Category: Configuration Settings

Reduce backlog and improve productivity with “Bump-Bump-Solve”

In a time where customer service and support teams are being flooded with queries and requests, it is important that technology helps not only improve productivity, but also the experience delivered.

Examples like the one below allow technology platforms like Zendesk to take care of repetitive tasks, automating where possible, and freeing up customer service for key customer interactions and conversations.

This demo and video was built and recorded by my colleague Matt Brown – Senior Consultant at Capventis, with 15 years experience in Support Management, and leading the Zendesk enablement and implementation for our customers.

Configuration Settings – Tips VIII

Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known.

In previous blog posts (7 posts to be exact), I have been sharing a few that you might want to be aware of. This time, I share some that my fellow CX Heroes mentioned, in the Oracle Service Cloud Hero Hub, as being one of their favorite configuration settings.

CS_HOLIDAY_MSG_ENABLED

This configuration setting was mentioned by Jessica Campbell, from Brother International Corporation, who used it to disable the chat during holidays.

If it is enabled (set to “Yes”) then OSvC will use the holidays table (which you can find in Configurations > Service > Service Level Agreements > Holidays) to determine whether the Live Chat should be enabled or disabled.

If your customers try to use the Live Chat channel on a date that is specified as a holiday, they will be shown a message stating it is a holiday and no agent is available.

The default value for this configuration setting is disabled (set to “No”).

SNEAK_PREVIEW_ENABLED

This configuration setting was mentioned by Kristine Tannert, from Insperity, who says that her agents love the Sneak Preview functionality, as it allows them to get ahead of the game and prepare responses on chat with the customers. This is particularly helpful since the questions their agents have to answer for customers can sometimes take awhile to investigate, so anything that helps them get a jump start on answering the customers question is appreciated!

It enables the Sneak Preview functionality, which allows agents to preview what a customer is typing prior to the customer sending the message.

The default value for this configuration setting is disabled (set to “No”).

INC_INCLUDE_POST_TIME

This configuration setting was mentioned by Robert Pozderec, also from Brother International Corporation, who said it is an extremely important setting when it comes to QA (Quality Assurance).

It specifies whether the post time is to be included in incidents created for a Chat session, meaning messages in the chat transcript will have a date and time against it.

The default value for this configuration setting is disabled (set to “No”).

CUSTOM_SCRIPT_DATA_SIZE

This configuration setting was mentioned by Sasi Gudimetta, from AST Corporation, who shared with the community that he usually works with reports that have custom scripts, and these have a query data limit, controlled by this setting, which needs to be increased to avoid the script from stopping after the defined number of rows, and the report output from being “No Value”.

It specifies the size of the data buffer (in bytes) used when processing custom scripts in Analytics.

The default value for this configuration setting is 50,000. The minimum value is zero (0) and the maximum value is 2,147,483,647.

Keep in mind increasing this to a large value causes the custom script to parse more of the report data (which is good!), but this also causes additional load on the server, which could result in negative performance impact for the overall site (not so good!).

Configuration Settings – Tips VII

Oracle Service Cloud has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known. Below are a few that you might want to be aware of.

AR_AUTO_ENABLE

This configuration setting is useful for knowledge managers or administrators to better manage the knowledge base, and ensure the answers are always up-to-date and helpful for customers.

It enables a feature that automatically changes the status of an answer to “Review”, when data aging reduces the answer’s solved count to zero. The default value is disabled (No) but you might want to turn it on (Yes).

ANS_NEW_INC_DURATION

Speaking about answers aging, this configuration setting specifies the number of days that the Solved Count of new answers will not be aged (meaning reduced).

You might new answers not to be impacted by aging, in the first few days or weeks, and ensure they keep up there for people to easily bump onto them.

If this value is set to zero (0) no answers will be considered new. The default value is 30. And the maximum is 9999999999 (basically, forever).

ANS_UPD_INC_DURATION

Similarly, this configuration setting specifies the number of days that the Solved Count of updated answers will not be aged.

If this value is set to zero (0) no answers will be considered new. The default value is 30. And the maximum is 9999999999 (basically, forever).

Please notice that this is for updated answers, whilst the above setting is for new answers.

ANS_PRV_ENABLED

If you would like to implement a specific answer access level, and have a subset of answers only to be seen/displayed to users with a specific access level, then you must enable this configuration setting.

It enables the “Privileged Access” feature which allows customers to access privileged access levels of answers. These access levels are in addition to those that are visible by default on the interface (Help, Everyone).

Privileged access levels are assigned to SLAs. An SLA must be applied to a Contact or Organisation and the individual must be logged in to the customer portal, in order to view the answer.

