Joe Fuster is Global Head of the Customer Experience (CX) Cloud at Oracle. He is responsible for driving the growth for the cloud portfolio of integrated applications across three domains, marketing, sales and service. He is a proven leader in transforming Go-To-Market models from on-premise to cloud His intense focus on customer outcomes has brought him notoriety for key business transformations in manufacturing, financial services, consumer packaged goods and life science industries.

How are Oracle solutions helping to enhance the customer experience?

Providing a very good service requires coordination across lots of different topics. The way that Oracle is producing better customer experiences is by realising that the individual is common across the experiences. Oracle is doing a very good job recognising the individual and then recording what the individual likes, dislikes, etc. In this way the experience gets tailored to the individual. Oracle has decided that we need to think about the entire spectrum and this starts at the advertising level and continues into the marketing, sales and commerce levels, and then at the customer and field services. Oracle solutions help because the recognition is there - the world is always moving, there is always someone in a different time zone needing something. You must be in the moment; you must be present with service. Oracle is working very hard to be present, in the moment, for the customer. That's unique.

What industries are you targeting for customer experience solutions?

We are known for our service in B2C and handling the big consumer brands. However, as more and more business people expect the experience at the professional environment to be similar to what they experience as an individual, we see the B2B market changing. The trend is to act more and more like B2C. Oracle believes that, over time, we're not going to make the distinction. It is going to be that same level of expectation in all markets. Industry wise, in the B2B space, you will get companies that get very high value interactions. If we can get all the different interactions right, we can make sure that the end consumer also has a much better experience. We've targeted a lot of the B2B segments which are heavily involved with goods. In the B2C space we are targeting banking, financial, insurance and retailing in particular.

What about the healthcare sector?

This is one of the areas where the new technologies are going to play a huge role. Blockchain technology allows me to take data and safeguard it, but also to distribute it very widely. In doing so, if we were to think about personal data sovereignty, medical records are something to consider. For example, every time I take a loved one to a hospital, there are countless numbers of forms that I must fill out and there is not a lot of coordination between the providers. I think this is an area where having data sovereignty as an individual means that I could carry with me all my medical records in a blockchain format. This means the records could be safeguarded and make everybody's life better or easier at virtually no cost. I believe deeply in data privacy but when somebody needs medical help in an instant, I want instant access as well. Blockchain can do that for us. I think we are going to see a lot of innovation in the healthcare space combined with personal data sovereignty.

Can you elaborate on the dualism of structured and unstructured data?

When I talk about structured and unstructured, the structured is how you keep a measure of your accounts. You think about them in a sequence. The unstructured is what does not fit your sequence. The unstructured data elements come into your life all the time and it is very easy for a human to comprehend them, but it is very hard in a system to put unstructured data next to all of the structured data. The idea of having to do both is kind of like the brain having a left side and a right side. Humans are very good at being creative and being structured as your brain can process the structured and unstructured. In all these years, computers have been set to only process the structured. We are now at a point where the capabilities are there to start looking at the structured and unstructured just like the brain does. The real time structured and unstructured being processed together is completely new. Oracle is leading in this area and I am very excited for what it can do for everybody. It is equally available if you are a three-person start-up or if you are the biggest bank, insurance company or even the government. Now it is the meritocracy of your idea, the creativity of your strategy, the execution that matters. The barriers when competing as the small guy go away. This makes it very important and exciting. 

What would be your advice to a company working on their customer experience strategy?

Be relentless. If you think about the best customer experiences you have across all the different brands that you deal with in your life and then you do a little bit of research and read back about the founders and about the vision of the brand, you will discover that even when they think they got it right, they are still trying to get it better. I welcome the challenge that Walt Disney, Amazon or American Express put up for everybody. They are thinking about your needs, all the time, and even though they are world-class, they are still trying to improve. 

In October this year, Oracle Slovenia got a new Executive Director - Julij Božič: 

"In September, I attended Oracle OpenWorld 2020 in San Francisco, where I confirmed that I work in a company that strives for change and has both the energy and knowledge necessary to achieve it. In the massive world of Oracle, a country as small as Slovenia will find it hard to rank among the champions considering the limited scope of our projects. We can, however, position ourselves as a country with many innovative projects, good reference stories and a powerful ecosystem. Doing so, we can increase our global recognition and so it is worth working on."