May 2017 release now available

The May 2017 release of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is now generally available and, as always, brings some exciting new features and functionality that touch the Customer Portal (CP), the Browser UI (BUI), the Knowledge Base (KB), Oracle Policy Automation (OPA), and the underlying platform.

Community Home Page and Widgets

A “Home Page” is now available for the community, acting as the landing page and facilitating – through a series of new (and existing) widgets – an immediate overview. It also provides an easy navigation to the areas of the community that are most relevant to the customer, making things more user friendly and smooth. Some of the new widgets (listed below) are shown in the following screenshot.

• Announcements
• Forums List
• User List (most comments)
• User List (most questions)
• Recently Active Users
• Twitter

This new release also includes other new features on the discussion and account management pages, as well as allows community members to use Facebook profile picture as community avatar.

Customer Portal – CAPTCHA

The CAPTCHA widget was also enhanced in the May 2017 release of OSvC and is not in-line with the latest Google “reCAPTCHA” widget, which increases security and makes it easier for the customer – as the new reCAPTCHA allows users to attest they are humans with a single click, without having to solve a CAPTCHA.

Browser User Interface (BUI)

Following up on the development of agent-facing functionality into the BUI, on the May 2017 release Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) is fully integrated, allowing users to complete OPA interviews withing the BUI – as they would in the Dynamic Agent Desktop.

On top of that, the May 2017 release brings a significant number of enhancements to the BUI, when it comes to reports.

• Report Inline Editing is now available – allowing users to update data directly in a report.
• Cross Tabs reports are now supported – allowing users to group data by row and column output.
• Additional export formats are now available
• Dashboards can now be exported

Knowledge Base

The May 2017 release adds new capabilities to the Knowledge Base (KB) namely to the Knowledge Advanced, for either the Customer Portal and Agent Desktop.

One of the most interesting capabilities is the multi-language search, which will be particularly useful for those companies that support multiple countries, and have KB answers in various languages. Based on user preferences, this feature limits search results on the KB search report/window, to answers in the languages selected on the user profile.

Another very useful enhancement on the KB capabilities is the new API functionality to:

• bulk import images – allowing the upload and deletion of images (used in KB content) in bulk, using the API as an alternative to the authoring tool.
• mass update content with inline images
• migrate documents from other environments or legacy knowledge bases

Another new capability on the Knowledge Advanced front is the ability to enable search by Product and Category in the customer portal. This will allow customers to browse KB content by product and category, improving usability and web self-service capability.

The May 2017 release also brings to Knowledge Advanced enhanced support for file types upload. Adding to the ability to upload images (jpeg, png, bmp, gif), Administrators can now configure and allow Knowledge Managers or Authors to upload further file types (PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, TXT…).

Finally, in this new release, the Site Wide Link Checker (which was introduced in Nov 2015 release) is now able to check Knowledge Advanced answer links, allowing knowledge managers to easily identify broken links within KB content, and fix them.

Oracle Service Cloud Platform

Some exciting news at the platform level. As advanced in the Las Vegas conference, Oracle is releasing the Enterprise Extension Manager which will basically be a release management tool, allowing the export and import of configuration changes and packages between environments and interfaces. This is an extremely useful and long-requested feature, by admins and developers, which is not yet complete and Oracle advises has “controlled availability in May 2017 release“.

The May 2017 release also brings enhancements on data management, including Cloud Auxiliary Storage Service. A scalable data storage that provides real-time read/write functionality for non-operational data.

Lastly, Managed Tables are improved in order to expose and allow access to additional OSvC through RightNow Object Query Language (ROQL). The following managed tables are now available for ROQL queries:

• ChatQueue
• Flow
• FlowQuestion
• IncidentQueue
• Profile

If you want to know more about May 2017 release and access the release documentation, please visit the Customer Success Blog

RightNow November 2013 Release

The November 2013 release of Oracle RightNow CX (or Oracle Service Cloud) provides significant new features and capabilities.

Virtual Assistant

Oracle RightNow Virtual Assistant: One of the coolest new features of this release. With the virtual assistant organisations can decrease the volume of Live Chat sessions that require an actual human agent.

Live Chat

Virtual Assistant Escalation: Whilst servicing the customer, the Virtual Assistant checks for agent availability and seamlessly transfers the customer to a Live Chat session, providing the agent all the information collected up front.

Page Peek: Agents can now see a snapshot of the actual website page the customer was navigating when he engaged in the Live Chat session. (note: sensitive data such as account or credit cards numbers can be hidden so they are not displayed to the agent).

Customer Portal

Widget Migration Assistant: This is something particularly useful for developers, saving time and making them more efficient. A widget wizard guides the developers through the custom code migration process. On top of that, it provides code validation and enhancement suggestions. (note: Framework Version 3 has to be enabled).

