.

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Handset: The handset will be integrated to the Siebel CRM system. Any activities processed through the handset, including activation, downloads, and top-ups will immediately be visible to sales and service agents, as appropriate, across any channel. Agents or the system will be able to contact the customer through the handset to complete activation or deliver offers and notification of low balance, status on service issues, etc.

•

Siebel CME plans to support both new service activation as well as a pre-paid to post-paid migration. The high level processes supported include new activation, pre-paid to post-paid migration, usage/balance inquiry, and top-up.

Fig. 107 – Pre-paid service view in Siebel Communications High-Level Processes

New views, processes and business logic have been added to Siebel CME including:


A new view displaying the service profile, current balance, and Intelligent Network activities enabling a single view of a prepaid customers’ most relevant information.




Ability to display service specific current balance, Intelligent Network activities (download, calls, top-up) and top-up transactions so that accounts who have multiple prepaid services with a CME organization can have the information specific to each of their various services.




Ability to view top-up history for each service so the customer’s history can be well understood as context for their current request.




Support for top-up using credit card, voucher, promotion, and complimentary credit




Ability to validate a voucher and retrieve a voucher balance to apply to a top-up to ensure that there is no revenue leakage through the use of invalid or depleted vouchers.

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Support for administrative capabilities, including the ability to differentiate products as either pre-paid or post paid products.




Multiple billing profiles enabling a customer to maintain more the one payment method. The relationship between how a customer pays for a service and the service itself is tracked throughout the full order lifecycle, starting with the quote and moving to the order and ultimately to the asset.

Integration Support for Oracle Application Integration Architecture

Oracle offers a pre-built integration of Oracle’s Siebel Communications, Media and Energy (CME) and Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) using Oracle Application Integration Architecture Process Integration Packs (PIP). This pre-built integration of Siebel CME and Oracle BRM ensures the accuracy and near real-time availability of customer, billing, product, and pricing data through:


Product and price synchronization




Account, contact, address and billing profile synchronization




Integrated order management o

Process sales order

o

Initiate billing on fulfilled services

o

Update order status

To support this integration, Siebel CME will include new VBC-based views that enable an agent to retrieve information from Oracle BRM for:


Real-time view of balance groups & balance details




Real time display of unbilled usage information




View of invoice details




View of payment and adjustment history




Capture of payments for an invoice and submission of data to Oracle BRM for processing




Capture of new adjustment requests into Siebel CME and submission of data to Oracle BRM for processing

These views supporting Siebel CME and Oracle BRM integration will be supported through the Siebel CME Billing Management product. Customers deploying this integration through Oracle must purchase this product in combination with appropriate Oracle Application Integration Architecture Process Integration Pack licenses:

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The Oracle Communications Integration Pack for Order to Bill




The Communications Agent Assisted Billing Care PIP

For more information about PIPs visit http://aia.oraclecorp.com/products/indspc.html.

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SIEBEL FINANCIAL SERVICES Product Group Visibility

Investment banking has undergone many changes as a result of consolidation, globalization, deregulation, increased competition, and compliance requirements. In this new market place, Oracle provides a comprehensive solution that allows investment banks to effectively manage client interaction and complex relationships. Due to the changes and trends within investment banking - plus the deployment of cross divisional/functional CRM within financial institutions – investment banking division are requiring more granular access and relationship visibility. Oracle is working with our customers to solve this challenge. Product group visibility in Siebel Financial Services empowers our customers to succeed. Chinese walls are the boundaries that separate the different functions and divisions within financial institutions. The walls aim to prevent the transmission of confidential client information across divisions in the firm. Siebel Financial Services plans to allow the investment bank to model and maintain Chinese wall criteria within the application to ensure that confidential information is kept secure. Siebel Financial Services contains various levels of security that restrict access to information and application functionality. Information can be secured based on user information. This functionality allows members of the investment banking team to have access to different information than members of the sales and research departments. In Siebel Financial Services, product group visibility enables one product group to share or not share information with another product group(s) while respecting regulatory requirements and the need for privacy between select product groups. This visibility supports matrix-based financial institutions, regions, divisions and specific product functions or team groupings. Product Group Visibility Benefits and Features

With Siebel Financial Services planned product group visibility feature, financial services organizations can obtain a variety of business benefits including:


Ensuring that valuable customer relationship information across the organization is captured and accessed at the right time, by the right resources.




Increased data quality, and process consistency, through a confidence in data level access across product group functional and divisions.




Deeper relationship and sales penetration through better quality relationship information across product group functional and divisions.

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Enhanced executive transparency and visibility into the financial institution’s complete relationship across the entire enterprise.




Respect for industry rules, regulations, and compliance.

Fig. 108 – Product Group Visibility Application View Applet Logic

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SIEBEL HOSPITALITY

Siebel Hospitality 8.1.1 helps hospitality companies streamline revenue capture across all channels; ensure that bookings reflect the optimal pricing and selection of products in accordance with local demands; maximize the usage of available inventory; and coordinate all planning and operations processes of events across multiple properties. Sales representatives can capture leads, check inventory availability, design and price tailored solutions, generate property specific quotes and create contracts in a single interaction using Siebel Hospitality. Opportunity Booking Enhancements Enhanced Opportunity functionality that includes: o

Users will now have the ability to send multiple and/or additional quotes for the same opportunity to the same property

o

Users now have the ability to allow multiple quotes go definite

Enhanced Quote functionality that includes: o

Users will have the ability to turn off automatic status change when a quote goes definite

o

When a quote has its status changed to definite, the other quotes won't automatically have their status changed to turndown

By adding these new enhancements to Siebel Hospitality, users will be able to provide the customer with more valuable information needed to secure the customer booking.

