To help you prepare for a successful transition to our latest release, we are pleased to provide you a centralized view of what is included in the latest release and recent releases.
Oracle B2C Service 24D version is now available!
The Oracle B2C Service Development Organization is excited to introduce our fourth quarterly release of 2024!
Oracle B2C Service 24D Release Materials
Oracle B2C Service 24D Roadmap
Customer Experience
The Web Chat for Service (customer chat user interface) team continues to carry the lion share of the enhancements included in the Customer Experience section. Petra and team announced ten enhancements for 24D spanning from advancements to the way links and buttons are conditionally displayed, improvements to individual field behavior on the customer chat user interface, to the inclusion of additional features such as sensitive information detection in the subject, the possibility of a post conversation message link, controlling attachments on the agent side, and Improved cross site scripting prevention and form security. An attempt to summarize all ten would result in an unusually long release summary, so I encourage everyone to review the Cloud Customer Connect Roadmap webinar for a detailed understanding of all of the exciting features that make up the 24D Web Chat for Service release. Not to be outdone, the Knowledge Advanced team also released several popular features that are surfaced in the customer portal widgets such as a new content grid means of viewing multiple images, a user experience enhancement to assist in viewing additional search results, and more options when selecting multiple facets to filter the search results. Finally, the customer portal team is introducing a new calendar date widget to the list of widgets available.
Agent Experience
We are going to start the agent experience section with announcing that the real-time language translation is available in the Bring Your Own service model. This is another highly requested feature and the B2C Service development organization is really excited to release it. As there are steps in how to configure to the desired translation service, please review the readiness, external facing answer and Cloud Customer Connect webinar to ascertain the necessary details. Additional user experience enhancements are included focused on the previous existing control maximize functionality. Maximize is now available on workspace browser controls as well as the user behavior has been altered for the Incident Thread control to make it more accessible. For the agent chat user interface, 24D brings additional reporting for agent personalization options. Supervisors can now view when and what an agent has personalized their maximum number of chats value. The Agent Chat User Interface has also been updated to include a single button enhancement for service center organizations that are leveraging the Collaboration feature user more specifically Zoom. The final section we will touch in in the Agent Experience has to do with Analytics. There are a couple of features that are popular requests that the team released and those are the ability to export scheduled reports to XLSX format as well as the ability to manually move reports out of deferred execution from within the Browser user interface. A final analytics enhancement includes the auto-filter capability on reports. The agent now has two separate experiences available with the existing left side facet approach and now with 24D, the legacy console behavior of selecting filters on the column headers.
Administrator Experience
Although the agent and customer experience sections above are riddled with new abilities, for 24D it is the administrator experience that really shines. This is where our highly anticipated Hot Topic feature is highlighted as well as a long time and extremely popular request to allow site administrators to schedule and execute their own CRON PHP jobs. As exciting as those two features are, that isn’t all, we’ve also included an integration with the Responsys team to leverage their SMS integration and allow for business rules to send out SMS messages. This demonstrates our continued focus on working within the portfolio to build customer brand adhesion. Element manager adds four additional “elements” to the fold as customizable menus, product, categories, and dispositions are now supported. For Knowledge authors, the Answer editor has closed the support for anchors and source color highlighting gaps that were created by the introduction of the Oracle rich text editor and for Knowledge Advanced authors, the site can be configured to require a remove after date on a knowledge article.
Developer Experience
Our final focus is in the area of the developer experience and here we have enhancements for Event Delivery Service, External Objects & Integration, and Service Health Metrics. A configuration user interface for the Oracle Streaming Service has been released to simplify the configuration and usage of Event Deliver Service feature set. For the risk adverse service centers the External Objects and Integrations feature can be configured to only allow particular API methods to be leveraged. Finally, the popular Service Health Metrics feature has been enhanced to include reporting on the Chat Service.
This concludes the release announcements for 24D. As with all of the quarterly releases over the past several decades, it takes a highly performant team working together to continually provide meaningful advancements to this mature application.
Please be sure to check out our Oracle Release Readiness pages for ALL features delivered in this release.
Recent Releases
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Oracle B2C Service 24C Product Release Highlights
The 24C release demonstrates the continued momentum of our Customer Driven Enhancement program, delivering 23 enhancements that come directly from customer asks! A total of 33 enhancements are included in the 24C release!
We are delivering a milestone project: “Support for multiple versions of PHP”, which sets our customers up for success by allowing them to choose the timeline for their upgrade, and helpful out-of-the-box reports to aid in this process There is another across the application enhancement and that is the move to the Oracle owned rich text editor. For 24C, this editor will replace the previously used editors on the Answer Workspace as well as the Knowledge Advanced Authoring user experience. The move to this editor will also happen on the Incident Workspace Thread Component and Agent Chat Response shortly following the 24C release. Please find the links below to a single page roadmap summary for 24C (QR code for documentation included) & the full 24C deck sharing details about all 33 enhancements!
Summary
Release Materials As you’ll see in the highlights below, our strategy to deliver features by persona easily articulates business value, making the overall roadmap presentation more accessible & compelling when discussing future plans with customers…
Customer Experience
Our focus on improving the customer experience includes more than ten enhancements in the 24C release! Updates to the Web Chat for Service experience include changes to make configuring the widget easier, like adding support for multiple B2C Service Interfaces in a single chat component, and the ability to easily upgrade & copy a widget so that up taking new features is faster. Additional updates to the Web Chat for Service experience include support for proactive chat invitations, and the ability to mask sensitive information (full masking & partial masking). Finally, the Web Chat for Service experience now has more customization options for the look & feel of the widget, as well as several enhancements to improve the conversational experience. In 24C we have included emoji support for message templates, so that the emailed response now includes all of the information that was exchanged. And in 24C, our Customer Portal now includes an enhancement to support Knowledge Advanced configurations; this update allows articles to be shared across multiple customer portals and provides configuration options so that access levels can be used to define which content is available to each persona on each portal.
Agent Experience
The agent experience is made better by the seven enhancements that we are delivering in the 24C release! For 24C we continue to make improvements to the real-time language translations feature available to agents. Previously, we supported the OCI Language service for making translations in chat, in 24C we introduce the ability to leverage 3rd party language translation services to drive both the chat and non-chat agent experiences. We continue to focus on efficiency gains for the Chat Agent in our 24C release, including the ability to configure the user experience to alter the background color of the chat header when the session goes into wrap-up mode. 24C also includes the ability to configure which queues agents can transfer chats to, making the transfer process much more accurate and fast for agents. Our 24C release brings back the ever-popular Infolet Dashboards for analytics. We have made improvements to the two seeded Infolet Dashboards & the user experience for those dashboards. This visual improvement is just the beginning of the plans for the infolet dashboard in upcoming releases.
Administrator Experience
The 24C release delivers enhancements to some of our “administrator favorite” features, including updates to Enhanced Business Rules, Element Manager, Data Lifecyle Policy, and Service Usage Metric features. And, for our Knowledge Advanced customers, the 24C release includes several enhancements like the ability to bulk update user groups and delete specific article versions. Developer Experience The 24C release includes improvements that provide better support for the Oracle Integration Cloud. First, we made enhancements to the RightNow Oracle Integration Cloud adapter in order to uptake the new OIC private endpoints strategy. Next, the release makes it easier to configure the Oracle Integration Cloud as an external endpoint for the B2C Service Event Delivery Service. Finally, in 24C we are enhancing our Service Health Metrics feature by expanding the list of services tracked via new APIs and increase the list of data points to include more details latency information.
Oracle B2C Service 24B Product Release Highlights
The Oracle B2C Service development team proudly announces the second quarterly release of 2024 and is delivering some highly anticipated features and improvements. This is a particularly exciting release as the team prioritized customer-driven enhancements and incorporating artificial intelligence use cases into the product offerings. Of the 36 features that we are announcing, 28 (76%) of them are associated to direct customer asks. Below are further details concerning the released enhancements broken out by persona to assist in communicating the value.
