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 24C version is now available!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’ve only highlighted some of the exciting features delivered in the 24C release. 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 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.
Oracle B2C Service 23D Product Release Highlights
- Oracle B2C Service continues to leverage the Web Chat for Service team to enhance the user experience for customers. Please view their 23D release announcements for details. For 23D, the Service Email team did release the following feature:
- Email Client Like Grouping – Individual email responses to a specific incident, will be grouped via the subject in the mail client. This assists the customer’s tracking of their requests as the entire email chain is grouped as a conversation under one header.
- We continue our momentum of enhancing the user’s experience by increasing their personalization abilities, optimizing common tasks, and providing additional access to existing features.
- Engagement Panel Version is Linked – There is a choice under the Agent Browser User Interface Settings and Actions Menu located in the global header to render the Oracle B2C Service About Dialog. This dialog contains information having to do with what version of the core, Browser User Interface, and Engagement Panel (Agent Chat Panel) that is currently in use for the site. In order to understand what features were included in a specific Engagement Panel version, the administrator would then need to use a new browser tab/window to navigate to the Engagement Panel answer. In order to assist the administrator, the engagement panel version in the About dialog has been converted into a link that points to the information answer.
- Personalize the Display of the Engagement Panel – In order to provide the agent with more control over their desktop, we added a new set of personalization options in the Setting user interface. These allow for the agent to choose the colors and font family that is rendered for the Engagement Panel itself. These selections are persisted and can assist in reducing eye fatigue from bright backgrounds.
- Enhanced User Experience for Leveraging Guided Assistance while Chatting – There are two features that were provided for customers that leverage both our Guided Assistance feature as well as our Chat feature. First off, each individual question can now be added to the chat response via a single click of a button. Previously the agent could only add all of the questions into the chat response. Additional, an ability for the question Options to be added to the response as well.
- Auto Accept Chat Control per Queue – Today, when a new chat enters a queue there are several options that are available for configuring how that chat is presented to the agent. If the profile is configured to Push Chats to the agent, then we can present the agent with a toast notification (this exists today and is NOT new functionality). What we are releasing as part of 23D, is the ability to configure a particular queue to not present the agent with a toast notification but instead auto-accept the chat.
- Chat Sound is Controlled per Queue – Another way of alerting the agent of a new chat is to play an audio sound. Again, that is a feature that already exists, what is being released is the ability to configure on a queue by queue basis, if the audio prompt is played.
- Automatically Close the Chat Panel – Administrators can now configure the system to close the Engagement Panel after the last chat is terminated.
- Expand and Collapse Notes – The user experience of the Notes control that is available on the Organization and Contact workspaces has been enhanced to allow for one or all notes to be expanded/collapsed.
- Honor Tab Control Alignment in Agent Browser User Interface – This configuration has been available on all tab controls via the legacy Workspace Designer. Previously, it was not honored when those workspaces were rendered in the Agent Browser User Interface. This includes the ability to render the tabs on the top, left side, right side, and bottom of the control.
- HTML on Agent Insight Cards – When creating the text to be included in the Agent Insights Card either through an extension or via a Workspace Rule Action, it is now supported to include html markup for formatting purposes.
- Report Export Notification – Report export has been limited to only one per user at a time. When the export is initiated, the agent will receive a visual indicating such. If the agent attempts to export another report, while the inititial export is still in progress, they will receive a message in a dialog that tells them that another export is currently in progress.
- For our administrators we continue to build out enhancements for our Element Manager, Enhanced Business Rules, Data Lifecycle Management, Knowledge Advanced, and Service Usage Metrics features.
- Enhance Element Manager CI/CD APIs to Support Individual Reports – In the last couple of releases support for importing B2C Service artifacts such as CPMs and Extensions has been added. For 23D, we are including the ability to include Reports to that list of supported artifacts.
- Avoid redundant overwrites of elements during imports – During an import, if the process determines that an artifact in the export has not changed then that artifact will be skipped in the import process. This will avoid re-deployment of existing unchanged elements and reduces the total time and resource consumption for the import.
- Enhanced Business Rules: Notify All Admins for Deployment - During the deployment initiation an option is now provided that allows the agent to indicate that all users that have rule administration privileges should be notified of the action. This will avoid collisions of multiple administrators attempting to execute the same action on a rule set.
- Custom Process Management Logging Capabilities – Provide a visual report that allows for the viewing of the history and current process that have been queued and processed.
- Data Lifecycle Policy: Foreign Keys as Filters – Provide the ability to define data lifecycle policies with a new set of filters. This allows administrators to manage the service data according to their business needs with the use of additional filters.
- Data Lifecycle Policy: Date Created Filter in the Custom Object Transaction – The provides the ability to define data lifecycle policies on Custom Object transactions with the Date Created as the only filter. This allows administrators to create policies to purge all Custom Object transactions based only on the date of creation.
- Service Usage Metrics – Administrators are now able to drill down in the into the API monthly usage report to view request counts per interface and source. This allows administrators to easily understand the usage pattern of API operations, the peak contributor of the usage, and thereby better align their resources.
- Knowledge Advanced: Mark Recommendations as Under Review – An additional “Under Review” option has been included for the Knowledge Advanced recommendation feature. This was supported to provide a user with the ability to let the person that created the recommendation know that it has in fact been looked at and the determination to reject or act on the recommendation has still not been decided.
- Knowledge Advanced: Interface-filtered favorites – Cross-trained users that are utilizing multiple interfaces (whether in CP or BUI) may choose to use the in-application knowledge favoriting functionality. Historically this list would be consistent between interfaces for users of this sort, leading to clickthrough issues and lists of favorites that were not focused on the work the user was doing at the moment. Now the list of favorites will be limited to those articles which are available in the active interface. Additionally, expired articles will be excluded from the list of favorited articles.
- Knowledge Advanced: Answer Feedback Widget Support – For businesses that are interested in a larger set of features for working on knowledge feedback Incidents have long been the preferred solution. This has been something that each business has had to build for themselves, now it will be possible to utilize an out of the box customer portal widget to collect the initial information that generates the incident and other existing widgets for exposing those incidents in customer portal, facilitating ongoing interactions on the feedback and understanding what has happened with the feedback.
- From an integrators perspective, 23D concentrated on enhancing the External Objects feature and arrival of our second AI/ML Accelerator.
- External Objects: In Agent Browser User Interface Error Logs – Integrators and administrators will now be able to view the errors of each external object connection with the Agent Browser User Interface.
- Accelerator: Live Chat Sentiment Analysis – An accelerator is now available via the Accelerator card located on the Agent Browser User Interface Administration UI that provides the live Sentiment Analysis of a chat conversation. The accelerator supports agent indicator of the chat sentiment as well as a supervisor support that allows them to also track the sentiment and receive alerts when a sentiment crosses a certain escalation threshold.
