What is Oracle Service Cloud?

What is Oracle Service Cloud?

OSvC (which we will adopt from now on to save a bit of space) is a modern, easy-to-use and easy-to-configure cloud-based contact center and customer service platform that lets contact center agents manage customer interactions across all channels – mail, phone, web chat and social networks – in one place.

OSvC is highly configurable with a low technical resource dependency. Many things can be achieved quickly and efficiently without recourse to programming or other non-business skills.

Components of Oracle Service Cloud

OSvC is all about giving great service to your customers. Whether it be on a self-service basis or on the phone with your contact centre, OSvC ensures that the speed and efficiency of the responses your users make provides a great service experience for your customers.

Self Service

The Self Service capabilities of the application allow your customers to find answers on their own – as and when they need to. The features that customers mostly need – searching for information and browsing, getting to community features, accessing automated solutions to get what’s needed without having to wait for a human to become available – are all part of this solution.

The Customer Portal is part of your OSvC solution: you have a customer-facing portal ready for your use. At the heart of the Customer Portal is the list of Answers, the knowledgebase your customers will be searching through. It is, of course, empty when you first get hold of it, and you will definitely need to make some configuration changes to it, so that it better reflects your corporate style. It might look something like the example below.

Assisted Service

For times when the customer needs to be able to interact with physical resources from your company, the OSvC solution provides total channel capability: email, phone, chat and social networking. In addition, the platform allows for the rapid creation of incidents and follows the process of solving the issue, noting down the different conversations along the way.

Agent Desktop

When your staff need to interact with OSvC they can easily work with records and search and edit information (for example, customer data). At the same time, administrators need a place to easily create users, build custom layouts, and perform maintenance activities. The Agent Desktop is a Windows application that is downloaded to the agent’s machine. It can be customized and configured, is available in local languages, and can also be downloaded as a Mobile Agent App for Apple devices such as iPad and iPhone.

In the screenshot above, the agent is viewing a tabular report of incidents organized by contact. Depending on your role in an organization, you might use the Agent Desktop for searching and editing customer data, for configuring and administering your OSvC knowledgebase, or for performing other administrative tasks as you will see.

You should note that the Agent Desktop, when it is first downloaded, will have very limited navigation options. You will need to configure it, as required, to release the extra functions your users need. This book assumes that you have sufficient permissions to undertake those tasks, as you would if held the Profile of Administrator in OSvC.

Configuration

The OSvC platform, and the Agent Desktop particularly, contain effective tools to design and deliver business automation, making it easier to optimize the experience for the agent. Here are just a few of them:

• Scripted interactions that drive efficient data capture.
• Workflows that dynamically render the user interface.
• Business Automation for the routing of incidents, escalation, and more.
• Multi-lingual interfaces available within a single customer instance of OSvC.

The Agent Desktop contains lots of tools and functionality to create a configured workspace for the end user.

Many of the tools are used to configure (meaning that no programming knowledge or coding experience is required) rather than to customize (meaning that technical knowledge is required) the environment to meet your requirements. As a simple example, designing dynamic workflow processes is done within a graphical editor as part of the Agent Desktop, as the example below illustrates.

TIP: The Agent Desktop is thus not at all limited to contact center agents. It has a dual role as both the place for end-user activities like updating records, as well as administrative tasks like building new Workflow.

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This excerpt is taken from Chapter 1 of Getting Started with Oracle Service Cloud