Less than a decade ago, sales and marketing people were using the tried and true methods for talking with their customers. Telephone, email and standalone chat programs, such as ICQ or Yahoo Messenger, were marketing industry standards. And while those methods are still in use today, the number of available communication channels between customers and sales and marketing has exploded in recent years due to the rise of social media, according to Steve Fioretti (pictured, right), vice president of product management, Oracle RightNow Service Cloud, at Oracle Corp.

“There’s a lot of things going on in the industry that are affecting customer service,” Fioretti said. “There’s new dynamic channels emerging. For example, people want to use Facebook Messenger or WeChat or WhatsApp as customer service channels to interact with their brand. It’s much beyond just email, phone, chat [and] things like that.”

Fioretti and Heather Miksch (pictured, left), vice president of field and product operations at Carbon Inc., visited with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the Oracle Modern Marketing Experience event in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Disclosure below.)

Fioretti and Miksch discussed the impact of many new communications channels on the marketing industry as a whole.

Keeping up with technology is essential

In addition to a plethora of new social media channels, other new technologies are being adapted to increase marketing productivity even further. According to Fioretti, sales and marketing organizations are beginning to embrace technologies such as augmented intelligence and automation.

“So new channels are emerging and companies have to think about ‘how do I integrate that into my customer service organization?'” said Fioretti. “Automation is really coming to the fore.”

Due to the pooling and sharing of data streams, instead of having just one single stream, customers have a mountain of shared data that can be mined by everyone in the ecosystem, and that improves the quality and accuracy of whatever the customer is looking for.

“Taking all that first-party data and third-party data, combining that with artificial intelligence to deliver those personalized smart experiences is what’s really happening,” stated Fioretti.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience. The conference sponsor, Oracle, does not have editorial oversight of content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE