This time last year, a group of G2 analysts attended Oracle OpenWorld 2019 and we later discussed the biggest surprises and promising innovations that we took away from the event.

I wrote about how Oracle and Deloitte Digital teamed up on Oracle CX Unity, Oracle’s Customer Data Platform (CDP), which was launched in 2018. The major theme that I walked away with from Oracle OpenWorld was the importance of creating customer connections to deliver exceptional experiences and how companies need to create an energized focus on the entire customer journey at each and every touchpoint.

Oracle Live 2020 Highlights

As we all have witnessed this year, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the events management industry and has spurred the adoption of virtual event platforms. Oracle Live took place on Tuesday, September 29, 2020, it was entirely virtual and it included live keynotes as well as on-demand presentations around news, announcements, and product insights. Here are three updates and highlights that I took away from some of the sessions around customer experience (CX).

Source: Oracle Live Event: CX Sessions

New B2B marketing capabilities              

Oracle announced that the most recent release of Oracle Unity includes a new B2B data schema that relates contact data to an account, which is a key capability for account-based marketing strategies. The launch of Unity B2B Support can help with segmentation at a B2B level in terms of company segmentation, and Oracle Unity also integrates with Oracle Eloqua, their B2B marketing automation product.

  Source: Oracle Live Event: CX Sessions

Complete integration with Oracle's data management platform (DMP)

It was announced during Oracle Live that Oracle Unity is now fully integrated with the Oracle DMP, formerly known as Oracle BlueKai. This integration allows marketers to categorize unknown website visitors by interest and drive more connected customer experiences across digital channels.

A CDP makes integrations of first-party data easier for DMPs to improve targeting and a DMP helps enrich CDP data for smarter communications. As machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) advance, we expect CDPs to expand their capabilities to help marketers analyze and activate customer data. For true personalization, a CDP needs AI and machine learning capabilities. These help marketers create unified customer experiences while optimizing the customer journey and trigger behavior-based messages in real time. As incoming data grows and grows, so does the complexity. AI-empowered CDPs will be able to learn as more data is gathered from each successive marketing campaign, and it will lead to a more fluid customer experience tailored in real time.

New partner integrations to assist with data privacy

A CDP simplifies gathering customer data stored across multiple systems by providing a single source of truth and helps companies remove nonessential customer data from their systems; however, deploying a CDP doesn’t ensure compliance as they aren’t designed as privacy platforms. Oracle announced two new partner integrations with Sourcepoint and OneTrust to help marketers achieve compliance goals around shifting consumer data privacy and security regulations.

A new integration between the Sourcepoint Consent Management Platform and Oracle Unity will help mutual customers maintain consent records that are quickly and easily accessible in real time, and the new integrations with the OneTrust PreferenceChoice platform and Oracle Unity will help customers achieve their privacy regulations (CCPA, GDPR, LGPD, and more) by collecting consent and preferences through web forms, cookie banners, in-person events, and more to ensure customer choices are honored throughout marketing systems.

Other notable announcements

Some other announcements included new integrations between Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) and Zoom, as well as new integrations with Sprinklr, a customer experience management platform. Finally, it was announced that Oracle launched Industry CX, with an industry-specific lens focused on communications and the media industry to help deliver personalized customer experiences.