Aon consolidates sales, marketing insights in Oracle Cloud

Headquartered in London, Aon is a global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions. The firm’s 50,000 colleagues in 120 countries empower results for clients by using proprietary data and analytics to deliver insights that reduce volatility and improve performance.

Having grown over the years through several acquisitions, Aon needed to consolidate its silos of data and sales and marketing applications in order to get a single view of its clients and prospects. It also needed a more robust analytics platform.

A happy customer of Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation tools for more than 18 years, Aon turned to Oracle when it came time to consolidate its broader patchwork of customer relationship management applications, under a program called CRM United. The company started with Oracle Sales, part of the Oracle CX suite of applications, replacing multiple sales applications—including six instances of Salesforce.com—that were inherited from multiple acquisitions. Aon later added Oracle Service, including Oracle Intelligent Advisor to automate client discovery forms for its sales organization. Aon continues to use Oracle Eloqua, now integrated with its Oracle’s sales and customer service applications, for lead generation and to drive personalized B2B email marketing campaigns.

Aon’s team integrates and manages data from various sales and marketing sources and then produces dashboards for several thousand sales colleagues. Its cloud-based Oracle Autonomous Database, coupled with Oracle Analytics, automates those tasks and provides superior security, reporting, and performance, all with less database maintenance and end-user training compared with on-premises software.

By eliminating data silos and adding robust analytics and reporting, Aon gained visibility into client-facing activities within and across departments, as well as deep insights for better targeting and cross-selling.

“Through all those acquisitions, through all that technology, our client-facing colleagues had 16 different places to go to do their jobs,” says Teffani Zadeh, CIO, Growth Enablement and North America IT, at Aon. “That is not efficient. That makes people frustrated. That does not help them sell.”

By automating as much of the sales, marketing, and service process as possible, Aon simplified the day-to-day work of its front-line colleagues, freeing them to focus on growing the business.

The consolidation onto Oracle CX applications also cut costs—in hard dollars as well as time saved—and allowed Aon to centralize its app expertise under one core team.

By moving its data reporting and analytics capacity from a variety of sources to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Analytics, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Aon boosted performance 50X to 60X. Response times to complex sales queries from 500 power users are now much faster, and Aon estimates that its analytics costs are significantly lower than with its on-premises business intelligence tools.

Meanwhile, the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is saving Aon 15 hours per week now that colleagues don’t have to manually extract data, and it has enhanced security of confidential sales information.

Aon sales teams can now easily visualize business trends, outliers, client sentiment, and sales performance.