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.