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SIEBEL LIFE SCIENCES

Siebel Life Sciences 8.1.1 introduces the next major evolution of Siebel’s industryleading CRM applications designed to support the pharmaceutical, medical and medical device industries. Siebel Life Sciences is a comprehensive suite of applications that enables companies to manage, synchronize and coordinate all customer interactions across multiple channels. Siebel Life Sciences 8.1.1 extends its Siebel Life Sciences offerings to better enable companies to manage samples more effectively and support personalized detailing as part of the closed-loop marketing process. Sample Compliance and Accountability

Product sampling has proven to be a powerful marketing vehicle for the pharmaceutical industry. Use of product samples for product promotion by pharmaceutical companies around the world is governed by local country legislations. In the United States, samples distribution is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and the Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA). The process of managing samples and ensuring the company is in compliance with this process is critical for all companies. Siebel Pharma 8.1.1 offers advanced functionality, elevating your ability to comply with PDMA regulations to an unprecedented level. It provides an end-to-end solution for sales and sample compliance groups that enable customers to incorporate and enforce business processes in accordance with federal and regional government regulations ensuring improved accountability and compliance throughout the organization. It enhances the ability of pharmaceutical companies to manage and maintain an electronic inventory of samples and promotional items using Siebel Pharma samples management while providing better control and oversight of the sample management process. Siebel samples management allows sales representatives and/or administrators to measure and monitor sample disbursements at every level throughout the organization. These enhancements include: Allocation-Based Sampling

Sales management can control field sampling activity by defining thresholds and controls on what and how much can be sampled for a given period. This allows better control and ability to maximize your investment with these promotional resources. Control Sample Replenishment Orders

Sales management can control field force sample replenishment orders by defining thresholds and controls on what and how much can be requested for a given period. This allows better control over samples and orders can be fulfilled in a timely manner.

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Support for Direct Mail-fulfilled Sample Request Process

Sales representatives can disburse or request samples for direct and mail fulfillment. Transactions can be tracked from request to shipment to acknowledgement. Dynamic Disclaimers

Dynamic disclaimers can be generated for signature capture forms depending on a variety of factors such as: type of sampling activity, who is being sampled, which state samples are being distibuted in, and the type of samples (controlled/non-controlled substances) being distributed. Sample Compliance Home Page and Dashboard for Proactive alerts

Enables home office analysts to quickly investigate and resolve inventory and delivery discrepancies. Administrator Managed Inventory and Reconciliation Processes

Enables sample compliance users and/or sales reps to maintain an accurate and comprehensive account of all sample activity from distribution and inspections to inventory reconciliation. Exception Case and Incident Management

Allows sample compliance analyst to track sales rep accountability exceptions. Enables analysts to consolidate diverse information about a field representative into a single view and then track the case. Improved Signature Audit with Follow-up Tracking

Allows home office users to view signatures captured from multiple sources and sample requests on one page; fulfill receipt requests of electronic disbursement transactions; and verify signatures for audits. Sample compliance analysts can also flag exceptions and complete physician follow-up procedures. Approval and Signature Processes for Adjustments

Allows home office review of all adjustments made by sales reps and verifies them before including them in calculations. You can also enforce electronic signatures capture before submitting any transaction for approval. Inventory Audit and Location Inspection Reports

Allows sales reps, managers and inventory auditors to submit interim/closeout physical inventory counts and location inspection reports. Provides automatic tracking and processing of sample shipments and transactions, including disbursements, transfers, partial transfers, returns, loss, and inventory management for sales reps and independent 3rd party physical inventory counts.

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Siebel Personalized Content Delivery

Siebel Personalized Content Delivery improves the value delivered by closed-loop marketing processes. It provides the ability for marketing teams to improve the planning, execution, analysis, and adjustment of all marketing activities including leveraging the sales force channel to deliver tailored messages for different customer segments. It allows marketing teams to adjust and distribute messages along with relevant digital content in an efficient way. In addition, Personalized Content Delivery provides the ability for marketing teams to gather information on customer needs through assessments and surveys in a more timely fashion. Insight collected by the sales force can be leveraged by marketing teams to refine existing messages, change tactics and develop new and more effective marketing strategies. Siebel Personalized Content Delivery solution makes it is possible to deliver high impact experiences tailored to customer needs using multimedia visualization content created by the marketing teams. It allows sales teams to deliver the right message, to the right customer at the right time to optimize each selling opportunity, resulting in improved customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention. Planned features of Siebel Personalized Content Delivery 8.1.1 include: Ease of Managing Content

Personalized Content Delivery solution improves processes associated with message and content distribution. The solution enables customers the flexibility to work with content providers of their choice without the need for proprietary content authoring tools. Approved marketing content can be loaded and distributed using permission-based access control by leveraging existing Siebel Remote infrastructure without the need for a separate infrastructure to distribute content to remote users. Drag and Drop Message Assembly

Personalized Content Delivery solution provides an easy to use drag and drop capability for brand managers to assemble messaging content. The Personalized Content Delivery solution is integrated into the campaign management processes to allow brand managers to further optimize their multi-channel marketing strategy.

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Fig. 109 – Personalized Content Delivery message planner

Integrated into Sales Process

Personalized Content Delivery solution extends the current Siebel’s call reporting capability making it easy to complete an end-to-end sales process without the need for expensive integration into third-party software. Brand Management

Personalized Content Delivery ensures consistency and accuracy of the message and improves the quality of the sales call. It provides control mechanisms to lock down content, organize messages and manage fair-balance messaging requirements for highly regulated industries. Designed for Customer-Facing Interactions

Personalized Content Delivery provides an easy to use, smart solution for sales representatives to deliver rich, interactive digital marketing content. It is designed to help engage in a meaningful dialog, present key messages, leverage the high interactive content capabilities provided by Flash, video and other industry content formats. One-Click Access

Personalized Content Delivery provides one-click access to start an interaction session, switch between different product messages, show related collateral and collect feedback. For industries such as life sciences, sales representatives also have one-click access to capture electronic signatures for samples during their physician interactions.