Attached to this answer are a couple links to images. The first is what we are calling our Quick Glimpse Card and it provides a list of high value enhancements in each of the four roles. The second is the complete list of enhancements for each role. There is a QR code that is included that will take the viewer to the 24B Release Readiness content.
Customer Experience
Web Chat for Service
The Web Chat for Service component continues to expand its no code customization possibilities by allowing custom icons to be leveraged for avatars and system messages as well as allowing for the name that is used to represent the agent to be customized providing additional privacy options. Two Engagement Engine features are now available with the addition of Page Peek and Visitor Browser History to Web Chat for Service as well. The ability to share files between agent and customer continues to involve as new attributes have been added to Engagement Engine to define the attachment settings when agent or end-user upload and download files. This allows the administrator to configure which file types the server will accept during a chat interaction which can be all supported file types or a subset of them. Finally for customers with tighter security concerns, we are making it possible to turn off incline CSS insertion.
Knowledge Advanced
In 24A we introduced the ability to attach files to recommendations but users who had left recommendations were not able to see those attachments on their recommendations in customer portal, leaving a user wondering whether or not the file really attached. Now the user will not only be able to see their attachment but will also be able to download it.
Agent Experience
There are some exciting features that are coming for the agent experience in 2024 as we introduce artificial intelligence at the point of need. Oracle B2C Service is dedicated to opening up options for your contact center to surface ai to your agents driven by your choice of ai services. For 24B, we are concentrating on language translation and response suggestions driven by Oracle AI services. We are designing the user experience to be able to leverage your choice of ai service, so that bring your own service option will be available in a subsequent release.
Agent Chat
The agent chat user experience has been focusing over the past several releases with providing a means for the agent to personalize their chat control either visually or functionally with such additions as ability to set the number of active chats, the number of seconds till the next chat is offered as well as the sounds associated with certain chat events. For 24B, a report is available that allows supervisors to view the values that the individual agents have selected.
The initial release of our chat automated response suggestions will be available as an early adopter feature. The feature will provide real-time suggestions for the agent in the engagement panel based on the last response received from the customer. The feature will be initially available based on an integration with Oracle Digital Assistant, but there will be the ability to use OCI services without ODA in subsequent releases as well as the ability to leverage non-Oracle ai services to drive the user experience.
Automated language translation is also now available during live chat sessions. Agents will receive messages in the language set on the interface and customers receive messages in their preferred language. This feature will also be available via an early adopter process and leverage OCI Language Translation APIs. However, language translation has also been designed to allow for other translation services to drive the productized user experience.
Agent Insights and Workspaces
The agent response suggestion use case will also be made available in 24B leveraging the Agent Insights Panel to surface the suggestions. As with the chat channel, this will be made available via an early adopter program. Realtime translation will not make the 24B release for the non-chat use case, but is planned to be available in 24C. There are several non-ai related enhancements that we are supporting based on customer requests including an attachment image viewer that allows the agent to preview all attachment files with Next and Previous arrows, a user experience request to better handle hierarchy fields if a parent node is not a valid selection option, and honoring additional report design configuration in the browser user interface runtime. 24B is also the release where we are supporting the agent’s ability to add an @mention to a private note to drive notifications. This has been a well-received enhancement in our discussions with customers.
Knowledge Advanced
There are also two Knowledge Advanced enhancements that are targeting the Agent persona. The first is a user experience enhancement to surface additional filter in the browser user interface control by adding a More link. The second, is the inclusion of the content type view privileges in the search results.
Admin Experience
We continue to place an emphasis on making our application easier to administrate. Common features such as Business Rules, Element Manager, Data Lifecycle Management, and Service Usage Metrics have been further enhanced to assist the administrator.
