Oracle Corp. today said it has bought a startup called CrowdTwist Inc. in order to enhance its Customer Experience Cloud.

CrowdTwist is a maker of a “customer loyalty” platform for marketers, and the plan is to integrate this with Oracle’s Responsys, Eloqua and CX Unity platforms. Oracle said doing so will make it easier to tailor its CX portfolio for specific customer’s needs.

The addition of CrowdTwist’s customer loyalty offerings could help marketers who use Oracle’s CX tools to improve customer retention. Ensuring customer loyalty is vital part of any marketing initiative, and CrowdTwist offers more than 100 out-of-the-box engagement paths and loyalty rewards programs to help with this, which are adaptable enough to serve various specific use cases, it said.

“Oracle is taking a unique approach to the customer data platform space, enabling the application of intelligence across every customer touchpoint,” Oracle Executive Vice President Rob Tarkoff said in a statement. “CrowdTwist’s leading loyalty platform will significantly augment Oracle CX’s ability to help our customers build more meaningful relationships with their customers.”

Analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that CrowdTwist was a leading player in the customer loyalty segment because it had worked out how to help companies ensure better customer retention through a range of programs it has built.

“What makes their program unique is how they build loyalty based on activities,” Wang said. “They place value in activities that are used to track what drives their view of a customer’s loyalty. The result is a more quantified and sticky assessment, development and execution of loyalty programs.”

Last month at its annual Oracle OpenWorld conference, Oracle added several new industry-focused features to its CX suite, including new digital assistants, data-driven business-to-business sales tools and artificial intelligence features.

Photo: Li May/Flickr