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Automated Tracking

Personalized Content Delivery allows automated tracking of customer interaction, navigation path, tracking of content used, time spent on each asset and click-stream data within each asset. Dynamic Assessments

Personalized Content Delivery allows capturing feedback from customers, follow-ups for sales representatives, and conducting assessments to capture customer's needs and beliefs. Marketing and sales managers can easily create new assessments to capture additional data to improve their targeting and messaging effectiveness. Intelligent Message Selection

Information collected during interactions (used in conjunction with other customer related information) helps determine the next best action for the sales representative. Personalized Content Delivery provides an extensible messaging optimizer to auto-load the optimal set of messages for each customer interaction.

Fig. 110 – Siebel Personalized Content Delivery viewer

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SIEBEL PUBLIC SECTOR

Siebel Public Sector changes the way governments interact with citizens by providing the ability to fill out electronic forms online and submit those forms directly to the Siebel case management system. In Siebel Public Sector, once citizens complete an electronic form, the government agency will have the choice of allowing the data to be automatically transferred to the Siebel Pubic Sector self-service application, or to be reviewed by an agency employee who can take an action (i.e. click a button) to upload the data to Siebel. Self-Service Features for Siebel Public Sector Online Form Locator

Citizens and agency employees can search for the appropriate form by name, number or type using the online form locator in Siebel Public Sector

Fig. 111 – Siebel CRM Online Form Locator Suspended/Resume Intake

Government forms are oftentimes complex, requiring citizens and agency employees to collect information from a variety of sources to accurately complete the form. Siebel Public Sector plans to provide government agencies with two options to streamline this process:


Citizens can create a user name and password and return to complete the form at any time it is convenient.




Citizens are able to submit the form without creating a user name and password.

When a citizen creates a user name and password, the form is saved on the Adobe Form Server. The citizen is then able to return to the Siebel Public Sector self-

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service portal, re-enter the user name and password, and complete the form when it is convenient. Citizens can also enter form data without the creation of a user name and password, submitting the date directly to the Siebel case management solution. Required Field Prompts

Government agencies require certain information to be captured to determine a citizen’s eligibility for benefits, file taxes or initiate the creation of a case. When designing forms in Siebel Tools, administrators are able to specify required fields. Upon deploying the Adobe Form on the Siebel Self-Service solution, these fields are then highlighted. When a citizen tries to submit a form without completing all required fields, they receive an error message. This process is completed on the backend through form data validation. When the user clicks the Submit button on a form, Siebel validates that all required fields are filled in properly, and may also include additional validations set by the administrator. If the form does not satisfy the validations rules, the user will be prevented from submitting it and given the opportunity to make the necessary changes.

Fig. 112 – Required field prompts on the Siebel Public Sector self-service page Capture of Required Fee and/or Supporting Documentation

Many government services require a fee for certain services (for example, a building permit or passport renewal). The Siebel Public Sector 8.1 self-service solution provides the ability to capture payment information via credit card,

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automated clearing house (ACH) and other forms of payments from the citizen after the form is completed, but before the final submission. In addition to capturing payment information, Siebel Public Sector 8.1 provides the ability to capture supporting documentation (for example, copy of driver’s license or paystub). The system prompts the citizen to attach required supporting documentation prior to the application being uploaded into the Siebel case management system. Form Submission

The self-service capabilities in Siebel Public Sector 8.1 will provide a number of features to support the form submission process including confirmation numbers, data validation and contact matching. Upon submitting a form through the online portal using Siebel Public Sector 8.1, a confirmation will appear on the citizen’s screen as well as a message which indicates when they should expect to hear back about the status of the application. Citizens can check on the status of their form submission by querying the confirmation number on the portal site. Prior to processing the citizen’s application for benefits, the Siebel Public Sector 8.1 solution will route the application to an employee case folder for review of all required data elements. Only employees can upload an application form into the system. At this stage, employees will either create a new contact or match an ID. For creating a new contact, the form will create the new contact record, including the form data, and use the data to update additional child data elements. When searching for an ID match, the system will prompt the user for a unique identifier (for example, Social Security Number) to identify the existing contact record. Once a match is found, the contact data in the form is compared to existing data in the record, and any discrepancies presented to the user to resolve. The rest of the form data will then be uploaded to the child records-related contacts, case, households, addresses, vehicles, assets, and more. Data from the citizen/employee application form will be transferred to the Siebel Public Sector application so that the agency has a historical record of the data as submitted at that point in time. Employees will then upload the application into the system. During the upload process, a master case record will be located or created; one case will be created for each program the citizen applies for; and relevant data from the form(s) is imported into the appropriate Siebel contact, household and case records. All cases generated from the application are imported as child objects to the master case. In addition to uploading individual cases, the agent is able to select multiple applications from multiple contacts and upload one at a time or all of the applications at once. The information that is contained in the application is populated into the appropriate fields within Siebel Public Sector.

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Form Administration

Through integration with Siebel Public Sector and Adobe Lifecycle Server, administrators can use Siebel Tools to map fields in a given form to the Siebel schema. The self-service capabilities in Siebel Public Sector 8.1 release will provide a Siebel administrative view to manage all the forms that have been mapped, as well as payments and supporting documents associated with specific application forms. Verification Template

The verification template will let the agency administrator define the set of items that must be verified for a certain case type. As new cases come in, and a case type is assigned to them, the cases worker will automatically get to see the items that must be verified for the open case. This capability is expected to enhance consistency of service and reduce errors in servicing a citizen’s case. Once the caseworker has verified the items listed in the case, the case can move to the next stage.

Fig. 113 – Verification plans and verification items in Siebel Public Sector 8.1.1

Quality Assurance Template

The quality assurance template will let the government agency define the items that must be reviewed during a quality assurance assessment. The quality assurance worker applies a checklist to a case in their work queue. This checklist is a sequence of actions that need to be performed as well as a list of items that need to be addressed. Some of the questions that can be included in the quality assurance template are: - Was this case resolved in a satisfactory timeframe? - Was a follow-up call performed?

