Unified Search for Self-Service

For those organisations who use the support community (peer-to-peer community where users support each other) the new search capability unifies and integrates both answers from the knowledge base and articles from the community. This will not only improve web self-service from the customer’s perspective but also help knowledge manager find gaps in the knowledge base, by using the new set of reports that display the number of answers vs discussions viewed for a particular topic.

Unified Content for SmartAssistant

Following the above, discussions from the support community will also display in the SmartAssistant, to make use of the other customer’s knowledge to resolve even more questions online.

Customer Portal Framework v3.3

The August 2015 release of Oracle Service Cloud includes Customer Portal Framework Version 3.3. This new version includes changes to support the new web self-service features, as well as a new reference implementation, with the same standard functionality but new out-of-the-box pages with a cleaner and more modern look & feel.

Customer Portal Responsive Design

The new version of Oracle Service Cloud comes with responsive design for the customer portal reference implementation. i.e. customer portal pages will responds and adapt to the customer’s device, regardless of it being a phone, tablet, lap or desktop.

Nevertheless this does not mean that the set of mobile pages will be deprecated. No, they will still be there for those who chose to use them.

Customer Portal Product Pages

The new version also comes with Product pages. A set of pages that group content about particular products. This is more of a landing page for products. A “answer list” page filtered by product if you whish. This could and was done in the passed with custom pages and reports, but now comes with the reference implementation.

Enhanced Co-Browse for iOS

The co-browse functionality was enhanced to support co-browsing with customers on mobile devices on native iOS applications. In the past, when co-browsing with mobile customers, agents could only see the web browser, but now they will be able to see native apps as well.

Larger Email Attachments

The maximum attachment size for incoming emails (incidents) has been 5 MB. This was set on the Mailbox configurations when admins were configuring the settings for incoming email. From now on, the maximum attachment size will be 25 MB, but only on hosted mailboxes.

Limiting Source Editing in Answers

This new feature allows managers to limit the ability of agents to edit knowledge base answers inserted within an email (incident) response. This is true when agents are changing answers in HTML or source mode. Managers can control what answer content agents can edit. This is controlled at the Profile level on the Services Permissions.

Incident Response Failure

In case the email (incident) response fails (or bounces) the agent will now immediately be notified by a toast notification in the agent desktop.

Agent Browser UI Enhancements

The new version of Oracle Service Cloud brings a few enhancements to the Browser UI – which is now available for all customers, even though Oracle recommends some hand-holding when implementing it. Amongst those are the ability for agents to:

• Forward incidents with attachments
• Quickly insert pre-formatted text into incidents with standard text.

The reports displayed in the Browser UI were expanded and are now closer to the ones in the Agent Desktop Enhanced Console, now supporting more charts types and search capabilities (filters).

It is now possible to use a browser-type control in the Browser UI workspace in order to do surfacing type (mashup) integrations with 3rd party websites or web-based systems, with the ability to also pass data as parameter.

Routing Social Incidents

The integration between Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud (fka Oracle SRM) was enhanced and a most wanted functionality was included to help organisations to route incidents to the right team or agent. It is now possible to pass the Oracle Social Cloud tags (created automatically or manually) to Oracle Service Cloud and use them as criteria in the business rules to route incidents to the a specific queue.

Twitter Private Messaging

Oracle Service Cloud now supports the new Twitter policy for private messaging, which allows organisations to reply to customers via direct message even if the customer is not following the organisation’s Twitter account.

Message Templates Enhancements

It is now possible to truncate text-based merge fields in order to control the size of emails. Admins can set a maximum number of character for text-based merge fields. This will truncate the text that displays in the email. It is also possible to append an ellipsis to the displayed text to indicate there is more to read if the text length limit is exceeded. This feature is also available in Outreach and Feedback emails.

Facebook Graph API v2.0 Migration

The Facebook Graph API enables developers to read from and write data into Facebook. Facebook has migrated all applications to version 2.0 of the Graph API which results in a few changes as Facebook has tightened control over shared information and customers. For example, keyword search across all Facebook content is no longer supported. However it is possible to do keyword search on Facebook fan pages.

API Enhancements

It is now possible to use the APIs to query survey data (questions and responses) using ROQL queries.

Additional capabilities have been added to PHP Mail API mailboxes, like the ability to select any mailbox when sending e-mails and override “reply to” and “friendly from” addresses.

The REST API was extended and now support ROQL for object and tabular queries.

Supported Platform Changes

The new release of Oracle Service Cloud discontinues support for the following deprecated browsers:

• Windows Server 2003 as a terminal service
• Firefox v35 on the Agent Browser UI and end-user applications
• Safari v7.1 on the Agent Browser UI and end-user applications
• Android v2.3 and v3.x operating systems for end-user applications