Opportunity Management and Add-ins in OSvC BUI

It was great news when Oracle announced the launch of the Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) Browser User Interface (BUI), which finally gave more flexibility to the users and allowed them to access the platform from any browser.

Unfortunately, for reasons that do not make too much sense to me, Oracle decided to leave certain functionalities out of the BUI (functionality available in the Dynamic Agent Desktop – the .NET console). Opportunity Management was one of them.

The Opportunity Management functionality allows the management of sales opportunities, and is used by several organisations and thousands of users, who have in OSvC a full-blown customer relationship and engagement management platform.

That is the case in the company I work for, Capventis. We obviously wanted to adopt the BUI, but needed to have complete functionality. We decided to roll out to the service and support teams – as Customer and Incident Management is standard and available.

But then needed to roll out to the sales team, and therefore decided to create the Opportunity Management functionality (for the BUI) ourselves. In that process, we also decided to streamline the process of adding line items to Opportunities.

The truth is the standard Quote functionality never worked for us, and all we wanted was a simple way to add line items to an opportunity. We decided then to create what we called the Breakdown entity (with a Many-to-1 relationship with Opportunity).

This entity allows us to simply select the Type and Sub-Type of product or service to sell, add a Quantity and a Unit price to it. Then a BUI add-in automatically calculates the Total Amount for the line item.

The Opportunity entity is the same that we had (using the standard functionality), but another BUI add-in calculates the total amount of all line items (in the Breakdown entity) and automatically sets the opportunity Forecast Revenue.

Both BUI add-ins were put in place leveraging the BUI Extensibility Framework API which allowed us to develop the necessary JavaScript add-in and code to read and write data from and to the database.

The video shows the fantastic work of our team (in particular Harriet, Gary and Mark) who made it possible for everyone in the company to use the OSvC BUI, whilst making the Opportunity Management functionality even slicker and simpler.

CX Editor – Edit answers inline in the Customer Portal

In MSE17 I had the pleasure to meet my fellow All Star 2017 Bastiaan van der Kooij, from CX Builders, and get to know the amazing work he has been doing around Oracle Service Cloud.

One of the coolest things he has developed, is the CX Editor, an inline WYSIWYG editor for knowledge base answers, which allows the authoring of answers directly in the customer portal.

It has all the necessary and key functionality that a knowledge manager or administrator would expect (and has available in the console) but also a whole raft of other cool and very useful features and functions.

For example, it enables users to easily insert custom components like accordions or tab sets, with preview capability, and even provides A/B comparison between updated and original versions.

If you want to know more about it, see the demo:

The CX Editor is available to buy and download on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Click here to access. Alternatively, contact Bastiaan at info@cxbuilders.com or visit the CX Builders website to see what other cool add-ins are available for Oracle Service Cloud.

Integration: Connect Web Services and .NET API

One of the best, and most challenging, implementation projects I had the opportunity to be involved with as a Lead Consultant and Project Manager was in a company with 50 offices, 700,000 customers, a global sales & marketing organisation and 2 contact centres (Europe and Asia).

Oracle Service Cloud was chosen as the platform at the centre of this key strategic project which aimed to achieve transformation in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and back-office Operations.

As the main Customer platform, and to provide the users with a full 360-degree view of the customer, Oracle Service Cloud had to be integrated with legacy Oracle eBusiness Suite (on-premise), as well as a bespoke system (Amazon Cloud). Oracle Fusion Middleware was already in place to be the glue that would join up all systems.

To deliver the full 360-degree view of the customer, Oracle Service Cloud would have to allow staff members to see key customer information (demographics, contacts, etc.), customer details (roles, relationships, interactions), finance and other information, stored in Oracle eBusiness Suite.

Furthermore, the full 360-degree view of the customer in Oracle Service Cloud would also have to display company-specific information, associated with each customer, stored in a bespoke system, hosted in the Amazon Cloud.

The challenge was not only to have a synchronisation of key customer information, and service requests (created by legacy processes in Oracle eBusiness Suite), but also display the additional data (from Oracle eBusiness Suite and bespoke system) without holding it in the Oracle Service Cloud database.

Two types of integrations were developed:

Near Real-Time type integration (in grey) to synchronise key customer information and service requests, between Oracle eBusiness Suite and Oracle Service Cloud databases;
Surfacing type integration (in red) to get customer details, finance and other information from Oracle eBusiness Suite and the bespoke system, and display it in a custom screen embedded in the Contact workspace.

Below is a brief overview of the architecture:

20170122-project-architecture

These two integrations were developed, leveraging the Oracle Service Cloud Connect Web Services for SOAP (CWS SOAP), and the .NET API that allowed our team to build the integration and the custom .NET components, controls, and applications needed for the custom screen.

The project go-live was a few months ago. After a period of stabilization this post is not only to share the experience, and show the power and art of the possible with Oracle Service Cloud, but also to celebrate the effort of a fantastic team (made of Capventis and Client resources).