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This is expected to help the government agency offers consistency of service according to rules, regulations, policies and/or for legal compliance and in accordance with local, state, regional, provincial and country regulations.

Fig. 114 – Quality assurance plans and items in Siebel Public Sector 8.1.1

Benefits Plan The benefits plan object provides one place to track all the services and benefits delivered to a constituent. The benefits Pplan will list all of the programs an individual is eligible for. For each program, the system highlights the specific benefits the individual recipients will receive as well as all those activities a recipient must conduct in order to remain eligible for a given program. Typically in a social services environment, there are a number of individuals involved in the administration of benefits to a recipient. These participants can vary from nonprofits and other agencies to local governments. The benefits plan provides mechanisms for assigning individual services to partners and providers, and gives partners the ability to provide input on the status of a benefit line item and relevant activities that impact the case.

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Fig. 115 – Benefit Plan and Relevant Objects

Benefits Plan History Changes in an individual’s living situation can impact what programs and services he/she is eligible for. As changes in circumstances are evaluated, new benefit plans must be created to reflect these changes. At the same time, it is important for the organization to keep track of not just current benefits, but previous benefits provided to an individual. The Siebel benefits case management system provides a benefits plan history view where old benefit plans can be archived to provide an audit trail of all benefits administered to the individual and his/her family. Flag Related Cases New in Siebel Public Sector 8.1.1, the master case object provides a single view into all the cases being administered to an individual. When contact, relationship, income or demographic fields are changed that impact eligibility at the case level, the master case file is flagged so case workers assigned on other cases are aware of the change(s) and can evaluate eligibility.

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Oracle Business Intelligence Applications

ORACLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS

Enterprises depend on information to optimize performance. However, most organizations are hampered by information that is incomplete, out of date, or otherwise inadequate for answering critical business questions. Additionally, organizations often struggle to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. Oracle Business Intelligence Applications provide the most integrated and up-to-date pre-built analytical solution for Siebel CRM 8.1.1. Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Business Adapter

Oracle Business Intelligence Applications provides a wide array of adapters to Siebel CRM source systems for data extraction and loading into the pre-built Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. Built upon the industry leading Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) Plus technology platform, the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications for CRM (Oracle Sales Analytics, Oracle Service Analytics, Oracle Marketing Analytics) have been industry leading customer analytics applications for a number of years. An upcoming release of Oracle BI Applications includes planned support for Siebel CRM 8.1.1. This will extend the existing broad support for Siebel CRM 6.3, 7.5.x, 7.7.x, 7.8.x and 8.0.x applications even further. Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics

In today’s increasingly competitive marketplace, a company’s contact center can become an important source of competitive advantage. Companies with topperforming contact centers typically have more satisfied customers, lower operating costs, and higher revenue per customer. To achieve these results, however, organizations must rigorously track and analyze key contact center metrics – for example, first call resolution rates, average call handle times, transfer rates, revenue per agent, and cost per contact – and take the appropriate actions to maintain their performance levels. Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics provides organizations with insight that enables them to analyze key aspects of contact center performance. The solution provides best-practice metrics, alerts, and key performance indicators (KPIs) enabling companies to take targeted action

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to improve employee productivity, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction. Contact center analytics have traditionally been confined to telephony metrics generated by switches of CTI systems, leaving contact center managers with an incomplete picture of contact center performance. Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics displays information from the telephony switch, routing middleware, and CRM systems to contact center professionals, providing timely insight that enables them to take action. With Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics, contact center professionals can spot potential issues and identify opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and improve customer satisfaction. As staffing costs continue to climb, contact centers are implementing new technologies to ensure that service requests are handled as cost-effectively as possible. Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics is built on an open analytics platform that integrates with web servers, IVR, ACD and CTI solutions. As such, Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics provides an integrated view of key metrics across channels, including IVR, email, and the web. Supervisors can analyze trends and usage of each channel and determine where customers abandon lower costs channels, like an IVR menu or web page, in favor of talking to a CSR. The application also displays cost per contact, channel response times, and customer channel preference. Understanding how channels are used and identifying problem areas enables organizations to make improvements and point customers to the best channel for each type of interaction.

Fig. 116 – Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics dashboard.

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Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics provides contact center managers with access to actionable information that can be used to drive greater satisfaction, lower cost, and increased revenue. Oracle Sales Analytics

Oracle Sales Analytics, a part of the BI Applications family, helps sales organizations leverage the power of timely, actionable information to improve decision making and ultimately drive results. It is a comprehensive analytic solution that provides timely, fact based insight into the entire sales process. It provides new levels of information richness, usability and reach to sales professionals throughout the enterprise and in the field. Sales executives can obtain insight into their sales organization’s performance, look at trends and identify exceptions to take corrective action. Sales managers can analyze team performance, pipeline opportunities and forecasts to determine actions required to meet sales targets. Sales reps can determine which products and customer segments generate the most revenue and how to effectively cross-sell and up-sell in existing accounts. With Oracle Sales Analytics, organizations can make faster, informed decisions enabling them to compete more effectively, lower sales costs and achieve better results. The Usage Accelerator functionality of Sales Analytics is a powerful solution that helps Oracle’s Siebel Sales customers monitor, measure and manage sales force adoption and effectiveness. It is beneficial to users at all levels in a sales organization. With this functionality, organizations are able to derive maximum value from their sales force automation implementations. Oracle Sales Analytics is tightly integrated with Siebel Applications and is planned to be interoperable with Siebel 8.1.1.

