This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates are logged below, with the most recent updates at the top.
Date |
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Notes |
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09 NOV 2016 |
Initial Document Creation |
Oracle Service Cloud November Release Overview
Oracle continues to invest in integration to other Oracle applications; the November release introduces two new integrations for the Marketing Cloud using the Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS).
In addition, Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle IoT Cloud Service have introduced an Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator to help brands capitalize on the opportunity to drive next-generation customer service experiences. Accelerators are a collection of sample code, sample workflows and best practices, documentation and design guidance to assist customers with seamless integrations to and from Oracle Service Cloud.
Customers today are turning to the Web when they have a question, need to find information, or want to purchase a product or service. Organizations are using this opportunity to connect with their online and mobile customers, and they are enhancing those interactions with technologies like Co-browse. They are also providing a platform for their customers to connect with each other by embedding customer communities within the cross-channel experience as a key component of delivering modern customer service.
This release adds two new features for Co-browse administrators. First is the ability for a customers’ account administrator to grant user privileges for their organization. Account administrators are able to configure users without the need to involve Oracle, speeding configuration and giving customers full control over user configuration.
The second feature is a new notification on the welcome screen. This enables Oracle to provide notifications to the Co-browse Admin Console users. Admin Console users can see messages on the Admin Console Welcome screen so they can be notified of upcoming events or product announcements. This is a generic message and they are not customer specific.
Sneak preview allows chat agents to see what a customer is typing before they hit submit. Sneak Preview is designed to enhance agent productivity and bring value to the contact center by decreasing handle times. By allowing the agent to see what the customer is typing ahead of time they can begin to formulate an answer more quickly, which results in faster responses and faster conversations.
Community Self-Service Enhancements
This enhancement allows for answer ratings to be presented graphically. Administrators can now choose to display ratings in numerical or graphical formats and as averages or total ratings. Ratings are essential in harnessing the wisdom of the collective community and also improves answer effectiveness.
Best Answer Visibility Control
One of the primary benefits of Community Self Service is that it enables customers to answer other customer’s questions. However sometimes there are other community use cases where the “Mark as Best Answer” option may not apply. This widget configuration offers visibility control, which allows for admins configuring the widget to hide the "mark as best answer" option. This increases flexibility and gives administrators more control over their sites and their community use cases.
Currently users have two avatar choices; a default picture generated from their display name, or their avatar (if they have one). This new feature offers a third option, which allows users to browse a set of images called the "avatar library" and select the one they want to convey their community presence. This feature helps build a more personal community, giving users more ways to reflect their online presence. Users can select up to 18 avatars.
Cross Channel Contact Center
Oracle Service Cloud Cross Channel Customer Service powers organizations to provide quick, consistent, proactive, and reactive assisted service across multiple channels. Oracle Service Cloud Cross-Channel Contact Center helps organizations increase efficiency and reduce operational costs by enabling customers to resolve simple issues using self-service, while directing the more complex issues to contact center agents.
The November 2016 release includes analytics performance enhancements and better notifications for report authors.
With this release, modern LED, horizontal, and circular-gauges are added to create intuitive report views, which enable users to more quickly interpret data. Additionally, new rendering options allow the the removal of unnecessary components in reports, crisper rendering of charts, and a new modern layout theme.
November also brings us a radically new dashboard concept—specifically designed for that 5-second-glance overview for busy customer service leaders. These infolets are available out-of-the-box and contain a number of single metric charts with real-time key performance indicators like open incidents by severity, SLA, FCR, new incidents by channel, and so forth. Users can also schedule and send the infolet dashboard by email to key stakeholders at regular intervals.
The November 2016 release is an extensive release for the Agent Browser User Interface.
Performance and Single Version
The Agent Browser UI has gone through a significant performance enhancement to support high interactivity and a broad range of analytics capabilities. With the new Browser User Interface architectural change, the Browser UI is backwards compatible with versions of Oracle Service Cloud from May 2015 forward. This means that customers on older versions of Oracle Service Cloud can take advantage of the latest Browser UI capabilities without needing to upgrade their entire implementation. Additionally, upgrades now require zero downtime.
With the November 2016 release, the agent browser UI supports a much broader range of analytics capabilities, including rollups and slicing, more formatting options, calculations, sorting and hiding and new charts and inline gauges.
The UI theme has been updated to be consistent across all applications in the Oracle Cloud Portfolio. Also in the November 16 release Live Chat is now a fully supported channel; contacts are automatically matched and the contact and chat workspaces are integrated.
With the November 2016 release, Knowledge Authors can now use the Agent Browser User Interface to author and edit knowledge answers with a new HTML editor with HTML5 support.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is essential for delivering exceptional customer experiences and increasing customer loyalty. In the contact center, empowered, efficient agents must have access to timely information when they need it. Customers expect to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, when and where they ask them. Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Management provides a fully integrated knowledge management solution that delivers a seamless, consistent experience across all channels, from self-service to contact centers to communities and social sites.
Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Advanced
With the November 2016 release, Oracle continues to add new capabilities to the Knowledge Advanced edition, with new functionality in Knowledge Advanced for Customer Portal and Advanced Knowledge for Agent Desktop.