Attachment Bulk Download

Oracle Service Cloud allows the attachment of files to all standard and custom objects. The most common uses are when staff attach files to Contacts, or when customers attach files to Incidents.

But in order to access those files a user would normally have to search for the desired record, open it, go to the “Attachments” tab and open or download the file attached.

This was not manageable for one of our clients. They were asking many of their customers to upload a file through the portal, and then they wanted a specific team to analyse all files uploaded by the customers. Obviously it was not feasible to go into each and every record, download the file, etc.

So they asked us, at Capventis, if it was possible to bulk download all attachments. Actually, they wanted something even more clever. The ability to search in an object, for all records that had attachments, by date range and type, then select only the ones they wanted, and download the files to their local/shared drive.

Our team discussed and it was definitely possible to build such capability using an add-in. But why re-invent the wheel, when we were certain that our long-standing partners in Holland, WeSquare, surely had something similar or that would fit, as they dedicate themselves to develop add-ins for Oracle Service Cloud.

We were right, and in a few days WeSquare had developed an Attachment Bulk Download add-in perfectly aligned with our customer’s needs. Once more the partnership was a success and WeSquare demonstrated their specialism and knowledge.

Open the add-in from the Navigation Set.

OSvC_Attachments_Download1

Search for all records that contain an attachment, by date range and type.

OSvC_Attachments_Download2

Select only the records from which you want to download the files attached. Ability to “Select/Unselect All”

Click “Download” and select the location to where files will be downloaded.

OSvC_Attachments_Download4

Oracle Service Cloud with LinguistNow in PhotoBox

It was almost three years ago when I first came across a brilliant add-on to Oracle Service Cloud, developed by Language I/O. At the time I wrote a post about it, describing how it would work for Incident and Answer translation.

A number of months later I posted about the success story of the Answer translation (LinguistHelp) in iRobot.

This time the post is about another success story, but related to the Incident translation (LinguistNow) in PhotoBox.

I would like to outline the words of Chris Gallimore, Customer Support Operations Manager at PhotoBox, who I had the pleasure to meet not long ago: “When LinguistNow came up as an option and was explored, it seemed to tick off a couple of boxes straight away in that it supported all of the languages that we support and had a solution that tied into Oracle Service Cloud”.

Also worth to emphasise… “LinguistNow Response easily fits into Oracle Service Cloud, combining both machine and rapid human translation to allow support agents of any language to respond to customer emails quickly and in their preferred language. Together, PhotoBox and Language I/O are able to successfully support customers in eleven languages. When a support agent responsible for one specific language is unavailable, another agent is able to easily service his or her customers in their language, in just a few clicks, via the LinguistNow tool”.

Versioning of Answers with VersionCX from Ideqa

Oracle Open World 2014 was very fruitful to me. From an Oracle Service Cloud perspective, it was really great. a) I had the chance to confirm some of the great features and functionalities in the roadmap, and b) I was able to get in touch with people/companies that work everyday to improve the customer and user experience of those who interact with Oracle Service Cloud.

One of those companies is Ideqa. A New Zealand-based company, that focuses on CX and partners with Oracle for the implementation of Oracle Service Cloud. But they were not satisfied with what the product had to offer, and went on to build a very clever functionality: VersionCX, which helps companies manage versioning of Answers in the Knowledge Base.

VersionCX is an add-in for Oracle Service Cloud that allows companies to store historical versions of Answers. This will allow knowledge managers to consult or roll back to prior versions if necessary (for business or even legal reasons). VersionCX also allows the scheduling of Answers.

But the coolest thing about VersionCX is that the new/updated version of the Answer always takes the original ID, which means that a) the Answer retains its score and historical usage, and b) ensure the embedded URLs and Google searches continue to return the correct result.

To know more about VersionCX (prices, packs) visit Ideqa’s website.

Oracle Service Cloud with LinguistNow, by iRobot

iRobot was founded in 1990 by MIT roboticists. The company designs and builds robots for home usage, like vacuum cleaner, floor scrubbing, floor mopping. iRobot has a $500 million revenue, 500+ employees, and sold more than 6 million robots in 60 countries.

Customer Service is very important to iRobot. To manage that, and engage with their customers, iRobot implemented Oracle Service Cloud. The Oracle Service Cloud Customer Portal and Knowledge Base are behind one of the key parts of customer service, web self-service.

iRobot has 6,000 FAQs in the Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Base and the need to translate and organise them all in order to better serve non-English speaking clients around the world. That was obviously a massive task for a company which core business is robots, rather than translation.

After consulting Oracle iRobot went to Language I/O and implemented their LinguistNow Help product, which seamlessly integrate with Oracle Service Cloud (integration validated by Oracle) in order to translate all the answers/articles in the Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Base.

Over one year ago I wrote a post about this great product. Today, I share the below video. It is a webinar where iRobot gives their testimony regarding the Oracle Service Cloud / LinguistNow power.

Customer Support in any language from Language I/O on Vimeo.