Do you know what an oracle is? I did not (at least not in any detail), so I looked it up recently, when I started thinking about this blog…
Oracle (or·a·cle /ˈôrək(ə)l/ (noun): In classical antiquity, an oracle was a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods.
Disclaimer: I do not claim to know whether Oracle (the company) was named thus after the Oracle in classical Greece, but if so, it would make sense in our context. Here is why: You have likely noticed that customers are getting ever more demanding. They expect your agents to know who they are, and what they want, right off the bat. It’s a general finding in the contact center industry: customers are growing more exigent. And if you don’t up the ante, chances are they will wander off to the competition, looking for better customer service elsewhere. That being so, what can you do to improve customer service? Arguably the single most helpful tool that allows your agents to provide better, more personalized customer service is an integration with the very source of “insightful counsel”; nowadays (and in this context), generally known as a CRM solution, such as Oracle Service Cloud.
Extending our offering of pre-built CRM integrations, NICE CXone has recently added the NICE CXone Agent for Oracle® Service Cloud to our portfolio. This new product has all the features and functionality that you would expect from a CRM integration: agent functionality and controls are seamlessly embedded into Oracle Service Cloud. Your agents can use an interface they are familiar with to handle contacts, which reduces the need for training and declutters the agents’ desktop. Agents can handle inbound and outbound voice calls, voicemails, callbacks, chat interactions and work items in the same interface (read: no more ALT+TAB between different application windows). For every interaction, they will see customer data displayed on their screen synchronized with each routed interaction. To help improve First Contact Resolution rates, agents have access to Agent and Skill Directories, as well as Address Books, which streamlines reaching out to experts in the contact center as well as elsewhere in the enterprise. And since agents can see the availability of those resources, unsuccessful transfers and consults are minimized. Basic Call Recording functionality is also right there in the interface, so in many cases there’s no need to deploy a separate solution.
The NICE CXone Media Bar gives the agent insight into queue depth for all contacts they are eligible to handle in real-time, so that they can adjust contact handling activity to the current conditions. Call dispositioning allows for richer historical reporting, by allowing the agent to select “outcome codes” from a list of configured dispositions. Flexible agent settings--that you can define using the Admin module--allow you to configure how the NICE CXone Agent will share data and pop objects such as Contacts or Tasks in the Oracle Service Cloud.
The “prophetic predictions or precognition of the future” that were said to be provided by the Pythia in Delphi’s oracle are not currently part of what the NICE CXone Agent for Oracle Service Cloud encompasses. But if you want to provide your agents with “wise and insightful counsel” to help them optimize customer service, the NICE CXone Agent for Oracle® Service Cloud might just get you there.
