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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Save As Template
While drafting an email, the agent can choose to save the email as a template
directly from the outgoing message screen.
Siebel Chat is tightly integrated with Siebel Contact Center and leverages many of
its features and components, including:
Service request created in this manner pre-populate the new service request form
with data pulled from the customer and chat dashboards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While working on chat interactions, the agent will use many phrases time after
time. For example:
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deal Analysis
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.
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.
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?
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. 24 – Siebel CRM provides an enhanced self-service interface for easily importing
responses, leads and customer lists
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
Fig. 26 – A new task-based user interface layout makes it easy to quickly design
personalized e-mail messages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This feature enables users to set up multiple incentive choices for each accrual
Flexible accrual rewards enable leading
promotion. For a given promotion, each targeted member can choose an incentive
organizations to run customer-centric
loyalty programs, aligned to the interests, based on what he or she perceives to be of the highest value. When a member
attitudes, opinions, and way of life of the qualifies for the promotion, the Siebel Loyalty engine triggers an incentive inline
best customers of their business with the member’s choice.
Figure 31: Flexible accrual rewards allows users to define multiple incentive choiceds
for each promotion.
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.
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.
Points
Sub-types
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 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.
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.
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.
Fig. 36 – Partner setup is enhanced to include Billing Rates setup for post-paid partners
Siebel Loyalty now allows loyalty programs to setup multiple pricing rules for pre-
paid 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.
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.
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 re-
order 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.
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:
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.
Fig. 39 – Unified partner point type simplifies partner billing and reduces the complexity
of selling multiple point types to each partner.
Partner Statements
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.
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,
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
Siebel Loyalty supports the option to loan points temporarily to enable their most
Automated point loans enable seamless
integration between the redemption and
valuable customers to redeem an award and enhance their experience. Siebel
loan process, thereby enhancing process Loyalty has streamlined the process to automatically loan points to members to
efficiency. Setting-up loan limits based on cover for the shortfall of points required to redeem a given award. The size of the
member tier will enable Loyalty programs loan issued to the member is driven by limits set up at the member’s tier level so
to ensure that members in higher tiers
that members in different tiers may enjoy different privileges. For example, a
receive differentiated benefits.
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.
GDS or
3rd Party Interface Inventory systems
Web Services
Quote Award Price Loyalty
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.
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.
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.
External target list integration with loyalty External Target List Integration with Loyalty Promotion
promotions enables Loyalty programs to
Siebel Loyalty further enhances integration with Siebel Enterprise Marketing Suite
leverage Oracle’s sophisticated analytics
to enable loyalty programs to leverage sophisticated segmentation capabilities to
platform and external lists to effectively
target members for rewards and implement highly targeted loyalty promotions. Siebel Loyalty allows loyalty
recognition. 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.
The Siebel Loyalty real time engine has been enhanced to permit processing
Real-time processing enables
member transactions on significantly large transaction volumes, for example, those
implementation of next generation ‘real-
time Loyalty programs’ and delivery of a typically seen in mid-to large-sized retailers and airlines. The enhanced Siebel
superior membership experience. 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.
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
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 ‘Rolling Period’ Based Tier Assessment
based tier assessment models enable
Tier assessment based on a ‘rolling period’ typically takes into account the
Loyalty programs to implement tier
‘recency and frequency’ aspect of member activities. A member’s tier is
assessment practices followed across
industries to foster loyalty through determined based on the activities completed/qualifying points earned by the
recognition of desired customer behavior. 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Retro-Claim
Non-Air Redemption
Redemption Cancellation
Points Purchase
Points Transfer
Enrollment
Lounge Purchase
Membership Renewal
Membership Cancellation
Fig. 45 – Promotion Enrollment service displays all the active promotion requiring
enrollment and incentive choices for each promotion for member’s selection.
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.
Loyalty services
Call Center
Loyalty
Loyalty services
Web
3rd Party Interface 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.
Member Type
Membership scheme
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.
Loyalty programs typically offer customers multiple ways to apply for membership.
Batch enrollment enables Loyalty programs
to avoid manually entering thousands of
Some of the popular methods include hand-filled paper applications, partners and
enrolment applications received from travel agents. The applications received through these offline channels are very
several channels/sources, improving large in number and require entry through an automated batch process.
productivity and data quality.
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
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.
