Oracle Corp. today introduced enhancements to its Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience customer relationship management application focused on improving both virtual selling and buying.

Citing a recent Oracle-sponsored Beagle Research Group LLC study that found that traditional CRM systems are seen as more a burden than a resource, the company said the new features are focused on better integrating sources of data about customers to improve lead scoring and to help sellers focus on the most promising prospects.

“We are on a transformative journey with our portfolio,” said Katrina Gosek, vice president of product portfolio strategy for Oracle CX Sales & Commerce. “We’re bringing all these applications together with common data, services and fueled by a common back office.”

The updated CRM better integrates data from multiple sources, particularly enterprise resource planning. Although Oracle offers connectors that work with non-Oracle applications, Gosek said, “we’re natively plugged into the Oracle ERP. It’s literally the same platform, data models, processes and services.”

Predictive lead scoring uses machine learning to generate a probability score that shows a seller how likely a lead will close based on first-party and historic lead data such as past interactions, product purchases and account profile data. “We dedupe it, clean it and create a golden customer record,” she said.

The user interface has been updated based upon Oracle’s Redwood user experience design language to adapt the user experience to the seller’s role and deliver action-driven prompts. Redwood is more than just a design specification, Gosek said.

“It’s a new UI construct,” she said. “We’re feeding data into the systems automatically driven by personas.”

A new integration enables sellers to collaborate using Microsoft Corp.’s Teams software. Integration with Oracle’s CPQ price quotation application gives sellers the ability to start, search for and finish quotes and proposals from with the Oracle CX Sales application. A new sales planning dashboard gives users current views of forecasts and revenue models with data sourced both from live ERP and CRM information.

On the buyer side, new integrations between Oracle’s CX Commerce e-commerce platform and Unity customer data platform expand the ability of sellers to customize the user experience by tapping into a customer’s master record. The platform also features optimized and embedded recommendations and search. “It knows what I’ve looked at so it can give me products in my price range based on my preferences,” Gosek said.

Streamlined configuration management enables buyers to configure even complex purchases with hundreds of variables online with the ability to pass partially configured requests to direct sellers. Other new capabilities support subscription sales and guide buyers to product content and information.

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