Connect Object Explorer (COE): Another cool feature for developers. COE makes it easier for developers to inspect the objects that Connect exposes, providing an object and field explorer to view metadata information and a have a stronger understanding of Connect objects. It also has an easy-to-use ROQL query interface which allows the export of custom queries.

New widgets: The November 2013 version of the CP includes several new widgets:

• ClickjackPrevention widget
• TopAnswers widget
• VirtualAssistantAvatar
• VirtualAssistantBanner
• VirtualAssistantSimilarMatches
• VirtualAssistantFeedback

Access to customer profile data with JavaScript: Developers are now able to access customer profile information using JavaScript (avoiding the need to gather that information in a widget controller.php file and manually pass it to JavaScript.

Interface-specific cookies: To prevent malicious reuse of the cookie across interfaces.

File attachment thumbnail display: The FileListDisplay widget now includes a display_thumbnail attribute that displays thumbnails of image file attachments on the question details page of all three page sets.

Hiding empty columns on reports: The new hide_empty_columns attribute prevents the display of output columns for custom fields or custom attributes that do not contain data.

Link to Customer Portal API documentation: The Help button on the dashboard of the Customer Portal Administration site now includes a link to the PHP API and JavaScript API documentation.

Removed widgets: The following deprecated widgets have been removed from this version of the CP:

• MobileEmailAnswerLink
• ContactNameDisplay

Agent Desktop

Single Sign-On Identity Provider: The new release enables the administration of SSO integrations with external applications that reside outside RightNow CX. SSO integrations allow RightNow to be used as an identity provider to store and authenticate customer credentials.

Message Templates: Enhanced features to customise and personalise admin notifications and emails, as well as contact emails.

• Conditional content in Incident threads (insert adverts/coupons in response threads).
• Customisable subject lines (add up to 5 merge fields on the subject line)
• Customisable print templates
• Case Sections
• Merge report properties

Mobile

Agent Mobile App: It was enhanced and is now supported not only in Apple’s iPads but in iPhones, providing also the ability to:

• Create and edit Contacts;
• Access Survey result history;
• Forward Incidents, Tasks, and Answers;
• Upload Incident attachments;
• View a customised Incidents report;
• View knowledge base answers;
• Customise lists and other Mobile Workspaces.

Reports

Standard Reports: Two new reports were added to help admins identify other reports that are not running as efficiently as required.

• Report failure details (lists reports that failed to run, the reasons for that, and how often they failed)
• Summary of Report failures (lists the types of report failures along with the number of times the failure was encountered during a specified date range)

Enhanced report analyser: The report analyser now contains additional information that help admins work on the efficiency of the reports.

Social

Ignore results control and monitoring: Admins now have the ability to control which agent profiles have the permission to ignore social media posts. On top of that, new reports are now available to help admins monitor the number of posts being ignored by agents on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis.

Twitter filters: New filters were added to help reduce clutter when performing Twitter searches. Also, it is now available the ability to filter Twitter posts by the number of followers and exclude retweets from search results.

Facebook locale search: Already available on Twitter searches in previous releases, filter by locale when performing a Facebook search on public feed is now available, to narrow down to the results to more relevant data.

Cloud

Infrastructure – Incident Thread Masking: This new functionality will enables organisations to better comply with internal governance and data privacy issues. Sensitive data (credit card numbers, etc.) can be automatically masked with the use of patterns/regular expressions matching. These masks are applied to thread data, either entered by the customer or the agent. The data is modified in the database and the UI.

Expanded Data Center Footprint: Three new data centres were recently opened in Kitakyushu (Japan), Sydney (Australia), and Amsterdam (The Netherlands), making the number of data centres rise to 8 – others are Canada, Santa Clara (USA), Oklahoma (USA), Chicago (USA), London (UK), Singapure.

RightNow August 2013 Released

Oracle has announced the availability of the RightNow August 2013 release, which brings many interesting and relevant improvements to the platform. The main aim is to continue the enhancement of the overall Customer Experience, and the most relevant developments are the integration with Oracle ATG Web Commerce and Oracle Policy Automation.

Contact Center Experience:

– The integration with Oracle ATG Web Commerce allows agents to offer assistance to customers that are buying online. By pro-actively or re-actively answering questions and supporting the buying process they can help customers to complete orders, thus reducing cart abandonment.

– The integration with Oracle Policy Automation (that is now part of the Oracle Service cloud) gives the ability for solving complex Incidents using the dynamic questionnaires within the Dynamic Agent Desktop while interacting directly with the Incident’s relevant and related data in the database.

– Date and date/time fields in Custom Objects now support dates from the 1st January 1902 (until now it was 1st January 1970). Also a minimum and maximum value can be set when power users are creating these fields in the object designer.

