February 2015 release is now available

Private Messaging for Facebook

The Oracle Service Cloud Social Monitor is a very powerful feature to provide Customer Service over social media. It allows companies to listen, monitor and engage its customers, as well as people that are with the competition and may be unhappy and willing or open to change.

Companies can use the Social Monitor on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and any blog or website with a RSS feed. But so far, private messaging could only be done via Twitter. Facebook was limited to the public feed and the company’s pages or profiles.

Best practice for Customer Service over social media is clear when it comes to a particular type of conversations (e.g. complaints). Companies should acknowledge publicly but take them off-line as soon as possible. For this, private messaging is crucial.

The February 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud adds this functionality to the Facebook channel. It is now possible to monitor and respond to Facebook private messages, as well as transition between Facebook private and public messages in the same incident.

This also means that companies can now provide end-to-end interactions in all types of enquiries (not necessarily in a complaint scenario), as sometimes people need to share personal information with the Customer Service agent, and don’t want to do it publicly.

Mobile Compatibility for Co-Browse

The Oracle Service Cloud Co-Browse functionality is great for Customer Service over the web, as it enables agents to see what customers are seeing and guide them through web pages or forms, helping them to complete actions. By pointing or taking control.

The November 2014 release of Oracle Service Cloud already brought an enhanced Co-Browse capability, supporting more browsers, more complex browser technology, more platforms, one-click co-browse launching, and custom security.

The February 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud brings even more enhancements, adding mobile compatibility, enabling customers and agents to co-browse from mobile browsers on any device during a live chat session or phone interaction.

Note: To use the newest version of Co-Browse, Customer Portal Framework Version 3.2 needs to be in place.

More Functionality for Browser UI

The Agent Browser UI was introduced in the previous release. It is still in “beta” mode but Oracle keeps working on it, adding more and more functionality for – what they call – infrequent users. Again, it is not intended to replace the Dynamic Agent desktop.

With the February 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud users will now be able to access the Knowledge Base when working in an incident, share information with other users (by forwarding or bookmarking incidents), and also display dashboards.

Incident Archiving Improvements

Large companies with millions of customers may get to a point where they have too many incidents in the database, experiencing performance issues. Oracle Service Cloud Incident Archiving allows the archiving of old or outdated incidents.

Basically what this functionality does is it removes incidents from the database and stores them in searchable files. Archived incidents information is made read-only and cannot be updated. This can happen automatically after a certain period of time.

Setting the ARCHIVE_INCIDENTS configuration setting determines when solved incidents are archived. But they can now also be permanently deleted by the use of the new configuration setting: PURGE_ARCHIVED_INCIDENTS.

Draft Incident Responses

Sometimes a user may be working on an incident (e.g. an email response) and need to jump into another task (e.g. a more urgent incident). To avoid having multiple tabs or windows open, the February 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud allows saving draft incident responses.

A user can craft the response, select cc or bcc addresses, add attachments, etc. and then save the incident with that draft response to complete and send later. The draft response is copied to the message thread panel and can still be edited before sending.

Session Hard Timeout

For obvious security reasons companies require that user’s inactive sessions are automatically logged out. Currently it is possible to do this by configuring a profile setting (Session Timeout field) and a configuration setting (CLIENT_SESSION_EXP).

Once the time of inactivity exceeds the time set in these settings the client sends a soft logout request to the server. When attempting to access the Agent Desktop again, users will receive a Console Locked message asking for re-authentication.

The February 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud brings a new level of security. The session hard timeout forces users to re-authenticate after a pre-defined period of time, offering extra security for companies that required thorough compliance (e.g. PCI, DISA).

This functionality can be set using the new SESSION_HARD_TIMEOUT configuration setting. Users will be alerted 5 minutes before their session is set to expire. After re-entering login credentials, users will be authenticated, a new session will be created, and the session ID will be updated throughout the platform (including Add-ins, APIs or Co-Browse).

Bounced Incident Response Handling

It is not surprising to anyone that sometimes email messages bounce. It also happens with incident responses sent from Oracle Service Cloud, and sometimes it is difficult, if not impossible to handle those bounces.

The February 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud brings new functionality to handle those incident responses that are returned. There is a new source in the Transactions table that will allow Techmail utility to flag those bounces: “Techmail – Incoming Auto-Reply Message”.

This will obviously be very useful for the creation of reports – e.g. listing bounced incident responses – or business rules – e.g. set incident status to “bounced” or back to “unresolved” if source is Techmail–Incoming Auto-Reply Message – enabling Customer Service teams to re-contact the customer using the same or other contact channels.