Siebel Loyalty provides new web services to enable seamless integration with
point-of-sale systems. These services facilitate several types of member
Web services for PoS integration enable transactions in real-time at the point of sale, including:
loyalty programs to integrate with any PoS
Accrual processing
system to facilitate real-time member
transactions at minimum cost and effort. Redemption processing
Voucher Validation
Enrollment
Membership Inquiry & Update
Communication Management
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.
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
Design Registration
Deal Registration
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.
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.
Enable users to search for partners more The Partner Locator Web Service allows users to look for partners based on
effectively and provide access to alerts location and/or partner profile attributes. The Partner Alert Web Service provides
using the new Web services for Partner a list of all available message alerts for partners.
Locator and Partner Alerts
XMLP Server
Component
Siebel
Database
Saved Reports
Report Output 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
BI Publisher
BusComps Engine
(Embedded)
Siebel
Database
Saved
Reports
Report
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.
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.
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.
Fig. 63 – The global account hierarchy explorer interface provides quick and easy
navigation.
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
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
Fig. 65 – Pipeline management identifies those opportunities that make up the sales
forecast.
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.
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.
Oracle BI Publisher
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 e-
mail, 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 e-
mails 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.
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.
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
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
Page
Product Details Page
Prod Category =
Insurance
Template
Product Details:
TemplateInsurance
ProductTemplate
Details: Apparel
Product Details: Phones
Prod_Det_Insurance.jspx
Physical
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.
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 Self-
Service 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.
Index
SES
Search Engine
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.
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.
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.
Self Service
Eligibility
RTD
1.Send
Customer 2-n.Send Context
4-n.Learn
ID 3-n.Return Offer
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.
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.
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.
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.
Configurator as a Service
Siebel Configurator
High-Performance Configurator
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.
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.
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.
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.
B2B and B2C customers can create multiple shopping carts to manage multiple
purchasing projects. These carts can be renamed at any time.
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.
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.
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
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
Fig. 100 – Seamless asset modification between Siebel Customer Order Management and
Siebel eCommerce
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Siebel eCommerce for Communications will leverage the core eligibility and
Ensure a consistent and seamless
compatibility capabilities delivered with the Siebel Customer Order Management
customer experience across channels for
your mission critical sales and service 7.8 release and enable service providers to leverage the same product rules defined
processes. 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.
Fig. 102 – Enter zip code page enables location-based product eligibility for self-service
users.
Purchasing a new service plan and the corresponding equipment can require a
New service activation enables a complex
complex series of steps and decision points which has traditionally limited the
process to be simplified and streamlined
reducing the number of abandoned carts percentage of new orders placed through self-service sites within the CME
and increasing order completions and industries. As CME organizations look to drive business to their Websites to
customer satisfaction. leverage this low cost to serve, they need a guided selling flow, similar to the task-
based 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.
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.
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 200-
minute 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
Fig. 105 – Modify service online using Siebel Self-Service for Communications
Change Equipment
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Citizens and agency employees can search for the appropriate form by name,
number or type using the online form locator in Siebel Public Sector
Suspended/Resume Intake
Fig. 112 – Required field prompts on the Siebel Public Sector self-service page
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,
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.
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
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 non-
profits 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.
Fig. 118 – Campaign Performance Scorecard, Order Summary, Response Trends &
Segmentation Analysis for Siebel CRM
Fig. 119 – Service Request analysis by channel, region, product line, and severity
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 sign-
on 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
Fig. 122 – The dashboard text, data and currency is in localized for French
DQ Population Edit
Matching Override Rule
Administrative
Clients
Siebel DQ Matching
Rule Manager
API
User Interface Application Siebel
User's Batch User's On-line Data Admin Object UCM / CRM
Processes Transactions
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft Windows (32 bit) 2003 w/SP1 or above Intel-compatible x86-based 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
Oracle HTTP Server 10.1.3 Red Hat Linux Server 4 Intel-compatible x86-
(Apache Web Server v2.x or above) based servers
Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 kernel
level 2.6.9-42.0.0.0.1
Browser
Client Operating System Internet Explorer Internet Explorer
6.0 7.0
Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 or above X X
X = Supported
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.
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
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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World Headquarters
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Redwood Shores, CA 94065
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Worldwide Inquiries:
Phone: +1.650.506.7000
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