Oracle unveiled significant new functionality within Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud that helps organisations deliver better customer experience and drive more informed business decisions. The new social customer service capabilities enable brands to increase social engagement and business insights via a new community self-service solution, enhanced social service and incident routing, and extended social listening and analytics capabilities to private data sources.
Today more than one in three customers prefer to contact brands through social channels rather than by phone or email (Nielsen), and the distinction between social and traditional channels is eroding. To deliver the best possible customer experience across this expanding range of traditional and digital channels, customer care organisations need to provide a positive and unified experience where and when customers want, whether they are on Twitter, Facebook, customer communities or other social networks. Through a unified and modern customer experience across channels, organisations establish a competitive advantage.
The latest release of Oracle Service Cloud includes Community Self-Service, a new approach to Web self-service that brings community functionality directly into the core multi-channel Web experience. Oracle Service Cloud now enables organisations to deliver a seamless experience between Web service and community interactions, leveraging the power of customer knowledge to improve service operations. This helps organisations streamline the customer journey and lets customers quickly find an answer, while also driving efficiencies by reducing the overall requests to the contact centre.
Gartner’s research indicates that investment in Peer-to-Peer Communities drives support costs down and boosts profits. In fact, in a December 2014 research note, Nine CRM Projects to Do Right Now for Customer Service, “Gartner clients who are successful in this space are still seeing on average a 20% reduction in the creation of support tickets following the introduction of peer-to-peer communities,” wrote, Michael Maos, vice-president, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, “Clients are seeing other business benefits as well. By enabling community-based support, clients have been able to recognise new sales opportunities and increase existing customer satisfaction, resulting in increased revenue in several of these cases.”
Oracle is also introducing new workflow and automation capabilities between Oracle Social Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud that empower organisations to leverage the power of social insights and engagements. Business users can now attach contextual attributes and notes generated from posts or incidents identified by Oracle Social Cloud directly to the Oracle Service Cloud. By providing more customer information and context, organisations can improve service quality, drive efficiencies and improve resolution time as social posts are shared with the appropriate agents quickly.
The improved connectivity between Oracle Social Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud includes extended social listening and analytics to enterprise private-data sources such as the new Community Self-Service capability, survey data, chat and call logs. Organisations can now listen and analyse unstructured data and gain insights with terms, themes, sentiment and customer metrics, and can view private and public data side by side in the Oracle Social Cloud Relationship Management dashboard.
“In today’s hyper-competitive business environment, understanding the voice of the customer is essential to providing exceptional experiences, whether on public social networks, across communities, or within high-touch contact centres,” says David Vap, group vice-president, product development, Oracle. “The updates to the Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Social Cloud help businesses listen, identify and track social conversations, enabling them to quickly and efficiently respond to customers looking for answers, which helps foster a loyal group of brand ambassadors.”
The latest enhancements to Oracle Social Cloud and Oracle Service Cloud extend Oracle’s commitment to help organisations leverage social channels to enhance the customer experience and build on the recent introduction of Oracle’s Twitter-enriched social customer service solution. For more information, attend Stephen Fioretti’s session Accelerating Success with Modern Service in the Cloud at 3:10 p.m. eastern in A204 on Tuesday, September 18 at CRM Evolution in New York and visit us at Booth 300.