Fig. 117 – Sales Team Effectiveness analysis for Siebel CRM

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Oracle Marketing Analytics

Success of a business depends on how fast it is identifying the needs and wants of the market and proactively addressing them. Marketers have an increasing amount of data available to them as they seek to develop marketing strategies and plans, the key challenge is to harness the information contained in the data to effectively and efficiently grow the business and sustain it over time. Successful marketing requires excellence in both qualitative and quantitative analysis of marketplace factors. Marketing Analytics empowers the business to achieve all these. With its out-of-the-box dashboards and reports tailored towards a variety of users, Marketing Analytics makes the BI truly pervasive. Marketing Analytics provides extensive coverage on Campaign Planning and Performance Analysis, Customer Insight (for B2B and B2C), Event Management, and Segmentation areas. There are more than 500 metrics available out–of-thebox, sliced and diced by a variety of dimensions. Marketing Analytics leverages on the highly scalable and robust Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus technology platform along with the BI Applications architecture and the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. The conforming dimensions across the CRM and back-office applications make it possible to have a complete 360 degree view of the customers. Oracle Marketing Analytics is tightly integrated with Siebel Applications and is planned to be interoperable with Siebel 8.1.1.

Fig. 118 – Campaign Performance Scorecard, Order Summary, Response Trends & Segmentation Analysis for Siebel CRM

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Oracle Service Analytics

Oracle Service Analytics is designed to help organizations leverage the power of timely, reliable information to optimize service center performance and improve the quality of customer service. Oracle Service Analytics provides service center professionals with timely and comprehensive insight that enables them to take action. With Oracle Service Analytics, service center professionals can view the entire customer relationship; spot potential issues; and identify opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and improve customer satisfaction. Oracle Service Analytics proactively delivers insight to Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) while they are engaged with a customer, ensuring they always have the latest information they need to make informed decisions. Analytic insight can even be delivered directly to their Siebel CRM systems so CSRs don’t have to change screens when working with a customer. With cross-value chain insight, CSRs have a complete view of the customer’s account, helping them resolve issues quicker and increase cross-selling rates. With Oracle Service Analytics, companies can achieve higher effectiveness and maximize the value of their customer relationships. Oracle Service Analytics is tightly integrated with Siebel Applications and is planned to be interoperable with Siebel 8.1.1.

Fig. 119 – Service Request analysis by channel, region, product line, and severity

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Siebel CRM Industry-Specific Support

In addition to supporting the horizontal capabilities of Siebel CRM Sales, Service and Marketing, Oracle BI Applications also provide deep industry specific analysis to support the many Siebel Industry CRM Solutions including for: •

•

•

•

Siebel Financial Services o

Finance Sales Analytics

o

Finance Service Analytics

o

Finance Marketing Analytics

o

Finance Retail Analytics

o

Finance Institutional Analytics

Siebel Life Sciences Pharmaceuticals o

Pharma Marketing Analytics

o

Pharma Sales Analytics

Siebel Insurance o

Insurance Sales Analytics

o

Insurance Service Analytics

o

Insurance Marketing Analytics

o

Insurance Partner Manager Analytics

Siebel Public Sector Case Management o

•

•

Case Management Analytics

Siebel Telecommunications o

Telecom Sales Analytics

o

Telecom Service Analytics

o

Telecom Marketing Analytics

Siebel Consumer Goods o

Consumer Goods Trade Funds Analytics

Universal Adapter for Siebel and Customer CRM BI Applications

Customers with a mixed deployment of Siebel and custom CRM systems can now take advantage of the newly enhanced Universal Adapter support for the Oracle BI Applications for CRM, namely, Sales, Service and Marketing Analytics. The Universal Adapter provides an open interface for customers to load any additional non-Siebel data sources into the same data warehouse model where Siebel CRM

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data resides. This integration allows customers to leverage the Oracle BI Applications and the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse to perform complete CRM analysis spanning multiple Siebel and custom CRM systems with ease. Tight Integration with Siebel CRM

Oracle BI Applications provide a robust analytical platform that integrates easily with Siebel CRM. The solution offers a number of deployment options including embedding capabilities directly within the Siebel UI. The dashboards and reports can be directly embedded into a separate Siebel Screen, within a Siebel View or Form Applet. The BI reports can be filtered based on contextual information, such as the selected record in a Siebel List Applet. Moreover, individual BI metrics can be added as standard fields in a Siebel Form Applet.

Fig. 120 – Contextual analytics view driven by a Siebel CRM list applet

Oracle BI Applications can leverage the existing security constructs in Siebel CRM to perform user authentication and authorization. Instead of re-creating and storing user IDs and passwords in an Oracle BI repository, the customer can use the Siebel user table for authentication purposes. Similarly for user authorization, BI data coming from CRM can be filtered based on the Siebel Owner, Position, or Organization. Lastly, the Action Link feature in Oracle BI Applications allows users to take action immediately after analysis. A user can navigate from a highly summarized report, to a detail report, and then to the Siebel Screens seamlessly in a single signon environment that maintains the contextual information of the record that has been selected.

Fig. 121 – Direct navigation from BI report to Siebel CRM transactional screen while maintaining context

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Informatica PowerCenter 8.1.1 SP4 Support

Oracle BI Applications leverages an OEM version of the market leading data integration tool, Informatica PowerCenter, to perform the extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations for the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. The upcoming release of Oracle BI Applications that includes planned support for Siebel CRM 8.1.1 will also be leveraging a new version of Informatica PowerCenter, version 8.1.1 SP4. With this upgrade, customers can take advantage of the new supported operating systems, and database technology, and features provided by Informatica. Enhanced Support for Global Deployments

The Oracle BI Applications for CRM provide multi-lingual, multi-currency, and multi-timezone support for global Siebel CRM deployments. The user’s currency and time zone in each CRM transaction are preserved during extraction and loading of the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. Moreover, the Oracle BI Applications have been translated to 28 languages, which include all the languages supported by Siebel 8.1.1.

