David Fulton, Director of Product Development for Oracle Service Cloud, presented on the roadmap for the entire cloud / set of products within the cloud.
Agenda
- Web Customer Service (WCS) definition
- WCS Trends
- Business Challenges that WCS addresses
- Product Overview
- Roadmap
Definition
The way your customer can access knowledge / process, engage other customers, or contact your company with a burning question or need. David won’t be talking about phone support. He will refer to the phone as the evolving baseline choice customers use.
Trends
The phone is still by far the dominant channel. It has the highest levels of CSAT for any channel. You have a high degree of confidence that the person can answer the questions. But……..Oracle sees a new set of consumers that are “phone-a-phobes” Customer service expectations are changing.
- 55% of online adults say the are likely to abandon a purchase if they can’t get an answer
- 77% agree that valuing my time is the most important thing a company can do
- The phone will never go away but the web / messaging will continue to gain ground
- These consumers are getting more impatient. They want to see you be proactive. They want more information
Business Challenges That WCS Addresses
- Efficiency
- Increase productivity
- Reduce volume
- Lower costs of service even as you scale to a 24/7 operation
- Retention
- Increase satisfaction
- Improve loyalty
- Drive higher advocacy
- Acquisition
- Increase opportunities
- Improve conversions
- Think contextual here. Don’t leave a commerce site to answer a question. Answer the question in that context
- Drive more sales
Product Overview
The products here are wide in nature
- Self-service
- Has to be easy to find. Cannot be buried only in your web site.
- have to be able search in Google to find it
- Great way to intercept them before they make a call
- Should also match the branding of your company – closely match the branding
- Must deliver at scale
- Mobile self-service
- Virtual assistant
- This is personalized assistance based on knowing you
- Understands intent because of understanding of natural language
- Provides personalized experiences
- Finds solutions
- Integrated knowledge
- Customers trust other customers
- Let them communicate with each other in communities where you can be an active voice
- Live chat
- Augment self-service
- Deliver vis web and mobile
- leverage real time behavior and customer history to determine when to invite customer when to chat
- Co-browse
- communities
- Smart engagement / intelligent assistance
- this is guided assisance via a smart assistant
- match the right agent to the right customer
- Take the user to the one kernel of information specific to their need
- email support
- route and manage inbound emails
- define rich html response
- Let customers ask a question directly from your site
- automate the workflows
- User a smart assistant to recommend the best answer (agent tool)
This past year, Oracle actively invested in each of these products.
Roadmap
Imperatives
- Make connecting simple
- Tailor the experience. No pinch, zoom, or scrape
- Segment appropriately – right person
- Understand early- if you know that self-service won’t work then let the customer know
- Be proactive – engage at the right time to avoid frustration
Near future
Things they are working on today
Virtual assistance
- Suggest quesetions and answers
- Improved integration to other Oracle products
- Overlay retains session memory
Mobile
From adaptive to responsive. Resize to the most appropriate experience. David showed the upcoming release with a reference implementation. Yes……. it’s responsive
Peer to Peer support
bring together self-service and peer to peer. The two are more intermingled or at least closer together. In the demo of this, he showed a threaded interaction and the fact that a moderator can correct /moderate any question in the community. (full range of moderation)
The next release will be able to do more delegated administration on the web pages
Widgets on Pages and A/B Testing
Showed a demo video of a support page article. He showed a changing approach to how you rate the answers (yes/no, five stars, etc.) Think of it as an A/B approach to what you put in your pages.They will even give you some basic reporting on it so you can see what does work.
Syndication Platform
Syndicate information to other parts of your site or user cases. Push content to commerce transactions. You can also put a help center widget on a product page and then deliver answers to a variety of questions like shipping. This can also become a place to request support. With Syndication, the chat window becomes part of the overlay of whatever page you are on. This is all via a widget approach.
Widgets will include social, polling, chat, incident management, etc.
Chat – Visual Browser History / Page Peek
Will be able to view browse history in the chat channel. Give agents more information on what the user has been doing. Want to increase customer satisfaction. It’s called Visual Browser History.
Page peek lets you see a snapshot of what page they are on when they contact you.
Co-Browse
This came through an acquisition. They will be able to do a stand-alone co-browse solution for the voice channel. It will also launch faster and have better compatibility with html5 support. and yes, it will be mobile friendly.
Can block web domains, web pages, desktop apps, form fields, etc.
Wrap-up
Customer channel and omni-channel are converging rapidly. Addressing the challenges depends on a partnership with a vendor like Oracle. Too much to do by yourself.
David’s bottom line: “We’ve got your back”