Create Answer Links from HTML Editor
With the new Create Answer Link, knowledge authors can now easily link to other documents (answers) within a Knowledge Advanced answer. This feature adds an easy to use “Answer Link” button on the rich text editor.
Modernize and Modularize Insurance & Finance Ontologies
New Ontologies have been added to the Knowledge Advanced dictionary. The dictionary has been updated with the latest terms and abbreviations for the Finance and Insurance industries. This feature is localized into 25 languages, making it a significant feature for global organizations.
Interactive Spell check provides Interactive correction of misspelled search terms with “did you mean” suggestions for customers searching knowledge articles. This feature helps to improve the customer search experience.
Email Answer Link allows customers to email a link to the current answer they are viewing. This feature makes it easier for customers to share valuable information found within the knowledge base.
Policy Automation enables the automation of an organization’s business rules, processes, policies, or regulations. With Policy Automation, organizations can ensure polices and regulations are being met while leveraging intelligent decisioning and interviews to capture the right information from the customer, assist in the resolution of complex service requests, and help determine product or service eligibility.
The built in form generation now has capabilities to support both font embedding and barcodes.
Font embedding allows any embeddable font to be included with generated PDF documents, ensuring that customers will see documents as they were intended to appear, and that stored documents will always be presented correctly when they are retrieved at a later time.
Barcode support allows UPC, Code128 or Code39 barcodes to be placed anywhere in a generated PDF document, ensuring the codes can be tracked to the overarching business process to which they belong, regardless of where and when they are printed and used.
New Extended capabilities on the Next Generation Interview allows data to be collected dynamically for inferred entities.
Access Control allows users to control policies and projects, for authoring and deployment administration. This feature allows multiple project teams to share a single hub, while still ensuring each user can only see and modify policies for which they have the appropriate permissions.
The November release changes the appearance and navigation of omni-channel interviews to provide differentiated customer service, referred to as Next Generation Interviews. These Next Generation Interviews provide modern, dynamic and consistent user experiences across all channels. Features include enhanced navigation, new web and mobile-style controls and location services
Next Generation Interviews deliver engaging experiences using dynamic behavior. The real-time update occurs when the user exits an interview field or changes screens. Examples include automatic formatting for currency and dates, immediate calculation of rules and associating images with values.
The user experience is also enhanced with unified web and mobile style controls enabling the same look and feel for both web and mobile app interviews. New control types include button toggles, switches and sliders, password security and masked input.
It also includes a fully responsive mobile interview layout that works on any device.
With the November release, the Next Generation Interview can now capture the user’s location (latitude and longitude) as attributes and use it for location-specific logic (e.g. automatically select the closest location based on distance)
Oracle Service Cloud Platform
The Oracle Service Cloud Platform includes App Builder products, the Experience Platform, and the Virtual Configuration Interface Object (CIO) Cloud Service.
The November release adds support for the following browsers, OS and .NET versions:
- End-User
- Support Firefox v47 or greater
- Support Chrome v51 or greater
- Support for Android v5.x through v6.x (Drop support for Android v4.x)
- Browser Agent Desktop (BUI MTC)
- Support Firefox v47 or greater
- Support Chrome v51 or greater
- Add support for Edge in Win 10
- Support for Android 5.x through v6.x (tablets only)
- Agent Desktop
- All agent desktops must ensure they are compatible with TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2 - this means all agent desktops MUST install .NET framework 4.5.2, 4.6, or 4.6.1
In the November release, enhancements have been made to OAUTH (Open Authorization) support to enable business administrators to define one Identify Provider for all protocols, enforce audience restriction for REST APIs, and enhance configurability through custom audience URLs.
Oracle Service Cloud Integration
Oracle continues to invest in integration to other Oracle applications. The November release introduces two new integrations to Oracle Marketing Cloud using the Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS).
In addition, an Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator will enable internet enabled device connectivity to Oracle Service Cloud. Accelerators are a collection of sample code, sample workflows, best practices, and documentation and design guidance to assist customers with seamless integrations to and from Oracle Service Cloud.
Integration with Marketing Cloud
The Oracle Integration Cloud Service has two new connectors to between Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud (Responsys & Eloqua). These pre-built and certified integrations provide a two-way synchronization that ensures data consistency. The configurable framework allows extension to other objects such as incidents.
Internet of Things Accelerator
The November 2016 release delivers a new Internet of Things (IoT) Accelerator, which provides a bi-directional integration with Oracle IoT Cloud Service. This Accelerator or open source packaged integration between Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle IoT Cloud Service, helps customers take advantage of the Internet of Things connectivity so that service events and alerts received from connected devices can be consumed and appropriate action taken by agents within the Oracle Service Cloud desktop. The integration uses the Oracle Integration Cloud Services (ICS) framework, thereby ensuring configurability, reliability and fault tolerance.
The new IoT accelerator also includes implementation documentation to easily configure, extend and deploy the packaged integration to help customers increase operational efficiency and reduce costs by using IoT data to predict customer needs and proactively address customer service issues.
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