Oracle has revamped its Oracle Service Cloud, expanding existing capabilities such as skills-based routing, and spotlighting other features, such as cobrowsing, all of which can lead to quicker resolutions, improved agent efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction. Oracle Service Cloud is part of the Oracle Customer Experience Cloud stable of applications that includes Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Social Cloud, and Oracle Commerce.
With the release, the company has placed particular emphasis on cobrowsing, a technology that allows agents to visually connect with customers online to see where a problem has occurred in their journey. The feature gets a major assist from cobrowsing firm LiveLOOK, which Oracle acquired in June.
Stephen Fioretti, vice president of product management at Oracle Service Cloud, explains that there are two ways to deliver cobrowsing. One method uses HTML, which he describes as"quick and to the point with very lightweight capabilities."
A more in-depth, interactive cobrowsing solution is screen sharing, which lets agents view a customer's computer screen, determine where the user has experienced an issue in his journey, and walk the user through a fix. Screen sharing can also support other capabilities that HTML can't, such as Flash or PDF documents. While screen sharing can be used broadly, Fioretti says the biggest use cases are in financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail, online education and online software technology.
"What's nice about our product is that we have a hybrid version of cobrowse, which allows users to do [it] either way—it's the best of both worlds," Fioretti says. "You can do the instant mode, or if an agent determines that they need to invoke a robust screen sharing case, they can also do that."
Oracle Service Cloud is also now more tightly integrated with Oracle Social Cloud, which monitors social channels and provides analytics that enable companies to know when to take proactive steps to interact with customers and when to escalate responses to social posts. Fioretti says that this "social listening tool" enables companies to filter "noise" on social networks and have a better grasp of customer sentiment. "It lets companies understand what people are saying about their brand and whether they should respond to them," he says.
Using Oracle Social Cloud, contact centers can monitor specific incidents and determine the importance of a customer (i.e. by looking at their social profile). "However, sometimes, even if someone has a lot of Twitter followers, that may be less important than if someone has a problem that needs to be addressed. We know that just one consumer can have incredible social influence, and not monitoring...or valuing [that] can really backfire," Fioretti says.
The solution is timely considering the increasing number of customers who voice their experiences on social media. "Oracle Social has potential as more