The February 2017 Release of Oracle Service Cloud (OSvC) is now available to the public and brings some cool new features and functionality that touch the Customer Portal (CP), the Contact Centre experience, the Knowledge Base (KB) and Oracle Policy Automation (OPA).

Experience/Skills-based routing for all channels

This is one of the features that many OSvC users have been waiting for. The Feb 17 release now supports Experience/Skills-based Routing not only for Chat (introduced on the May 14 release) but for all channels – email, social, web.

This means that the assignment of all incidents, based on agent’s skills will be possible, and allow you to optimise the routing of incidents – assigning it not only to the right team, but to the best person, increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome and first contact resolution.

To have this, make sure you ask Oracle to enable the “Smart Interaction Hub”.

Widget Inspector

The widget inspector aims to make life easier for developers and CP administrators. It helps you identify widgets and inspect its attributes and settings. This new feature allows you to access CP admin pages, inspect widgets and change them without having to touch any code.

You can highlight and inspect widgets on a CP page, while in development mode. When you select a widget (or more than one) the page shows the widget being highlighted with the widget name superimposed over the top of the widget. Then, by selecting the widget name you can see the attributes of that widget.

Knowledge Advanced

The new features in Knowledge Advance bring additional reports that will help you look into agent knowledge usage, allowing knowledge managers to differentiate usage of knowledge articles by customers on the Customer Portal, and by agents on the Agent Desktop.

These new reports provide knowledge manages additional insight and key metrics on agent behaviour and engagement, helping them improve the effectiveness of knowledge based articles.

Another new feature is related to Travel Ontology (industry dictionary). Oracle added the latest terms and abbreviations for the travel industry, including IATA airport codes to the dictionary, in 22 languages. This will improve search results via contextual recognition of IATA airport codes.

The Recently Viewed Answers widget has now also been extended to the Advanced Knowledge (it was already available for Knowledge Foundation), and will help improve navigation, UX and ultimately CX.

Lastly for Knowledge Advance, a new feature that will allow the automatic notification of knowledge managers and authors on changes or updates needed on answers assigned to them. The Author Task Notifications is now available to be configured and will make things much more pro-active and efficient.

Oracle Policy Automation

In Feb 17 release, Oracle introduced some Connection Enhancements which will allow various users to use one OPA interview, including anonymous users, logged-in customers, and staff/agents.

Another new feature coming to OPA is the ability to synchronise OPA HUB users with other systems, enabling automatic creation of user accounts using the OPA HUB REST API.

The OPA HUB REST API for deployments will also help to automate policy life-cycle tasks, like the promotion from Test to Production environments, and the ability to deploy, explore, activate, and retrieve policy models on an OPA hub.

Also, the new export project data model feature allows you to export the attributes that define an OPA project’s data model. The new capability enables you to review and analyse attribute metadata and detailed entity and relationship information.

REST API Enhancements

The Feb 17 release bring enhancements to the REST API allowing you to download multiple file attachments as a single compressed file. Additionally, the Campaign (Outreach) object is now available in CCOM to retrieve information on email outreach campaigns via Connect API.

High Volume Bulk Delete API

Another of the features many of us will be happy to hear about is the High Volume Bulk Delete API, which allows you to delete large volumes of incidents in a single API for incident archiving or purge.

Oracle Social Cloud Accelerator

Adding to the list of current “accelerators”, Oracle is releasing the new Social Relationship Management (SRM) accelerator. Allowing you to respond to SRM posts from Oracle Service Cloud, configure private and public channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), prevent duplicates with interactive contact matching and view full conversations in Oracle Service Cloud.

Note: One of the novelties Oracle Product Management Team introduced in the last few releases was a video where one of the guys presents and talks us through the new features. You can see it here. This time is Jeff Wartgow, Director of Product Management, who presents.