The 18B release of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is now generally available and it brings some very interesting new features and enhancements. I will break them down in separate posts. This is the first post.

Chat – Virtual Assistant

One of those exciting enhancements is the launch of the Virtual Assistant (VA). Some of you may be asking “wasn’t the Virtual Assistant launched 5 years ago?“. Yes, back in Nov 2013 Oracle announced the VA which, at the time, was based on a separate product called Intent Guide and forced users to use a different application (login and user interface) to configure it.

The 18B release brings a much more integrated, seamless and powerful VA capability, which can be accessed, configured and fine tuned by OSvC administrators, using a VA editor in the OSvC interface. Nonetheless, it is still based on the aforementioned Oracle RightNow Intent Guide Cloud Service (find here the admin user guide).

This enhanced VA will hopefully be a step in the right direction and allow companies to not only decrease the volume of chat sessions that require an agent, but also improve the customer experience.

Simple questions with straightforward answers – aka high volume/low value queries – should be picked up and answered by the VA, using the information in the knowledge base. Making service more efficient and effective.

The new (or enhanced) OSvC VA allows you to configure escalation rules, that will route the chat session to the right queue and agent, when the VA cannot answer, as well as pass the conversation thread to the agent, for context.

Additionally it allows you to test scenarios and provides real-time dashboard so you can monitor performance and questions being asked, as well as identify new content that can be added to the VA and knowledgebase.

In order do use the VA you should ask Oracle (your account manager) to enable it and then perform the following steps:

1. Assign the Virtual Assistant Edit permission to your profile (you will find this permission in Profile > Permissions > Administration tab)
2. Add the Virtual Assistant editor to a navigation set (you will find this in Navigation Sets > Configuration > Components > Common)
3. Create the VA profile and account (to define the VA name that will display to customers e.g. “Siri”), as well as the VA chat queue (which will handle incoming chats and escalation)
4. Create chat rules to route virtual assistant chats and escalate virtual assistant chats to agents when necessary.

Note: You can have only one VA account and one VA queue. The VA profile, account, and queue cannot be deleted. However, account and queue names can be changed.