Business Rules
The ability to execute an event handler based on a task object is now available. A precursor to adding the execute task event handler is the ability to create a CPM for a task object and that is also available with this release. To assist the administrator in understand how the current set of rules are performing, the usage statistics can now be downloaded into a CSV file. Finally, we tweaked the deployment process with an eye toward reducing the amount of time it takes
Element Manager
In order to limit the possibility of incurring an Out of Memory issue when exporting, there was a limit introduced on the package size. To assist the administration with better understanding of the progress of import and export, a progress indicator has been introduced for imports, and a process completed notification has been included for the export process. Another time saving enhancement is the ability for the admin to modify values for the configuration verbs and message base items at import instead of requiring them to make the changes post-import. The final Element Manager enhancement has to do with surfacing the element type in the dependencies view.
Data Lifecycle Management
Two enhancements are introduced to assist with the Data Lifecycle Management feature. The first in the enforcing of only a single range filter per policy. The other is the introduction of a seeded custom policy for purging incidents threads that were created to contain chat transcripts.
Knowledge Advanced
We didn’t forget the administrators that are concerned with Knowledge Advanced as the access type attribute was made available in custom reports on more tables.
Integrator Experience
We continue to expand the integration choices both within our Event Delivery Service offering as well as via the External Objects and Integration feature. We also are introducing the Service Health Metrics feature allowing operational statistics concerning services to be available via REST calls.
Service Health Metrics
For 24B we have created a new set of REST API endpoints that B2C customers can utilize, in order to understand the overall “health” of the B2C Service system, and some of its underlying features. For this initial release, we will provide data point for both the Web Browser and Browser User Interface services.
Event Delivery Service
Event Delivery Service pushes create, update, and delete events to an external streaming service that can then be consumed by the integrator. Previously the Oracle Streaming Service was made available. For 24B, we are also providing support for the Microsoft Azure Event Hub as an additional destination for the events.
External Objects and Integrations
External Objects & integrations is a service of B2C service that facilitates admins for seamless integration with third-party services securely. With this enhancement, admins would send a request with custom parameters to other services for Authentication, like some services use an API key in the header as an authentication mechanism, in addition to the authentication types supported by External Objects & Integrations. The enhancement also provides admins an option to save the value as secret securely in the vault.
Please be sure to check out our Oracle Release Readiness pages for ALL features delivered
Oracle B2C Service 24A Product Release Highlights
- B2C Service continues to leverage the Web Chat for Service team to enhance the user experience for customers, more information on the 24A Web Chat for Service release can be found in the Digital Customer Service announcements. For 24A, the Knowledge Advanced team released the following feature:
- The Recommendation experience has been enhanced for end users because sometimes it can be challenging for users to capture in words exactly what content they are recommending, now they can simply attach a file or picture.
- In 24A we focused on improving the Chat Experience for Supervisors by including:
- Inline Editing for chat reports is now available empowering Supervisors to easily update information from within chat reports themselves.
- The Agent Experience has been further Optimized in 24A with these features:
- An agent personalization option to hide or show the Agent Insights panel by default when a chat or incident is opened. Prior to this, the Agent Insights panel would always be shown.
- When executing multiple Quick Searches, the agent can now clear out the previous contents with a single button click.
- A custom icon can now be configured to represent the Favorite Articles user interface for agents using Knowledge Advanced. A star icon is used by default which can cause some confusion since the same star icon is also used elsewhere on the Agent Console to represent Recent Items.
- Administrator Experience features for 24A include:
- Traditionally users with administrative privileges have access to view and edit all reports by default. With this new feature, the edit permission by default can be changed to provide/revoke edit report access, allowing certain business group administrators to restrict the editing of reports by certain other business group administrators and avoid conflicts.
- Administrators can now manage and monitor session usage alerts in the console itself. They can set a threshold, then configure an alert in the case the usage breaches the threshold.
- Enhanced Business Rules has been further enhanced:
- A new Enhanced Business Rules action has been included to automate sending emails to contacts about their Assets.
- The business rules execution statistics over a specific time period can now be exported to a comma separated value (CSV) file.
- The Business Rules runtime log table has been opened up to the B2C Service Analytics feature allowing for the creation of custom reports.
- Element Manager has been further enhanced:
- Importing extensions has been further optimized by providing the ability to choose the profiles and interfaces to authorize access during import.
- Data Lifecycle Management introduces additional canned templates to purge transactions in the Contact and Incident table.
