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This is a blog entry from our Support Experience Blog

Maintaining a healthy site is not always about things like writing good code or being on a supported version. An often overlooked component to keeping your Oracle B2C Service site functioning well is to assign the right people to the proper contact designation types. Even when a company follows all the best practices, there will be times that a software defect or incorrect configuration will cause problems. When that happens, CX Service Support will work with our customers to find the cause and determine the steps needed to resolve the problem. Ensuring the proper people are engaging CX Service Support and the appropriate tools and resources are available to them will streamline the identification of a root cause, thus enhancing the overall experience.

Technical Contacts are designated by a company as the people who interact with our CX Service Product Support Engineer. These should be people with advanced technical skills and an expertise in the company’s use and setup of Oracle B2C Service product. In many cases, Support will request that these Technical Contacts make changes to workaround defects, ask detailed questions about setup and configuration and explain complex defects in technical terms. An organization’s site administrator will typically be a strong fit for a Technical Contact since they have access to settings and knowledge of the site setup, but should not be the lone holder of this designation. Customers who use the Customer Portal heavily and/or have integrations and add-ins should also have a developer as a Technical Contact. Finally, every customer should have a Technical Contact who is very familiar with the infrastructure in which Oracle B2C Service is running. This IT person should have a good understanding of how Oracle B2C Service works in addition to understanding the company’s workstation and network setup.

Investigations can be difficult, and this is particularly true in cases where CX Service Support can’t reproduce a problem. Technical Contacts are required to gather testimonies of a problem from their agents using the Oracle B2C Service product. They will need to be able to gather data from these agents and may even need to work with them to turn on and gather logs recorded on their workstations. As such, companies should be setup so that they can easily install screen sharing solutions, video capture solutions and run .bat files on agent workstations. They should also ensure that they can run communication troubleshooting tools like ping, tracert and fiddlercap. These tools are all utilized on a daily basis by our CX Service Support in the pursuit of the resolution of customer problems. The inability of a customer to access these tools quickly, or at all, can cause significant delays or may even prevent CX Service Support from uncovering root causes.  Additionally, due to the critical and complicated nature of troubleshooting, we highly recommend Technical Contacts be on site with their agents.

Two of the top characteristics we have identified as common among well-run sites are having a strong team of Technical Contacts as well has having the proper tools available for information gathering. Although only part of the “Maintaining a Healthy Site” puzzle, having the right team in place, providing high-quality information is essential to site stability achieved through efficient problem resolution.

- A special thanks to the guest contributions of Jesse Howland

Reference Link:

Answer ID 1560: Using the Contact Management page to add or update designated contacts