Oracle Releases Oracle Knowledge Advanced for Service Cloud

Just two weeks after its annual OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco, Oracle has announced further enhancements to its cloud product set. Today, the company introduced Oracle Knowledge Advanced Cloud, a solution that helps facilitate customer service interactions by granting customers and contact center agents improved access to instructional materials.

According to Nav Chakravarti, vice president of product management at Oracle’s CRM Knowledge division, the product improves three key aspects of knowledge management—"creation, delivery, and refinement." First, it aims to help organizations anticipate any difficulties a customer might encounter during a service interaction so they can determine what content to present. Second, the product makes it easy to retrieve the materials, regardless of the medium, enabling customers to find them on their own terms. Lastly, it helps companies make effective service processes repeatable, by revealing what methods have proven to be the most successful over time.

For Oracle, the release comes as a continuation of efforts it began in 2011, when it acquired InQuira. While the vendor has previously provided on-premise knowledge management capabilities, this is its first iteration of such tools in the cloud, Chakravarti says.

And according to Chakravarti, it is becoming increasingly necessary that service agents have such tools readily available, to avoid prolonging calls and hampering the customer experience.

Kate Leggett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, reinforced the point in a statement. "Knowledge delivered to the customer or the customer-facing employee at the right time in the customer engagement process is critical to a successful interaction," Leggett said. If used properly, Leggett added, access to deeper knowledge can be used to enrich interactions, improve customer satisfaction, "and ultimately drive conversion and revenue." 

Chakravarti says that the technology can be applied to different information sources across the Web to "crawl, index, and harness" knowledge so that it may be quickly accessed when needed. With the tools in place, organizations are not forced to re-create knowledge items that already exist and can instead focus their energy on creating new content that will enrich service interactions.

The solution employs comprehensive search capabilities and can handle industry- and geography- specific queries, Chakravarti says. It is equipped to translate to and from 33 languages, as well as to handle vertical-specific terminology. The product uses natural language processing and machine learning capabilities to pick up on patterns that can guide service agents.

In the event that a customer service case reaches the contact center agent, she can use the tool in conjunction with the Service Cloud to tap into a customer's activity history and thus avoid repeating steps that have already proven ineffective, Chakravarti says.

Oracle Knowledge Advanced Cloud is available as an add-on to Oracle's Service Cloud, which is part of Oracle's CX suite and includes Marketing, Sales, and Social offerings. 

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