How many times have we heard this in respect of Oracle Intelligent Advisor? Well, if truth be told probably not that many, but the underlying comment or opinion is one that often “pops up” in discussions. So this article is the beginning of a series about this form designer / builder comment, and what it means, and what you can do to move beyond the facetious response that comes to mind.

Let’s break the conversation down :

So you want to collect information do you? If you are collecting information, why are you doing that? Whats the purpose?

Answer – I just want to collect data because the User Experience of my CRM or CX form is poor and this looks better.

If this is the case – you just want to collect data for some purpose or other – then Oracle Intelligent Advisor is not naturally the first choice. Of course there may be mitigating circumstances – this is a test run to make sure an integration between Oracle Intelligent Advisor and another application is functioning, and data capture is part of that process. Or, there may be some purpose (business objective) that has Oracle Intelligent Advisor at the heart of it, and this is a first step. Outside of these possibilities, then the next question is actually a slightly changed version of the first :

So you want to collect information? What is this information for?

Answer – Oh this is to replace a PDF form really. Our customers are filling out these forms and we check them to see if they are eligible for (insert something here). Or, we take the form and type it out again in our CX, and we assess (insert something here).

Now we are getting somewhere. So this notion of eligibility / or assessment / decision making, how do you do it today?

We apply the following rules / criteria / selection to the form and then we update the CRM / CX and we report back to the applicant / to the customer. Then the agent updates the CX again with the thread of the conversation. And they attach the PDF to the incident / service request / opportunity so we can find it again.

Very quickly we have come down to the heart of the matter. Oracle Intelligent Advisor is not a form designer, although you can use it to design forms. The key is understanding that the power of Oracle Intelligent Advisor goes way beyond forms into business rules, supporting the customer and the agent, providing 100% reliable feedback in various forms and being able to reuse the same logic in any Oracle Intelligent Advisor channel (web service, chat, batch, mobile, etc.)

The questions we need to ask about a potential Oracle Intelligent Advisor scenario are always the same (this is by no means a complete list, just some food for thought).

• What are the validation rules that govern this “data collection” (these skin-deep rules will drive the interview experience)
• What is the assessment goal or eligibility for, exactly? (these rules will govern our interview goal and define what outcomes are possible).
• What are the circumstances that the customer will interact with these rules (these will govern the channel r channels we choose to provide in Oracle Intelligent Advisor).
• What are the needs for the agent / the internal user / the recipient of the form (these will define how we express the validation and collection in the CX system, what records will be added / updated / deleted)
• How will the customer be informed of the outcome (this will reveal whether we need to provide an explanation, or a PDF or something else)
• How will this be tracked? (This may reveal if we need transcripts to be saved and whether we need to provide save and resume for the customer to pause and continue later).

For more thoughts on driving adoption of Oracle Intelligent Advisor, read this article.