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 |
What's Changed |
Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 05 FEB 2016 |
Initial Document Creation |
Oracle Service Cloud February Release Overview
Oracle continues to empower its customers to deliver great customer experiences with Oracle Service Cloud. The February 2016 release of Oracle Service Cloud adds new capabilities to Web Customer Service, Contact Center, Knowledge Management, Policy Automation and Field Service Management.
Field Service (formally TOA Technologies) enhances mobile capabilities and adds new mapping functionality, providing broader and more robust navigation functionality. Additionally, the February release adds several new enhancements to Policy Automation including dynamic online interviews and usability features to improve the overall experience for agents and customers.
Customers today are turning to the Web when they have a question, need to find information, or are looking to purchase a product or service. Organizations are leveraging this opportunity to connect with their online and mobile customers, enhancing those interactions with technologies like Co-browse. They are also providing a platform for these customers to connect with each other by embedding customer communities within the cross-channel experience as a key component of delivering modern customer service.
Oracle Service Cloud Community Self Service Enhancements
In this release, new features have been added to enhance the customer experience within Community Self Service. An enhancement to the ratings widget enables organizations to choose from multiple formats for capturing customer feedback on community content. Now customers can rate content on a five-star scale in addition to up and down voting. Organizations and customers are able to gain additional insights by seeing average ratings displayed next to any post or comment along with customer feedback on a particular section of content.
An additional widget has been released to enhance the customers’ experience when navigating through discussion threads about a product or category. Now links can be displayed at the bottom of a discussion page to allow customers to navigate to a previous discussion or to the next discussion associated with the same product or category.
The newest version of Co-browse includes a prebuilt default configuration that can be used by any organization. This default configuration features a simple user interface and doesn’t include any security configurations. By using the minimal default configuration, customers can quickly deploy Oracle Co-browse without having to perform any customizations.
Oracle Co-browse customers can now opt out of receiving automatic updates or upgrades to their Co-browse environments. While it is recommended that customers use the most up-to-date Co-browse technology in order to retain the advantages of Oracle’s ongoing work to improve speed, functionality, and compatibility, customers can now choose to stay on a specified version. Using the versioning feature, customers can test upgraded versions within their test environments before moving to an upgraded version in their production environment.
Oracle Service Cloud Cross Channel Customer Service enables organizations to provide quick, consistent, proactive, and reactive assisted service across multiple channels. Oracle Service Cloud Cross-Channel Contact Center can help 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.
Analytics - Consolidated Dashboard Layouts
The February 2016 release introduces a new analytics dashboard layout which combines single-row reports into a consolidated report grid view. This layout is helpful for reviewing dissimilar data sets and metrics in a single view. With Consolidated Dashboard Layouts, administrators can create dashboards with multiple single-line reports that are merged on the server into a single grid view, allowing multiple metrics to be represented in a single grid.
The February 2016 release adds new functionality to the Agent Browser UI for managers and agents, including workspace rules, extensibility with a JavaScript API, Social Monitoring, and additional Knowledge Advanced capabilities.
Workspace Rules – Phase 2 and Extensibility
To streamline the agent experience, Oracle Service Cloud uses workspace rules within the current Agent Desktop to present relevant information based on the business process. In the February 2016 release, workspace rules are available in the Agent Browser UI. Workspace rules for the Agent Browser UI can be managed using the same intuitive rule management that is used for the Agent Desktop.
In addition to workspace rules, the Agent Browser interface can be further extended using the JavaScript API. With the JavaScript API, developers can use standard web technologies to create UI and data mashups.
Knowledge Advanced Enhancement Within Agent Browser UI
The February 2016 release includes enhancements to Knowledge Advanced within the Agent Browser User Interface including dynamic loading of Knowledge Base content to increase performance.
Event Tracking has been added to provide insight into customer behavior. Event Tracking provides valuable data on the quality of the searchable content, including how quickly the right content is found and how knowledge is being used to resolve incidents.
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, too, expect to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, when and where they need it. Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Management provides a fully-integrated knowledge management solution that delivers a seamless, consistent experience across all channels, from self-service contact centers to communities and social sites.
Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Advanced
In this release, Oracle continues to add new capabilities to the Knowledge Advanced edition. New functionality has been introduced in Knowledge Advanced for Customer Portal and Advanced Knowledge for Agent Desktop.
The Agent Desktop - Pagination
With the addition of knowledge pagination, agents can navigate to a new page after 10 article results. Pagination allows agents to quickly flip through many knowledge articles without being required to scroll. This feature has been added to My Favorites, linked lists, My Subscriptions, and the toolbar window. Additionally, keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) can be used to quickly navigate to the next page of answer results.
Customer Portal – Interactive SpellCheck
The February release adds Interactive Spellcheck to Customer Portal. Interactive Spellcheck improves the customer experience with interactive correction of misspelled search terms. If a mistake in typing or spelling occurs, customers are now offered query correction options.
