Service Cloud Roadmap sessions at OOW16

Boxfusion attended Oracle OpenWorld 2016 - here's the latest update on the Oracle Service Cloud roadmap news and product direction!

Open World is always a good way to find out what direction Oracle are taking with their products, as long as you manage to survive the barrage of information that is thrown your way... This (relatively) short blog post is meant to synthesize the Service Cloud roadmap announcements and hopefully show some of that direction. Get in touch with us if you would like to find out more about the Service Cloud roadmap and how you can benefit from the new features.

Web Customer Service #

Enhancements in Web Customer Service are focussed mainly in social messaging, video chat and chat (notice a pattern?).
Following trends in communication patterns, Oracle will introduce social messaging as a supported channel. Not Social, but Social *Messaging*. By connecting with aggregators instead of the uncountable individual services out there, Oracle Service Cloud will quickly bring in these capabilities with minimal integration effort. Support of things like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, etc, will open up the solution to a modern audience with a completely new set of expectations.
Video chat is a good way to build relationships and increase trust between agents and customers. Chat sneak preview will allow agents to see what the customer is typing.

All of these are present at the platform level, meaning that regardless of the channel, all the information is collected in a single place. A customer can call in and follow up in chat or email and a full history is always available to agents.

Contact Centre #

The main topic under Contact Centre enhancements is definitely Browser UI. This continues to be the #1 feature we get asked about. Oracle will continue to build functionality into Browser UI, the simplified web-based interface for Service Cloud. Unlike the current Desktop Agent, which is based on .Net and requires libraries to be downloaded onto agent machines and relies on Microsoft-specific platforms, the Browser UI is a pure web client, accessible from any modern browser (HTML 5, JS and CSS).

Other changes coming along to the Contact Centre level are around Experience Routing. This is getting a much-awaited overhaul to simplify the rules and extend its use beyond chat to all and any channels, including Internet of Things (IoT).

Oracle are also making it easier to get data out of Service Cloud and into BI Cloud Service (BICS). Currently, there are no plans to change the existing transactional analytics engine, but BICS is the way to go when reporting over multiple data sources and performing more complex analyses.

Knowledge #

Changes to both Knowledge Foundation and Advanced were announced, the most sought-after are probably improvements to the authoring experience and knowledge versioning.

Platform #

Under the hood, many improvements are coming on the roadmap: improvements to the user experience around writing business rules, support for custom objects on business rules, completion of the REST API availability, and a few others. Tied in to the developments on Browser UI mentioned above, the widely awaited Browser UI Extension Framework is coming soon!

Keeping with a central theme in this year's Open World, IoT was mentioned in a number of slides... The reason for this is that service is seen as the "killer app" for IoT (although Marketing, especially using beacons, might contest this claim...). In Service, there is a wide gamut of experiences that can easily leverage IoT, from simple device registration, to proactive and preventative engagement. And vice-versa: it's by using the data produced by devices to make people's lives easier, that the IoT paradigm will continue to grow and Service is ideally placed for that.

Keep watching our blog for further news across these areas!

Reach out #

If you would like to hear more about how Oracle Service Cloud is evolving, or how Boxfusion can help you deploy it successfully for your organisation, give us a call on +44 203 283 4315 or contact us here.