The default value is disabled (No), and you must enable it to allow privileged access (Yes).

OSvC_blog_accesslevel

ANS_SRCH_THRESHOLD

When a customer searches for an answer on the Oracle Service Cloud knowledge base, the system will weigh the answers, based on the search (keywords, etc.). This configuration setting specifies a threshold for returning answers.

Only answers that match at or above this threshold will be returned. The minimum and default value is zero (0) and the maximum is 2147483647, even though acceptable values are between zero (0) and 100.

If the configuration setting ANS_SRCH_SUB_THRESHOLD is enabled an exception is made when all matching answers are below the threshold.

ANS_SRCH_SUB_THRESHOLD

As mentioned above, this configuration setting is linked to ANS_SRCH_THRESHOLD and it specifies whether there should be an exception to limiting answer results with a threshold on matching.

If enabled, when no answers match at or above the threshold set, the answers that matched less well are still returned, avoiding a zero result set. If disabled, no answers matching below threshold are ever returned. By default this configuration setting is disabled (No).

How to catch foreign SPAM

Recently a client was being flooded by incidents that looked like coming from a Chinese account, which was impacting the performance of their contact centre. They asked how could Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) help them deal with this situation.

The resolution for something like this cannot be easier. You can create an incident business rule that looks into the email header, assesses the character set, and either prevents incident creation, or routes incidents created to a specific queue.

If “Incident.Email Header” matches regular expression “character set name”
Then “Do Not Create Incident” or “assign incident to specific queue”

The “Email Header” field contains a lot of information, including the character set of the email charset=[character set name]. A list of all character sets can be found in the web (for example, here).

It is important to note that for the “Email Header” option to display on the business rule field drop-down, configuration setting EGW_SAVE_EMAIL_HEADERS (found in folder RightNow Common > Service Modules > RightNow Email) must be enabled.

 

Configuration Settings – Tips VI

Oracle Service Cloud has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known. Below are a few that you might want to be aware of.

CP_MAINTENANCE_MODE_ENABLED

In case you are undergoing some sort of maintenance and your customer portal (CP) is down, you can enable the CP maintenance mode by setting this configuration setting to “Yes”. If enabled, customers will be redirected to the splash page (*), when they try to access any CP page in production. Additionally, all syndicated widgets will also stop displaying any information. By default, this configuration setting is set to “No”.

(*) splash page can be found at:

http://yoursite.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/yoursite.cfg/php/euf/config/splash.html

osvc_splash_page

USER_WAIT_QUEUE_TIMEOUT

If Live Chat is enabled, we usually allow customers to request a chat session and wait in the queue for an available agent. Even though we configure chat to avoid customers waiting for long, there could be instances where they struggle to go through to an agent. This configuration setting defines the time (in seconds) that a customer remains in the wait queue before receiving a “Please try again later” message. The minimum value for this setting is 120. Maximum value is 999999. Default is 1800 (30 minutes).

TBAR_LINK_LIST

For those who spend a lot of time working from the OSvC console, it could be handy to have short-cuts to other systems, applications or sites. This configuration setting allows you to add a list of preferred or favourite links to the Links option of the menu on the navigation area of the toolbar. Links will appear in the menu in the order that you enter them. By default this list is blank.

The way to add links is to the configuration setting is

item(1, “Link Name”,”http:// www. domain. com”)

See example in the screenshot below: item(1, “Capventis”,”http:// www. capventis. com”)

You can insert separator between links by entering item(0, “”,””)

osvc_links_external

Configuration Settings – Tips V

Oracle Service Cloud has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known. Below are a few that you might want to be aware of.

EGW_SECURE_UPDATE_ENABLED

One of the questions that has been raised quite a lot in our implementations is what happens if an agent CC’s someone else other than the Contact in an email response, and that person then responds?

This configuration setting, if enabled (set to “Yes”), prevents any other person – apart from the primary Contact associated to the Incident – from responding to the email. If a CC’d contact replies to the email, OSvC will not accept it as a response, and will notify the sender that he/she is not the primary contact, and thus their response will be discarded.

If you disable it (set to “No”), then any person can respond, and an Incident can be updated by any email address or Contact.

By default, this configuration setting is enabled (set to “Yes”). And unless you have a really strong case, I would recommend you leave it as-is.

SEARCH_WITH_OPERATORS

Searching a Knowledge Base of answers can be hard, particularly when it has loads of answers, and it is our job to make it easier for customers to find what they need.

This configuration setting enables the ability to use special characters or operators “+” (plus), “–” (minus) and “~” (tilde) while searching for answers.

