Aon enhances its end-to-end client strategy with 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.

After decades of growth through acquisitions, Aon amassed thirty regional CRM systems, six different global platforms, and data siloes throughout the organization. Tools and processes varied across sales, marketing, and service teams, and the inability to quickly access and analyze data stunted further growth.

It was difficult for Aon to efficiently serve clients as a global team without a single view of its customer base. Leaders recognized the need for consolidated systems and data and more robust analytics tools to support its end-to-end client strategy.

A happy customer of Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation for more than 18 years, Aon turned to the Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) suite when it came time to consolidate its broader patchwork of customer relationship management applications, under a program called CRM United.

Aon would start with Oracle Fusion Cloud Sales to replace multiple sales applications—including six Salesforce instances—that were inherited from previous acquisitions. The company would then add Oracle Fusion Cloud Service, including Oracle Intelligent Advisor, to automate client discovery forms for its sales organization. Aon would continue to use Oracle Eloqua, integrating it with its new Oracle sales and service applications for lead generation and personalized B2B email marketing campaigns.

The Aon team would be able to integrate and manage data from various sales, marketing, and service sources to produce dashboards for several thousand sales colleagues. Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, coupled with Oracle Analytics, could automate those tasks and provides superior security, reporting, and performance, all with less database maintenance and end-user training compared to on-premises tools.

With its unified CX suite, including robust data management and analytics capabilities, Aon eliminated organizational siloes and gained a central platform to help serve clients worldwide with immediate action—from the basics to their most complex needs.

“Through all those acquisitions, through all that technology, our client-facing colleagues had so many different places to go to do their jobs,” says Teffani Zadeh, CIO of corporate and enterprise systems at Aon. “That is not efficient. That makes people frustrated. That does not help them sell.”

By automating sales, marketing, and service processes, Aon simplified the day-to-day work of its front-line colleagues, freeing them to focus on growing the business and serving clients. The consolidation onto a unified Oracle CX platform also cut costs—in hard dollars as well as time saved—and allowed Aon to centralize its application expertise under one core team.

By moving its data reporting and analytics capacity from a variety of disconnected sources to Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Analytics, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Aon boosted performance by 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. The single view of data also gave the company visibility into client-facing activities within and across departments, as well as deep insights for better engagement and cross-selling.

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