Fig. 122 – The dashboard text, data and currency is in localized for French

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Oracle Master Data Management (MDM)

ORACLE MASTER DATA MANAGEMENT (MDM)

Oracle Master Data Management (MDM) solution is a set of applications designed to consolidate, cleanse, enrich, and synchronize key business data objects, such as customer and product, across the enterprise and across time. It includes predefined extensible data models and access methods with powerful applications to centrally manage the quality and lifecycle of master business data. To do this, Oracle MDM Data Hubs: •

Consolidate information into one master repository from disparate systems and business lines;

•

Cleanse and enrich data centrally;

•

Governs master data according to organizational rules to insure compliance and reduce risk; and

•

Share data as a single point of truth for a consistent enterprise view.

ENHANCED SIEBEL DATA QUALITY

Siebel Data Quality 8.1 has significant improvements that enhance the quality of customer data with superior matching and cleansing capabilities. The integration leverages Universal Connector, a generalized interface that is capable of making real-time and batch requests to data cleansing and data matching servers. Siebel Data Quality Matching Server allows search, match, and identify duplicate customer records based on key customer attributes. Siebel Data Quality Matching Server

Without requiring programming or changes to existing database tables, the new Siebel Data Quality Matching Server provides search, matching, duplicate discovery and relationship linking for all forms of identification data. Moreover, without impacting database update efficiency, it maintains its own highperformance fuzzy indexes and efficiently de-normalized tables.Siebel Data Quality Matching Server overcomes the unavoidable variation, spelling, keying, and word sequence errors in names, addresses, and identity data – regardless of country, language, or character set. Aliases, compound names, dates of birth, prior addresses, multiple identities and phone numbers are also supported.

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Incoming data can be formatted or unformatted and does not require standardization cleansing, or enhancement beforehand. Moreover, the matching server allows rapid setup and easy rule selection, which avoids the typical, lengthy process of design, program, test, and change. The Siebel Data Quality Matching Server also includes a highly scalable Search Server that operates on both single and multiple processors. It allows new and improved search applications to be quickly implemented for a variety of business purposes, from customer lookup, through file screening, to investigative and clearance searches. The Search Server is scalable for large data volumes, transaction rates and concurrent users. Highperformance indexes are automatically generated and maintained with no change to existing business application programs or databases. The key building algorithms used by Siebel Data Quality Matching Server build rich, highly compressed keys for names, addresses, titles or descriptions. Search strategies are calculated and optimized in real-time based on the data being searched for, the level of risk and the need that the search must satisfy. These range from exhaustive search strategies, where it is essential to prove there is no possible match on file, through typical, to narrow strategies, where performance objectives dominate. Match purposes are tuned and tested to mimic an expert human operator making identification and matching decisions that suit the specific business purpose. Match purposes also support names, addresses, individuals, contacts, residents, households, organizations, divisions and all forms of identities. User-selectable match levels and thresholds allow the user to control the degree of match. DQ Matching

Population Override

Edit Rule

Administrative Clients

Siebel DQ Matching Rule Manager Loader & Utilities Update Synchronizer

Key & Strategy

Console Server

Matc Purpos TM Siebel DQ Matching Server

API User's Batch Processes

User's On-line Transactions

User Interface Data Admin

Application Object

Siebel UCM / CRM

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Siebel Data Quality Cleansing Server

Siebel Data Quality Cleansing Server corrects all address data, filters out superfluous information (stored in separate fields), assesses deliverability, and generates a detailed report with suggestions for possible sources of address problems. It parses both structured and unstructured data, identifies residues, and formats and standardizes the data. Postal reference tables in many countries change frequently as settlements expand or change their names, or country-coding systems change. Siebel Data Quality Cleansing Server utilizes arrangements with many local postal organizations— including Royal Mail, USPS, Canada Post and Australia Post —that allows you to receive monthly, quarterly, or biannual updates. Reference tables for each country are not included as part of Siebel Data Quality 8.1. Many languages, particularly Asian, have limited sounds and must represent foreign names with their syllable alphabets. When these names are transliterated back to the original language they frequently do not exactly match. The Cleansing Server helps overcome this challenge by performing string mapping for 40 character sets and seven alphabets. The Cleansing Server supports both real-time as well as batch updates. DATA WATCH AND REPAIR Data Watch and Repair helps the data steward examine and discover the meaning and quality of the data, in order to proactively perform data governance

Oracle Data Watch and Repair (DWR) is a profiling and correction solution that assists data governance processes undertaken by a data steward. The data steward can use DWR to regularly diagnose and maintain the data quality by running data profiling jobs, assessing the data compliance with existing and new data rules and correcting the data inconsistencies encountered in the process. This is an edge application that is new in Siebel 8.1 and is designed to connect to Siebel and import the relevant tables’ metadata and data into a staging area for profiling and correction purposes. This allows the tool to be minimally intrusive into regular data traffic while giving the data steward an in-depth and flexible framework under which to examine the data and its quality. Data Profiling

Data profiling is the first step to diagnose the data quality of a system within any organization. It is a robust and thorough data analysis method used to discover and evaluate the defects in the system’s data. By doing data profiling, you can discover things about your data, including (but not limited to) a domain of valid zip codes, a range of product discounts, columns that hold the pattern of an e-mail address, a one-to-many relationship between columns and anomalies and outliers within columns.

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Types of Data Profiling

DWR offers the following types of data analysis


Attribute analysis: Discovers both general and detailed information about the structure and content of data stored within a given column or attribute. Attribute analysis looks for information about patterns, domains, data types, and unique values.




Functional dependency: Reveals information about column relationships. This enables users detect any attribute dependencies.




Referential analysis: Detects aspects of data objects that refer to other objects, so as to provide insight into how the objects are connected. Common things detected include orphans, childless objects, redundant objects, and joins.




Data Rule profiling: Enables users to create rules to search for profile parameters within or between objects. This is very powerful as it enables custom rules defined by the business users. Users can then validate their business rules against the actual data and get a score of their accuracy.

Fig. 123 – Data profiling types

The results of a data profile job are presented in both tabular and graphical format. The user can also drill down into any of the results and look at the actual data related to this result.