These operators help refine the search and I’m sure most of you know how to use them. The plus operator links words together, the tilde operator makes the search look for synonyms, the minus operator excludes words from the search.

By default, this configuration setting is enabled (set to “Yes”), and I would recommend you leave it as-is, to ensure your customers can use all means and tools at their disposal to search.

SRCH_WILDCARD_MIN_PREFIX

One of the most common things, when searching content on the web, is also the use of wildcards. And customers are used to it. Now, unlike the above setting, this one helps broaden the search.

This configuration setting controls the minimum length of the term allowed in a wildcard search, on the OSvC knowledge base and portal.

  • The minimum value is zero (0)
  • The maximum value is 100
  • The default value is three (3)

This means that, for example, if the configuration setting is set to three (3)…

  • a search for “Vic*” will be treated as a wildcard search
  • a search for “Vi*“will be discarded (customer will get “No results found“)
  • a search for “V*” will also be discarded

Of course the value to which you should set your own instance is dependant on your requirement and the size of your knowledge base. Large knowledge bases may require this configuration setting to be higher in order to avoid impact on search performance.

 

 

Configuration Settings – Tips IV

Oracle Service Cloud has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known. Below are a few that you might want to be aware of.

EGW_SAVE_ORIG_MESSAGE

Some of you may have noticed (and found strange!) that attachments with name raw_message.mht appear on your incidents. Even stranger is that most times you are not even able to open it. This attachment is the original email message.

OSvC_raw_message

The EGW_SAVE_ORIG_MESSAGE configuration setting, enabled by default, makes the Email Gateway (incoming email) attach the original email message to the incident, after it is created. If you don’t want or need the original message attached, set this configuration setting to “No”.

Please also notice that subsequent updates (via email) to the same incident will not be saved as attachments or update the original file.

The raw_message.mht is in MIME HTML file format. If you have a compatible application to open this type of file, it will open in browser window, and the message will display in html (or text) format. You can also download the raw_message.mht file to your Desktop and “Open With” a text editor, to see the raw message, which will contain e.g. the original Internet Email headers.

ANS_PRV_ENABLED

This configuration setting enabled the Privileged Access feature of OSvC, which is what allows customers, in the customer portal, to see specific answers or content that is limited by Answer Access Levels.

By default, this configuration setting is disabled, and you need to enable it if you are creating different answer access levels (and associating it to SLAs), in order to give your customers different or more answers, or even additional content in the same answers (via conditional sections).

SA_APPEND_QUESTION

Most of you already noticed that when you add an answer as text to an incident (when using the “Add as Text” option on Search Knowledge Base or SmartAssistant windows), by default you add the Summary, the Question and the Answer.

This configuration setting, which is enabled by default, is what causes the above behaviour. If you want to remove the Summary and the Question sections and only add the Answer to your response, you need to disable it.

OSvC_answer_add_as_text

 

Configuration Settings – Tips III

Oracle Service Cloud has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known. Below are a few that you might want to be aware of.

As most of you may already know, the access to functionality delivered via the OSvC Customer Portal web pages (e.g. self-service, chat, surveys) is charged per session. And a “session” is defined as a single 15 minutes time period of web visit activity.

A “web visit” is a series of customer interactions with the OSvC Customer Portal that can span one or more sessions. And the length of a web visit is configurable and allows you to track and report on activities by a single user for up to 12 hours.

A visit will be considered new in one of the following cases:

  • The customer is inactive for longer than time defined in VISIT_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT;
  • The limit time defined in VISIT_MAX_TIME is hit;
  • The browser is closed;
  • The customer navigates way from the OSvC Customer Portal pages and the browser doesn’t support cookies.

Therefore it is important to understand what the above two configuration settings are.

VISIT_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT

This configuration setting defines the period of time after which a web visit is considered to be expired due to inactivity. The default value is 30 minutes, the minimum value is 15 minutes, and the maximum value is 2147483647.

VISIT_MAX_TIME

This configuration setting defines a hard limit after which any web visit will expire. If a web visit is longer than VISIT_MAX_TIME, then a new web visit and session ID are generated. The default value is 240 minutes, the minimum value is 15 minutes, and the maximum value is 720 minutes (12 hours).

Apart from the two configuration settings above, it is also important to be aware of another two configuration settings, which apply to cases where the customer is logged in.

CP_LOGIN_MAX_TIME

This configuration setting defines a the maximum amount of time for the length of the customer login cookie. If a visit is longer than CP_LOGIN_MAX_TIME, then the customer will be required to login again. The default value is 0 (zero), which means that the login cookie will expire based on user inactivity specified by the CP_LOGIN_COOKIE_EXP configuration setting. The minimum value is 0 and the maximum value is 2147483647.

