Posts
Siebel 8.0 Web Marketing – Web Services
This is the third part of a series of posts about Siebel marketing 8.0.
Flowing the wave of web services, Siebel 8.0 includes new pre-build web-services across the application in order to assist with system integration and reduce configuration effort. As usual, these are based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL), XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
The marketing web-services are meant to facilitate integration of marketing functionality (Siebel Web Marketing and Siebel eEvents) in custom web applications dedicated to customer interfacing.
The organization gains the liberty of choosing the web development tool and of creating a web site that satisfies its requirements in terms of customer experience, interaction and style, while incorporating content from its Siebel Marketing.
The WEBMARKETING service provides customer centered personalization as it tailors the HTML offer content and presents it directly in the web portal. In this way, it helps the user review a new product offering and decide which is the best fitting offer. From the interaction with the customer – entered information, indicated preferences, etc., responses are automatically created.
It is also an important automation point for subscription management, as it retrieves the list of all active subscription lists and presents the customer the available ones. Moreover, it can retrieve the subscription lists for the specific contact/prospect, indicating which lists were already subscribed by the user. Under direct user request, it alo subscribes/unsubscribes her/him from the indicated list.
The EVENTMANAGEMENT web-service provides automation for the event management activities in an organization. It retrieves the list of events, based on search specifications, and it presents them (and their details, retrieved separately). Session based search specifications (thus personalization) is another available option. As in the case of subscription lists, the web service can retrieve the list of events in which the user is registered as well as automate the event registration.
The possibility of using web services for marketing is important because of the automation it involves. Lets assume that a physician, "customer" (in the pharma business, above all for the prescription business, we could not really talk of customers!) of a pharma organization, receives an email with news about the organization’s product novelties and discoveries. As she is interested in the information, she decides to learn more about the organization’s newsletters and clicks the corresponding link. After having the user authenticated, the web service is asked to retrieve the list of active newsletters and the list of already subscribed newsletters corresponding to the particular user. As the organization has set in place several newsletters based on the products typology it offers (Heart, Diabetes, Skin, Veterinary medicine, etc.), there are several titles that might interest the customer. The user is presented the lists, so she can chose which one to subscribe or un-subscribe. Her requirements are passed to the web service again so that it refreshes the information available about the user in the CRM system. (see figure 1)
Flowing the wave of web services, Siebel 8.0 includes new pre-build web-services across the application in order to assist with system integration and reduce configuration effort. As usual, these are based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL), XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
The marketing web-services are meant to facilitate integration of marketing functionality (Siebel Web Marketing and Siebel eEvents) in custom web applications dedicated to customer interfacing.
The organization gains the liberty of choosing the web development tool and of creating a web site that satisfies its requirements in terms of customer experience, interaction and style, while incorporating content from its Siebel Marketing.
The WEBMARKETING service provides customer centered personalization as it tailors the HTML offer content and presents it directly in the web portal. In this way, it helps the user review a new product offering and decide which is the best fitting offer. From the interaction with the customer – entered information, indicated preferences, etc., responses are automatically created.
It is also an important automation point for subscription management, as it retrieves the list of all active subscription lists and presents the customer the available ones. Moreover, it can retrieve the subscription lists for the specific contact/prospect, indicating which lists were already subscribed by the user. Under direct user request, it alo subscribes/unsubscribes her/him from the indicated list.
The EVENTMANAGEMENT web-service provides automation for the event management activities in an organization. It retrieves the list of events, based on search specifications, and it presents them (and their details, retrieved separately). Session based search specifications (thus personalization) is another available option. As in the case of subscription lists, the web service can retrieve the list of events in which the user is registered as well as automate the event registration.
The possibility of using web services for marketing is important because of the automation it involves. Lets assume that a physician, "customer" (in the pharma business, above all for the prescription business, we could not really talk of customers!) of a pharma organization, receives an email with news about the organization’s product novelties and discoveries. As she is interested in the information, she decides to learn more about the organization’s newsletters and clicks the corresponding link. After having the user authenticated, the web service is asked to retrieve the list of active newsletters and the list of already subscribed newsletters corresponding to the particular user. As the organization has set in place several newsletters based on the products typology it offers (Heart, Diabetes, Skin, Veterinary medicine, etc.), there are several titles that might interest the customer. The user is presented the lists, so she can chose which one to subscribe or un-subscribe. Her requirements are passed to the web service again so that it refreshes the information available about the user in the CRM system. (see figure 1)
Figure 1. A Siebel Marketing Web Service Example for newsletter subscription.
Web services unleash lots of possibilities for organizations that desire to improve (or even revolutionize) their interaction and services towards the end customers. The marketing web services are just some of the available web services in Siebel. For web portals facing customers, some other web services might be interesting such as Product Configuration and Product Recommendation (in this case a new area, that of Partner Relationship Management -PRM-, could be open... maybe next post).