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Fig. 124 – Profiling results for S_CONTACT table

Assessing Data Compliance

While reviewing and understanding the data profiling results, data rules can be created to attain more insight on specific aspects of the data. A data rule is an expression that determines the set of legal data that can be stored within a data object. Data rules also determine the set of legal relationships that can exist between data objects. Data rules can be easily derived while examining data profiling results based on the results themselves. For example, in the domain results, a domain might be suggested, including all the values that have come up several times in the dataset. Immediately, a data rule can be derived when looking at this domain result. Data rules can also be manually created. For both, created or derived rules, the level of compliance is immediately populated or updated after a change.

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Fig. 125 – Applied data rules showing detail on compliant/non-compliant records Pre-seeded Customer Data Rules

A set of data rules of common usage within CRM and MDM applications have been created. Although not an extensive list, this rule set is aimed to address some common customer requirements. In addition to the built-in data rules that check if data has the standard form of a social security number, a phone number, or has proper date formatting, the following pre-seeded data rules come with the Data Watch and Repair tool and allow users to test customer data on additional constraints. •

Contact Completeness

•

Extended & International Phone Numbers

•

Name Capitalization & Full Name Standardization

•

No Access List by Name, SSN or Email

Data corrections

After creating and applying data rules from the profiling results, users can use DWR to automate the process of correcting source data based on the data profiling results. As part of the correction process, DWR creates corrected tables that adhere to the newly derived data rules and can be written back into Siebel 8.1 through Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager (EIM); as well as correction mappings that can be used and run repeatedly to cleanse the data thereafter.

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Non-compliant data can be ignored, reported or cleansed. There are four possible cleansing strategies, •

Remove: excludes from the corrected object those rows that fail this data rule.

•

Similarity Match: uses the built-in Match-Merge functionality in Oracle Warehouse Builder to change the erroneous value to the one that is most similar to it within the column domain.

•

Soundex Match: uses the SOUNDEX function to change erroneous values to the one within the domain that is the closest phonetic match to it

•

Custom: used where the logic to cleanse the column is more complex, involves other PL/SQL functions, uses conditional logic, or otherwise requires the creation of a custom PL/SQL function.

After a correction is defined, new definitions that hold the corrected data, as well as the correction mapping and transformations, will be automatically generated. These mappings can then be re-run at any future point to correct the data again. After the data is corrected appropriately, users can then write the results back into Siebel. An additional mapping is created to map the corrected data to the corresponding Siebel EIM table, which can then populate the corrected data to the base table.

Fig. 126 – Automatically generated correction mapping

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Platform Support

With Siebel CRM, Oracle plans to provide a comprehensive suite of applications that enables customers to leverage their investments in leading technologies from Oracle and partners (including HP, IBM, Microsoft and Sun) to deploy the most comprehensive multichannel CRM solution. Specifically, it is expected that Siebel CRM will enable companies to:


Take advantage of the latest server technologies to provide increased performance and scalability with compelling returns on investment.




Leverage the most recent versions of market-leading operating systems, databases, and Web servers to provide applications with improved security, easier administration, and greater flexibility.




Deploy solutions that adhere to their existing IT infrastructure standards, reducing implementation and administration costs.




Implement a global solution supporting multilingual data and localization to lower deployment and training costs.

With Siebel CRM, it is planned to provide support for the operating systems, database platforms, languages, and clients listed in the following tables. Further platform-specific details, such as the required minimum maintenance levels for all platforms and third-party products will be specified by the Siebel CRM System Requirements and Supported Platforms Guide, published along with the release.

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SIEBEL ENTERPRISE SERVER PLATFORMS

It is planned that Siebel Enterprise Servers will support the platforms specified in the following table. Server Operating System

Version

Server Platform

HP-UX 11i v2

11.23 or above

HP Integrity servers

IBM AIX 5L

5.3 w/ML04 or above

IBM pSeries servers

Microsoft Windows (32 bit)

2003 w/SP1 or above

Intel-compatible x86-based servers

Sun Solaris

10 with SP6 or above

SPARC V9 compatible servers

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (32 bit)

4.0 w/ Update 2

Intel-compatible x86-based servers

Novell SuSE Enterprise (32 bit)

9.0 + SP’s

Intel-compatible x86-based servers

Oracle Enterprise Linux (32 bit)

4.0 w/ Update 2

Intel-compatible x86-based servers

J2EE APPLICATION SERVERS

It is planned that Siebel CRM will support the Application Servers specified in the table below. Application Server

Version

BEA WebLogic Server

9.2

IBM WebSphere Application Server

6.1

Oracle Application Server

10.1.3

SIEBEL WEB SERVER PLATFORMS

It is planned that Siebel Web Servers will support the platforms specified in the table below. Web Server Software

Operating System

Server Platform

HP Web Server v2.16 or above

HP-UX 11i v2 for Itanium

HP Integrity servers

IBM HTTP Server 6.1 or above

AIX 5.3

IBM pSeries

Red Hat Enterprise Server 4 Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Microsoft IIS 6.0 or above

Microsoft Windows 2003

Intel-compatible x86based servers

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Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 SP4

Sun Solaris 10

UltraSPARC or

or above

SPARC64 V9 compatible servers

Oracle HTTP Server 10.1.3 (Apache Web Server v2.x or above)

Red Hat Linux Server 4

Intel-compatible x86-

Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 kernel

based servers

level 2.6.9-42.0.0.0.1 Novell SuSE Enterprise Linux 9

SIEBEL DATABASE SERVER PLATFORMS

It is planned that Siebel CRM will support a wide variety of relational database management systems and database operating systems.

Database

Version

Operating System

Microsoft SQL Server 2005, SP1

2005

IBM Universal Database (UDB) Enterprise Server Edition IBM Universal Database (UDB) for System Z

V9, with FixPak 2 or above 8 + RML

Available on all Microsoft Windows Server 2003 supported platforms. Available on all IBM UDB LUW supported platforms. IBM UDB for System Z and OS/ 390 v8 (with Required maintenance Level as specified by APAR ii13985) Available on all Oracle supported platforms. Available on all Oracle supported platforms.

