• 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.

• B2C Service (OSvC) Release Readiness Assets 
   

The Oracle B2C Service 23C release shows the rapid development or Oracle Fusion Service, Help Desk, Field Service and Intelligent Advisor. Notable new features and enhancements include: 

Fusion Service

• Service Center added a new option to enable the Redwood Service Center for customers in data center regions where the Activity Stream/Feed backend service may not yet be available. A new mode that can be enabled in Stage/Test environments allows accessing all the key Service Center features so that the customer’s implementation project can get underway in advance of the Feed service being deployed. Additionally, the Asset-based Service (ABS) solution now supports the ability to order and track parts from Service Logistics directly from a Service Request in the Redwood UI experience. This enables a wider variety of ABS use cases that can be fully served by the Redwood UI experience for service agents.
• Knowledge Management in the Redwood user experience brings forth significant quality-of-life enhancements for knowledge-base authors and service agents, including the ability to link to article anchor tags in authoring and the addition of knowledge search in smart filter, search for service agents.  Additionally, auto-complete of Knowledge Search in Oracle Digital Customer Service makes searching a quick and interactive experience for end-users.
• Digital Customer Service now provides support for Agent Affinity for Chat users who need to talk to an agent regarding an open Service Request and agents will be able to collaborate with other team members or managers via conference while on a chat with the customer. Further, Web Chat for Service, Oracle's newest chat client, now supports Multi-lingual support for Fusion, Off the record support and masking of sensitive PII data and End conversation custom message and flow to share a link or a survey at the end of the chat to capture Voice of the Customer.  Finally, we are very excited about or initial release of Embedded Service that provides multi-functional help at the point of need and allows you to insert a full support experience in any page with options like Search Knowledge, Popular Articles, Top Actions, Digital Assistant as an Agent (ODA), and Live Chat.
• Intelligent Advisor, Oracle’s decision automation tool, now supports adding and editing version comments in Intelligent Advisor Hub. Further, detailed samples are available for creating guided agent experiences for Fusion Sales and Service.
• Help Desk has been enhanced to provide additional efficiency to Agents, including being able to update multiple Help Desk requests at one time, looking up an employee and their request history without having to know a particular request number, allowing notifications for all resources within a queue, as well as other features. Help Desk has also added additional fields with ‘Subject Areas’ to enable further performance and usage analytics.

Field Service

• Asset Details: In 23C we are introducing the new Asset Details capability via standard plugin functionality. Asset details include pictures, historical and upcoming work order details, warranties, entitlements, asset notes, and history. This exciting new functionality offers complete visibility into assets across the enterprise. This information is available for the mobile technician and back-office users and is connected to Oracle Supply Chain (it also supports 3rd party applications).
• Oracle Field Service-Human Capital Management (OFS-HCM) Accelerator Enhancements: We are introducing a powerful enhancement to the OFS-HCM Accelerator. This enhancement will automatically update the resource work skills in Oracle Field Service when an employee's Job Profile is updated/changed within HCM Talent. Further, when HCM is utilized as the system of record for employee skills, qualifications, accomplishments, and career preferences, OFS automatically updates the work skills of the mobile resources. This enhancement streamlines the configuration process and eliminates duplicate data entry.
• Support for Date Ranges for Temporary Resource Location: Users can now set the date range (instead of one day at a time) for when a mobile resource is working in a temporary work area. This enhancement greatly reduces manual configuration and helps ensure routing accuracy with accurate resource locations.
• Dynamic Forms Launcher: This enhancement allows users to configure a single button or workflow step to dynamically launch various forms leveraging the data from associated activities or inventory properties. By introducing this new capability, users can streamline their configurations, reducing time, and helping to quickly add additional unique forms.
• Locked Activities to Particular Date/Time in Route: In 23C, we’ve renamed the ‘Time Notified’ field to ‘Communicated Window’ and added the ability to set the field as a time interval (including the date) for both the ‘Communicated Window Start’ and ‘Communicated Window End’, including support of overnight commitments. This functionality can be leveraged for every type of routing plan (except for Immediate Routing for Urgent activities) and every API call (except for bulk updates). Bulk routing will return the activity back to the Communicated Window if the activity is moved. If a user manually moves an activity outside the Communicated Delivery Window, a warning message appears, and the activity changes to in jeopardy. In addition, a new parameter has been added to the ‘move activity’ API call that prevents breaking the Communicated Window parameter when moving an activity. This enhancement improves the customer experience by ensuring high priority service is always done by the committed time. 
• Pre-defined Filter Date/Time Controls: For filters on the Dispatch Console and the Nearby Activities screens fields containing "date and time" or "time", we’ve added pickers for "date time" and "time", instead of plain text input. We’ve also added a description of the expected format for each input field. This feature significantly simplifies data filtering on the Dispatch Console and Nearby Activities screens, while improving the usability of the solution.

We’ve only highlighted some of the exciting features delivered in the 23C release. Please be sure to check out our Oracle Release Readiness pages for ALL features delivered in 23C:

• Oracle Fusion Service Release Readiness Assets
• Oracle Help Desk Release Readiness Assets
• Oracle Field Service Release Readiness Assets
• B2C Service (OSvC) Release Readiness Assets