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).

Knowledge Base Search – How does it work?

This is a question that several of our customers have asked us, when they start to build their own knowledge base of answers, to enable customer web self-service.

The knowledge base search (knowledge foundation) is not a simple mechanism. That is why it is so powerful, intelligent, dynamic and self-learning.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I decided to put together a diagram that depicts the process, and below leave you with a few definitions to be better understand the different components.

Weight

When a search is performed, each keyword and/or phrase entered by the customer is compared to the contents of the answers.

The Weight is a numerically calculated value, based on the number of occurrences, capitalisation, and location of a word. It is equal to the sum of the weights of all the matched words from the search.

The location of the word is important. It is ordered and weighed as per the diagram – e.g. words that match the Summary field will have higher weights than those that appear in the Answer field.

Computed Score

The Computed Score of an answer is usually the same as its Score, unless its Display Position is set to fix it at top/bottom. In that case, the Computed Score is calculated using the score of the answers located at the top or bottom of the list.

To better understand, if a new answer is created, and set with Display Position = “Fixed at the top”, once it is published, its Score will be zero, but the Computed Score will be larger than the highest score for all the published answers.

Score

The Score is a calculated value that ranks the order of answers, and indicates the usage of the answer, as well as how helpful that answer has been to customers. It is calculated based on the Solved Counts:

75% of the score is based on Solved Count, linked to customer usage
25% of the score is based on Solved Count, linked to agent usage

An answer with a large score indicates that several customers (and/or agents) have viewed that answer and that the answer was somehow useful to them.

Solved Count

The Solved Count collects information about the usefulness of answers in the Knowledge Base. Two types of data is gathered:

Implicit data – compiled by how customers select and view answers. If a customer views an answer, the solved count of the 1st answer is increased, but not as much as the 2nd viewed answer. In other words, the answer that the customer views last receives the largest solved count increase.
Explicit data – compiled by how customers rate individual answers – from the responses to the question “Is this answer helpful?”

6 Must-Haves for Agent-Facing Knowledge Base

Every contact centre manager wants – in all honesty, desperately needs – to help agents deliver a much better customer experience. But unfortunately there hasn’t been much originality in the solutions and practices to try and gear them up.

Soft skills training and call scripting are usually chosen to try and make agents deliver a better service, but it hasn’t worked out well. Fresher and smarter approaches are needed to replace these traditional ways. Contact centre managers need to invest in agent-facing knowledge and contextual guidance. Technology is crucial to help enable this.

Most companies have CRM systems able to manage customers, incidents or interactions, but often miss a knowledge base or, even better, a CX platform that would allow the Customer and Case Management capability to be tightly joined up with the knowledge base.

I’ve seen contact centres use Dropbox to store troubleshooting guides, MS SharePoint to build wikis, Google Drive to hold how-to guides, and even gigantic MS Power Point documents with product FAQs and answers. Those tools can give the illusion of an internal and centralised knowledge base, but they are not even close to what needs to be deployed to actually give agents what they need.

A true agent-facing knowledge base needs to have certain capabilities that the aforementioned tools cannot deliver – because they were not actually developed to do so! And the end goal must be to increase agent productivity, and improve key performance metrics (such as FCRR or response time), leading to increase in key customer metrics (such as NPS and CSAT scores).

Here are 6 of the capabilities that a true agent-facing knowledge base must have:

Content creation and authoring – to allow the person responsible for the content (e.g. knowledge rep or manager) to manage content. Create, update or retire. This will enable an easier, faster and controlled deployment of knowledge throughout the organisation.
Categorisation and scoring – for content to be organised, structured, and linked to interaction drivers, as well as dynamically ranked by usefulness. This will enable presentation of the most relevant and effective content first, improving efficiency.
Self-Learning – automatic linking between answers based on search and usage, as well as manual association (by the knowledge rep or manager) of sibling or related answers will help agents find the right answer quicker.
Step-by-step guidance – embedded in knowledge base articles, step-by-step guides give agents the ability to easily and quickly reach the information they need by selecting responses from question branches in guides. Or even, for example, guide customers through a troubleshooting issue.
Usage and management – reporting on the usage and usefulness of each article, as well as the gaps (e.g. keywords search without a match) will allow the knowledge rep or manager to keep a fresh, ever-green, and up-to-date knowledge base.
Keyword, intent and category search – a keyword Google-type search (potentially enhanced by semantic search technology, linguistic dictionaries and advanced algorithms) will match searches to the most relevant content and deliver the right answers immediately.

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.