Oracle 11g Enterprise Server Oracle 11g Standard Edition

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HIGH INTERACTIVITY-MODE CLIENTS

The Siebel CRM Smart Web Architecture is expected to support a high interactivity (HI) deployment mode that will provide a powerful user interface delivered through a Web browser. HI mode will provide support for characteristics such as minimal screen refresh, implicit record commit, and optimal network utilization due to the separate retrieval of data and layout. HI mode relies on advanced browser capabilities, such as Document Object Model (DOM), Java, and ActiveX controls to deliver this functionality. In general, HI mode is available only for Siebel “employee applications” such as Siebel Sales and Siebel Contact Center that are used by internal employees of an enterprise. IT departments can generally ensure that internal employees are running browsers that support HI mode. A complete listing of employee applications will be provided in the Siebel CRM System Requirements and Supported Platforms Guide. The table below lists the planned supported Web browsers and client operating systems that support HI mode.

Browser Client Operating System

Internet Explorer 6.0

Internet Explorer 7.0

Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 or above

X

X

Microsoft Windows XP Professional

X

X

X

X

Edition SP2 or above Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 SP2 or above X = Supported

STANDARD INTERACTIVITY-MODE CLIENTS

The Siebel CRM Smart Web Architecture is planned to support a standard interactivity (SI) mode that provides a user experience associated with traditional Web applications. The client technology used for the standard interactivity deployment is widely available browser technology, including HTML and JavaScript. In general, SI mode is available for users requiring accessibility features and for Siebel CRM “customer-facing” Internet applications—such as Siebel eSupport and Siebel Partner Relationship Management (PRM)—that are used by customers or partners of an organization. The browsers running within this larger user community generally cannot be controlled easily. Oracle’s Siebel is committed to offering access to its SI-mode applications on standard browsers from common customer desktop operating systems. A complete listing of customer applications

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will be provided in the Siebel CRM System Requirements and Supported Platforms Guide. STANDARD HANDHELD CLIENTS

Siebel CRM plans to support a wide variety of handheld devices and operating systems. Siebel CRM plans to support Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 and Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 operating system for the handheld applications. During the certification of the operating system, we work with some leading handheld device vendors to certify the platform. We have used HP iPAQ 610 and HTC Titan for Windows Mobile 6 certification. Note that Oracle is moving toward certifying the platform and during the platform certification process we work with some leading device vendors and test them and publish the results. We are not certifying individual devices and advise the customers to ensure that they check the devices are operational on the certified platform and check the application is fully functional before finalizing any handheld device. We encourage our customers to inform us which particular device they are using for the Siebel Handheld application by opening a SR and we will publish the results for other customers.

Devices

Operating System

HP iPaq 2790

Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC

HP iPaq 69xx

Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 Pocket PC

Dell x51

Phone Edition

Palm Treo 750 Cingular/AT&T Wireless HTC-8125 Intermec CN3 Mobile Computer

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LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Siebel plans to provide official language packs for Polish and Russian languages due to Poland’s membership in the European Union and an increasingly active Russian economy. This means that all visible text on the screen for each of the Siebel applications will be completely translated into Polish and Russian, and when installed, a user can choose to work completely in either of these languages, or any of the other 19 user interface languages that Siebel ships. This development brings the number of user interface languages now available for Siebel applications to 21.

Data Language

Siebel’s user interface language packs are independent of the language used for entering data. The data language is controlled only by the customer’s choice of default character set for the Siebel transaction database. If a customer configures their database default character set to be Unicode (recommended), data may be entered in any language worldwide. Siebel’s Unicode support permits a user with an English screen to enter data records in, for instance, English, Arabic, Thai, or Chinese at any time, provided that their client machine can enter and display these languages. Siebel’s language packs represent a substantial financial saving over performing one’s own translation. The language packs include all on-screen titles, tab names, field labels, pick-list entries, seed data entries, dialog boxes, and error messages for each of the Siebel applications. Multiple language packs may be installed for the same application, although each language version of an application requires its own application server to be loaded. This allows users around the globe to use the same application, each in their own language, yet be able to share transactions. Siebel also supports an ‘unshipped language’ process, where customers may also add their own translations into languages which Siebel does not yet ship, allowing yet more users to access the same application in their own language.

Customers with Existing Polish and Russian Translations

A number of customers have used partial language packs that have been available in the marketplace for some years. A partial Polish language pack has been available from a Polish systems integrator, while a partial Russian language pack was available from the Siebel Moscow office for a period of time. If you have installed these products, and plan to upgrade to Siebel CRM 8.1.1 or later and then install the new Siebel Polish and Russian language packs, please be aware that your previous translations of Siebel-supplied strings will be overwritten. The official Siebel language packs will use the language codes PLK for Polish and RUS for Russian. If your Siebel system is using these language codes for any reason and you wish to keep your current translations, then you should configure your existing translations to use a different language code before you perform the upgrade to

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Siebel CRM 8.1.1 or later. Translations of customer-generated application strings will not be affected.

Available Siebel Language Packs

With the release of Siebel CRM 8.1.1, the following 21 user interface language packs are expected to be available from Siebel (listed in alphabetical order): •

Arabic

•

Chinese (Simplified)

•

Chinese (Traditional)

•

Czech

•

Danish

•

Dutch

•

English (American)

•

Finnish

•

French

•

German

•

Hebrew

•

Italian

•

Japanese

•

Korean

•

Polish

•

Portuguese (Brazilian)

•

Portuguese (Portugal)

•

Russian

•

Spanish

•

Swedish

•

Thai

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Disclaimer

This document is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Planned Features October 2008 Author: CRM Applications Strategy Document Version: 2.0 Oracle Corporation World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065 U.S.A. Worldwide Inquiries: Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 oracle.com Copyright © 2008, Oracle. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft, are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.