As I mentioned in my Release 12 introduction post, service request management functionality has been added to Sales Cloud. And that changes EVERYTHING to the point that the name Sales Cloud no longer covers very well what Sales Cloud is capable off.
Whenever Oracle is mentioning ‘Engagement Cloud’, they are referring to Sales Cloud combined with the Service Management offering on the same Sales Cloud platform.
Service Request Management
Let me use as an example a typical Belgian problem to show off what Service Management is all about in Release 12.
A service request was created through one of the possible channels by my alter ego ‘Edouard Dewolf’, with a severity obviously set to ‘Critical’.
As this service requests can now be managed on the Sales Cloud platform, some things look very familiar:
- Some of the sidetab icons might be familiar to you. They indicate that we can add more external contacts and internal resources to this service requests and we can add tasks and appointments to this service request in order to get it resolved.
- Sales Cloud comes with a powerful reporting solution that now can report over all the service related information in Engagement Cloud too
- App Composer allows you to extend the service related objects in exactly the same way as you would extend sales related objects
- As service requests are managed in Engagement Cloud, notice how the account name and contact name are links that allow you to drill into the account and contact overview pages in case a service agent want to learn more about them, or look into their sales and service history before solving this new request?
When checking out the screenshot above, some things are really different too:
- Did you notice how service requests appear in a tabs? This is a new UX pattern to Engagement Cloud and one that makes sense as service agents need to be able to handle multiple service requests simultaneously e.g. one SR that came in through a website and requires an email response and maybe another few through a chat channel. The first tab always allows me to navigate back to the service request list screen.
- As you work with the sidetabs, the key SR information always stays available on the top of the screen.
- Some icons on the sidetabs are completely new like the ‘Responses’ sidetabs shown in the screenshot below.
Responses
Service request responses allow you to … respond to a service request. Responses allow you to log all internal and external communications that have happened in order to resolve the service request e.g. by sending a email reply or just log some internal notes
But service request management in Release 12 is much more than just being able to log and respond to a service request. I will share my first experiences with some of the other features in subsequent posts soon:
- how to assign service requests to service agents
- how service agents can browse the Engagement Cloud Knowledge Base to resolve service requests faster.
And the service request functionality that comes with Release 12 is just the beginning. There is an enormous amount of new functionality being added soon !!! Check out the upcoming features for Engagement Cloud in Release 13 here