CP_LOGIN_COOKIE_EXP

This configuration setting defines the period of inactivity after which the login cookie will expire. The default value is 60 minutes. Value -1 means the cookie will expire when the browser is closed. And 0 (zero) means the cookie will never expire.

 

3 Options To Set Up Service Mailbox

As you know, one of the key strengths of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is its email management capability, which handles email communication between customers and staff members. OSvC receives incoming email and manages all back-and-forth email replies between staff and customer until the incident is resolved.

For that you need to set up Mailboxes in OSvC, which are used to define the email accounts that OSvC should pull incoming email messages from, as well as outgoing email settings. There are two types of Mailboxes:

  • Oracle Managed Service Mailbox: Created, managed and monitored by Oracle.
  • General Service Mailbox: Created, managed and monitored by (your) Email Provider.

Even though this is a standard function of OSvC there is still a few questions and clarifications asked when it comes to the implementation. This post aims to expose options to set up, and hopefully answer a few questions.

Option 1 – General Service Mailbox (Intermediate)

With this setup, the flow would be:

  1. Customer sends email message to email@company.com
  2. Email message is received by the mailbox in the email provider servers
  3. Email message is redirected to an intermediate mailbox in email provider servers
  4. OSvC collects and deletes email message from intermediate mailbox
  5. OSvC creates Incident, and assigns to queue/agent
  6. Agent responds to customer’s email message
  7. OSvC sends response impersonating email@company.com

Oracle Service Cloud - Generic Service Mailbox Inter.png

Option 2 – General Service Mailbox (Direct)

With this setup, the flow would be:

  1. Customer sends email message to email@company.com
  2. Email message is received by the mailbox in email provider servers
  3. OSvC collects and deletes email message from email@company.com mailbox
  4. OSvC creates incident, and assigns to queue/agent
  5. Agent responds to customer’s email message
  6. OSvC sends response impersonating email@company.com

Oracle Service Cloud - Generic Service Mailbox Direct.png

Option 3 – Oracle Managed Service Mailbox

With this setup, the flow would be:

  1. Customer sends email message to email@company.com
  2. Email message is received by email provider servers
  3. And gets redirected to an Oracle-Managed Mailbox e.g. company@custhelp.com
  4. OSvC creates incident, and assigns to queue/agent
  5. Agent responds to customer’s email message
  6. OSvC sends response impersonating email@company.com

Oracle Service Cloud - Oracle Managed Service Mailbox.png

Configuration Settings – Tips II

Oracle Service Cloud has circa 500 configuration settings, which control the platform’s functions. Some of them are commonly used but many are not that well known. Below are a few that you might want to be aware of.

ENDUSER_URLS_ENABLED

This configuration setting will enable the links/URLs sent by customers to agents, during a chat interaction.

By default, and for security reasons, this configuration setting is set to “No”, meaning that links/URLs sent by customer would not be actionable and agents would not be able to just click and open a browser.

CI_HOURS

This configuration setting is related to the Incident Status, and sets the time an incident is on “Waiting” status until the agedatabase utility automatically closes it.

The minimum value is 6 (hours) and the default is 48 (hours). In case you would like to de-activate this you should set it to 0 (zero).

CI_WAITING_CALC_DAYS

This configuration setting is directly linked to the one above (CI_HOURS), as it defines which days of the week are taking into account when CI_HOURS is calculating how long the incident was on “Waiting” status.

By default all days of the week are considered: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And that is why you see the code “SuMTuWThFSa” in the setting.

If you leave the configuration setting blank, all days of the week will still be considered.

SEC_VALID<…>

There are a few configuration settings (see list below) that control the access to various Oracle Service Cloud areas, based on domain names or IP addresses. When you set these configuration settings you are limiting access only to users or customer who are logging in from the defined domains or IP addresses.

The values you can put on the configuration setting are: domain names (e.g. *.oracle.com), IP Addresses (e.g. 1.2.3.4), or IP Subnet Masks (10.11.12.0/255.255.255.0). Since Aug 2014 release, these settings also support IPv6 addresses (e.g. FE80:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329)

  • SEC_VALID_ADMIN_HOSTS – access to Admin interface (Console)
  • SEC_VALID_CHAT_API_HOSTS – access to the Chat SOAP interface
  • SEC_VALID_ENDUSER_HOSTS – access to the end-user interface (Customer Portal)
  • SEC_VALID_INTEG_HOSTS – access to the integration interface