Customer Portal - Recent Search
Customer Portal for Knowledge Advanced now displays recent searches within a drop-down list. This feature is designed to improve usability on Customer Portal by displaying a list of recent searches performed by a customer during their session.
Parametric Find allows knowledge authors to search parametrically for documents within a content type. Additionally, privileged authors can perform global Find and Replace across all content types. Global Find and Replace enables authors to quickly identify and perform bulk changes to knowledgebase articles, making curation easier with the ability to perform mass updates.
Policy Automation enables the automation of an organization’s business rules, processes, policies, or regulations. With Policy Automation, organizations can automatically provide intelligent service to complex service requests.
The February release enhances dynamic online interviews by adding navigation and usability features to improve the overall experience for agents and customers. These modern features include: Interview Checkpoints, Free Navigation in Interviews, Touch-friendly Interviews, and Multi-level Value Lists.
Interview checkpoints allow both agents and customers to save an in-progress interview and resume the interview later. Using the Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) Connector Framework with a connected application, interviews can be deployed that automatically save progress at selected points during the interview. This feature is available on every screen or after select screens. The policy author has the flexibility to configure interview checkpoints as necessary.
New design enhancements to the default font size, spacing, control sizes, colors, and layout have been designed to improve usability and simplify configuration. The new touch-friendly features enhance usability for interviews on mobile and tablet devices. An optional left navigation bar is also available to optimize landscape-oriented tablet displays.
The Free Navigation feature allows interview stages and screens to be updated in any order during an online interview. To help track progress, visual styling indicators help users’ understand where additional data is needed.
The Multilevel Value List enables customers to select multiple levels of data in hierarchical lists.
Built on time-based, self-learning, and predictive technology, Oracle Field Service Cloud transforms customer experiences as well as the effectiveness and productivity of field service operations. Customers know when service will occur and how long a job will take because Oracle Field Service Cloud’s patented approach eliminates guesswork and uncertainty. Users can plan, optimize, and manage fieldwork, scheduling, and coordinating jobs for mid-to-large workforces in minutes. Field teams can communicate with customers and each other to ensure that jobs are completed in a timely manner. This holistic field service loop allows managers to create efficient daily job schedules, work assignments, and routes while maintaining a real-time view of the field.
The Field Resource Manager feature expands the capabilities of the Supervisor Console feature released in August 2015 by improving visibility into the status of field team progress and enabling field supervisors to build field resource schedules and adjust shifts as needed from their mobile devices. The Field Resource Manager feature also supports inventory management using mobile devices, allowing field supervisors to track and manage inventories in the field.
With the February 2016 release, Oracle Maps is now embedded within Oracle Field Service Cloud. Built upon the Nokia/Navteq engine, Oracle Maps adds improved geocoding services, particularly in rural areas.
This enhancement provides broader and more robust navigation functionality, including improved resource tracking. New with this release is map layering, which allows customers to display their assets and infrastructure, whether above- or below-ground, directly on Oracle Maps.
The February 2016 release adds an immediate work management feature that allows users to automatically dispatch a field service technician to an emergency or urgent appointment with no human intervention. A new property on the activity object indicates when a new activity is urgent and automatically triggers Oracle Field Service Cloud to run the routing process. Oracle Field Service Cloud can quickly locate the closest field resource, suspend that resource’s current activity, and automatically route that resource to the emergency site. Since this process is completely automated, it delivers the fastest possible response time.
This enhancement allows users to create their own unique code or HTML5 applications and run them within the Oracle Field Service Cloud framework, enhancing the functionality of the Oracle Field Service Cloud Mobility application. Users can now develop additional functionality to accommodate their specific workflows and processes, seamlessly embed that functionality into the Mobility application, and access those capabilities offline.
Oracle E-Business Suite Field Service Accelerator
The February 2016 release includes an integration accelerator with Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), giving EBS users a simple way to add the advanced field service management capabilities of Oracle Field Service Cloud to EBS. Oracle Field Service Cloud can now schedule EBS-created work orders and update inventory in EBS. The accelerator uses standard APIs and includes complete sample code and documentation; all of the code is open source and can be adjusted to meet a customer’s unique business processes.
Integration Cloud Service Integration
There is now an easy way to connect Oracle Field Service Cloud with all Oracle cloud products using Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) available in the February 2016 release. ICS provides simple integrations and process adjustments. All integrations and process flows can be managed using an intuitive graphical display, allowing users to control integrations with no programming requirements.
The Oracle Service Cloud Platform includes App Builder products, the Experience Platform, and the Virtual Configuration Interface Object (CIO) Cloud Service.
Support for the following applications and browsers have been added:
- .NET 4.6
- iOS 9.x on mobile apps
- Browsers: End User Custom Portal Pages
- Firefox 41+
- Chrome 46+
- Safari 9.0
- Microsoft Office (including Outlook) 2016S
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