Mobile Agent app:

– Power users are now able to customise the Mobile App, namely the mobile Incident UI layout. They can add standard or custom fields for Incidents, Contacts or Organisations into certain areas of the Incident workspace (Summary, Additional Information, Contact Details).

– Another new feature for power users is the ability to reset staff members’ passwords and set Mobile Agent app permissions through the user’s Profile.

– Users are now able to perform a wider list of tasks from their mobile devices, such as send a message from an Incident to the primary contact, record and review Time Billed, or Filter open Incidents by Queue.

Feedback:

– New features that aim to increase the participation on Surveys will allow the placement of a syndicated survey link on the Customer Portal or any other pages. A new widget called SurveyLink is available in this version of the Customer Portal to address that.

– Two other new widgets – ProactiveSurveyLink andSyndicated ProactiveSurveyLink – will give the ability to display/pop an invitation window to participate in a Survey.

– To increase the completion and accuracy of the Surveys, a new Back button will allow customers to review or amend their previous answers before submitting the Survey.

– Up to four automatic reminders can be configured to notify customers of forgotten or incomplete Surveys. Those notifications can include merged fields and have available the proof and preview functionalities.

Analytics:

– A new button named References will be available in the reports designer so that power users can easily see where the reports are being used. In which Workspaces, Navigation Set or Dashboard.

– A new report named Incoming Email Filter Details will help power users understand why emails are being filtered out or rejected by Techmail utility. It lists emails that were filtered out or rejected, and its details.

– Two new reports named Survey Reminder Statistics and Broadcast Response Timeline are now available to complement the new Survey reminder functionality.

– Power users can now display external images in Reports without having to store them in RightNow through the Images Explorer. This option is available configuring the column format options pointing to external locations for the image files.

Web Experience:

– Enhancements in the Knowledge Syndication widget (KnowledgeSyndication) will allow the delivery of Answers on pages external to your Customer Portal. The aim is again to reduce cart abandonment and improve conversion rates.

– The integration with Oracle Policy Automation allows power users to build interviews that can be placed anywhere and be accessed from any channel or device.

– The DateInput and BasicDateInput widgets will now support years back to 1902 for system attribute fields. The default value of the min_year attribute remains 1970, but it can be changed.

Social Experience:

– New Community moderation planning tools will allow Community managers to better do their jobs by resource planning and tracking their moderators. Independent groups functionality will allow B2B communities and provide greater control of community interactions.

– Social Monitor improvements will allow enrichment of the customer’s social profile allowing the users to see information such as number of followers on Twitter, location and total number of posts, or number of friends on Facebook.

– That key customer profile information can also be captured and viewed in the Contact Workspace by adding the new Contact Social Profile report.

Knowledge Management:

– Improve the accuracy and relevancy of the Answers suggested by the SmartAssistant with the new AutoTuner. It leverages the machine learning, agent-specified best Answers, and implicit Answer / Incident linking information (prioritising Answers that have been appended to Incidents or have been identified as the Answer that best resolved an Incident).

Cloud Platform:

– Phase II of Custom Process Models brings improvements in the application performance as they enable existing processes to continue to run while waiting for an asynchronous response.

– Techmail utility has been enhanced and can now process email messages in parallel. The simultaneous processing of messages will increase the speed and the amount of messages processed, making the reply quicker.

RightNow May 2013 Released

Oracle have announced the May 2013 release of Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service, which has many interesting improvements that aim to enhance the Customer Experience.

Obviously, with the rise of mobile devices and social activity, the main new features/improvements are around Mobile Service (e.g. Mobile Agent App) and Social Monitoring.

Web Experience:

• Expand service to any mobile device with a browser – not only smartphones – including hand-held game systems, readers, and other non-traditional devices.

• Allow customer to attach images when submitting incidents through the mobile Customer Portal.

• Allow workspace add-ins and ribbon add-ins to be used within the Chat workspace.

• Better mobile SEO with search optimized to bring back mobile specific content.

Social Experience:

• Identify trends in the Social Monitor. New reports available to track engagements across social networks and enable targeted trend analysis.

• New reports provide further information to help Community Managers and Business Analysts get a deeper understanding of community engagement and usage.

• Streamlined Community moderation workflow to simplify the management of community content and identify users that require moderation.

Contact Center Experience:

• Mobile Agent App with new key capabilities to improve the productivity of roaming Agents and Specialists. Ability to create, assign, and update tasks. Ability to create new incidents and manage notes on contacts and incidents.

Engage:

• Report Management Module available to help CX administrators view information about report usage. Contains thirteen reports that display information regarding scheduled reports, reports used in workspaces and navigation sets, and reports that may require excessive processing time.

Cloud Platform:

• Open Integration and Extensibility: expanded data model coverage and product functionality through new Public APIs. Additionally, enhancements to security for SOAP Web service based integrations.