Oracle Service Cloud Chat and its 10 best features
Table of contents
Recent studies show that live chat support has become a big part of customer communication strategy, the reason being that it's an easy and effective way of engaging with customers. Companies use live chat software not only to provide better support and customer satisfaction, but also to significantly improve agents productivity. Increases sales, reduced support costs and improved first contact resolution rates are some other positive impacts of using chat.
Why is Oracle Service Cloud Chat a champion in my opinion?
Nowadays, most chat implementations offer features like chat wait time, file attachments or feedback. Unfortunately a lot of them still miss out on quite significant attributes. Even though a full list of Oracle Service Cloud Chat features can be found on the Oracle official web site I would like to highlight the most valuable benefits of using Oracle Service Cloud Chat.
Let's have a look at my 10 bullet points.
Designed to be easy
When it comes to implementing, Oracle made it very easy to personalise and style with your own branding across multiple platforms - from Desktop pages, Smartphone and tablets. It does not require advanced web knowledge to customise the chat link, icons and consumer interface. Oracle also provides lots of documentation and training courses on how this can be accomplished through configuration settings and simple editing of files. However, more complex customisations designed to be responsive may require engaging experienced professional services to save time and hassle.
Intelligent routing
Oracle Service Cloud Chat will efficiently manage all incoming chat requests and automatically assign them to appropriate chat agents. A reasonably new feature called Experience Routing will now not only route customers to agents based on their availability but also on the agent’s unique skill level as it evolves over time. It is a powerful tool that combines a variety of skills sets, like Product and Category Based Skills, Language Based Skills, Skill Scorekeeping and many more. Additionally, Oracle extends the product with a rules engine called Engagement Engine, that has been designed to work as a single service point. It gives you greater control over when, where, and how proactive and reactive chats are offered and also gives you information about what pages your customers were viewing when they decided to initiate a chat. Please have a look at our post about Enhanced chat targeting with Engagement Engine. I personally would advise getting some level of support in order to streamline the process of routing your customers to the right agent at the right time. This will definitely improve agent utilisation and customer satisfaction.
Agent efficiency
Being fully integrated with Oracle Service Cloud makes interactive assistance smooth and effortless. Agents have access to a number of features that increase their productivity and help them further understand the customer. Full customer records, including customer details and all previous interactions are available within the chat workspace allowing agents to access it whilst chatting with a customer. This allows agents to proactively engage with a customer who will greatly appreciate not having to repeat their past history. Besides handling multiple chats and resolving problems simultaneously, agents can also initiate a conference chat with other agents, transfer chats to different queues or agents or even use "whisper" conference mode to get support from other agents. It is a big bonus in terms of increasing customer satisfaction - customers receive help from the most knowledgeable agent.
Proactive and syndicated chat
Even though proactive chats are becoming a standard feature across many chat solutions what makes it special for Oracle is a possibility of implementing Oracle Service Cloud Chat on an external web page. The syndicated widgets are generated and configurable JavaScript snippet code that can be placed within another web page. It is actually quite easy to embed and configure on an external page and does not require a lot of technical knowledge. The Syndicated widgets are very useful for companies who decide not to use Oracle Service Cloud Customer Portal and don't miss out on Chat functionality.
Integrated knowledge base
Both, customers and agents have instant access to the knowledge-base enabling them to search for answers. Agents can also benefit from a very sophisticated feature called Smart Assistant that suggests answers based on the content analysis and chat questions. Another interesting component worth noting at this point is that agents may also invite customers to co-browse where they can guide customers through web pages by securely taking control of the customer's browser and help them complete an action.
PCI compliance
Security is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to implementing live chat and if it lets your customers to share sensitive data then it adds that extra benefit. Luckily, Oracle Service Cloud Chat allows your customers send information securely without it being stored in the chat transcript.
Reporting and analytics
Oracle Service Cloud provides a comprehensive analytics tool letting you not only organise and summarise data in reports but also analyse and evaluate the information thanks to the very helpful insights. With predefined reports, real-time and chat audit, you will get a clear picture of the effectiveness and performance enabling you to improve the quality of your service. As it is quite a beast you may find it a little bit overwhelming when trying to create your custom reports, but with help of an experienced Oracle Service Cloud Consultant a lot can be achieved in little time.
Customization and expanding
One of the biggest advantages of the Oracle Service Cloud product is that it can be customised! Sometimes easier and sometimes with a little challenge but I would say that almost everything can be done. The same applies to the Chat, it can be extended for the agents by using Addin functionality. Also, if you wish to integrate Chat with third-party platforms or build a custom chat window then this could be easily implemented using Chat APIs web services, but be aware that this would require a bit of technical knowledge.
Automatic reconnection
This is a very important aspect of live chats as things get interrupted in the web life, so if a chat connection is lost, Oracle Service Cloud Chat will automatically reconnect the customer to the same agent without losing the transcript information. In case the agent is not connected then the customer will be placed back in the queue without losing any session information.
Standard responses
Enable agents to reuse common responses to common questions to save time, but use wisely to avoid behaving like a bot!
Despite of being a very advanced tool unfortunately Oracle Chat lacks a couple of major characteristics in my view. First, often asked by our customers is:
Ability to download chat transcript
From my experience working with our clients I can see a huge potential of the ability of saving chat transcripts in real time by customers. This is advantageous for customers to be able to refer to the conversations in the future. We have recently added this feature for one of our clients and customized the Customer Portal by adding our custom widgets. Please, feel free to contact us if you have any questions, we're happy to help.
Another feature that our customers have been complaining about is the ability to embed chat on a website and allow customers to browse whilst continually chat with an agent. Oracle Service Cloud does not come with this feature until the latest release 18D
Inlaid chat:
A long overdue feature which is finally coming in version 18D release (mid-November) is chat inlays. Allowing chat within the page without relying on popup windows.
To sum up, Oracle Service Cloud Chat will help create long-lasting positive experience with your customers if implemented and used wisely. Oracle does take care of its users and provides plenty of technical documentation and video tutorials. Additionally, Oracle has a thriving community for customers and partners enabling them to collaborate on real-life challenges and share solutions and good practices.
If you think you could do with a little help then we are able to offer our extensive experience. Oracle Service Cloud is a really heavy loaded tool and it can look extremely daunting when trying to configure it yourself. We can help you draw the most value from your Service Cloud investment and achieve the best customer experience.