Oracle Engagement Cloud - Is it a glorified Sales Cloud or an Amalgamated Cloud housing Sales and Service Cloud features meant to provide true 360 degree view and simplify overall architecture?
One of my Enterprise customer with global footprint enquired last week whether it is wise to transform its CRM functions from Siebel onto Oracle's Engagement Cloud or his organization would be better off by having Oracle Sales Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud as a combination offerings to sunset Siebel. This is where I explained that it is not a zero sum decision but involves close consideration of the business objectives.
To drive home the discussion, I asked him to pen down Key business objectives of CX / CRM transformation his leadership has for this On-Premise (Siebel CRM) to On-Cloud (Oracle CX stack). It wasn't a surprising list as his 7 pointer had all those aspects covered which most enterprise organizations are discussing for the last 5 odd years.
Engagement Cloud has all (yes - 100%) features of Oracle Sales Cloud but basic features of Oracle Service Cloud. Objective 1, 2, 3 are met by adopting either of the two approaches (Engagement Cloud Vs Oracle Sales Cloud +Oracle Service Cloud). Decision points boils down to
What is the independent roadmap of the three Clouds à would one cloud (e.g. OSC or OSvC) cease to exist after 3-4 years resulting in another migration / transformation project?
Are end customers of the organization truly urging to have state of the art features like co-browsing, self-service etc. in near term
Performance: Is application performance truly a worrisome factor in current platform resulting in low user adoption of CRM platform
Total Cost of Ownership: What is the license cost for the two options (EC at one end and OSC+OSvC at the other end)
Is Sales sub-organization and Service sub-organization culturally working as single unit to gain 360 view of both the functions
My 2 cents for this enterprise customer which is a high volume call center managing service function for non banking financial company (NBFC) à Go for Oracle Sales Cloud + Oracle Service Cloud combination offering as
While the roadmap of all three clouds is promising, Engagement Cloud is not rich in core Service features in its current avatar. Today's customers expect chat, co-browsing and CTI enabled offerings where Oracle Service Cloud has an edge
Performance of EC would be relatively slower as higher degree of customization would be involved to achieve some nice OSvC features like Queue management for Incidents
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) would be more or less in the same ballpark sonsidering
License cost would be tad high by having two clouds (OSC + OSvC) than one (EC) --- Plus for EC
15-18 months down the line migration of Service Cloud and Sales Cloud data into Engagement Cloud -- Plus for EC
Cost of agents managing service requests would go down as OSvC rich service functions (self-service, co-browse, knowledge management) -- Plus for OSC + OSvC
More delighted customers would potentially result in future cross-sell and up-sell opportunities -- Plus for OSC + OSvC
Achieve 360 view through BICS (BI Cloud Services) for 360 view
What would have you advised to a customer in this situation?