Oracle B2C Service Chat is a powerful tool that enables businesses to provide real-time, personalized customer support through live chat.

A well-functioning chat service can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. To ensure optimal performance, it’s essential to monitor the health of the chat service. This is where the B2C Service Health Metrics feature comes into play.

This blog provides a comprehensive understanding of chat service health metrics and their importance. By leveraging these insights, you can:

  • Proactively Detect Issues: Identify potential problems before they escalate into major outages
  • Optimize Performance: Fine-tune your service to deliver improved response times and peak performance
  • Enhance the Customer Experience: Ensure a smooth and consistent customer journey
  • Make Data-Driven Decisions: Make informed choices based on real-time insights for Site metrics. Details about usage count, error metrics, latency and HTTP Status help with identifying and debugging issues faster

 

Tracking B2C Service Chat Sub-Service Performance: A Granular Approach

To truly optimize your Oracle B2C Service chat performance, it’s essential to delve into the performance of individual sub-services and their sub-services. This helps you gain a granular understanding of B2C Service chat performance. These granular components play a critical role in the overall functionality of your chat system.

 

What are the key chat metrics that I can track using the Service Health Metrics APIs?

  1. Total Requests: The total number of chat requests received
  2. Average Latency: The average time taken to process a chat request
  3. Success Percentage: The percentage of successful chat interactions
  4. Error Metrics: The error metrics associated with the site that is consuming the Chat API’s

 

 Which chat sub-services can I monitor with the Service Health Metrics APIs?

  1. Chat REST: You can use Service Health Metrics APIs to monitor these REST based Chat APIs related to agent, consumer, Third Party and Universal Queue. Additional details on Chat REST API documentation can be found at Chat REST API
    • Agent: Tracks agent API performance. Data includes metrics like response times, errors, usage count and HTTP Status.
    • Agent Fetch Message: Measures the performance for the Agent operation, which implements the polling get messages functionality for the client.
    • Consumer: Monitors the efficiency of end-user API requests and messages. Data includes metrics like usage count, latency, error count and HTTP Status.
    • Consumer Fetch Message: Measures the performance for the Consumer operation, which implements the polling get messages functionality for the client.
    • Third Party: Tracks the performance of integration API’s with external systems.
    • Third Party Fetch Message: Measures the performance of the Third Party API operation, which implements the polling get messages functionality for the client.
    • Universal Queue: Monitors the performance of the universal message queue API, which is used for advanced routing (also known as skills based routing or experience routing). Data includes metrics like usage count, latency, error count and HTTP Status.
    • Universal Queue Fetch Message: Measures the performance for the operation, which implements the polling get messages functionality for the client Universal Queue Fetch Message.

Note: Chat REST API’s have multiple sub-services and most of these sub-services have a “Fetch” API, and other operations. The “Fetch” API uses long polling, so if there are no messages available, then there is a delay when returning data. This delay may skew the latency metrics provided for the chat sub-services. To help prevent the latency metrics from being skewed, each of the Chat REST APIs (Agent, Consumer, Third Party & Universal Queue) are divided into two groups, and one of the groups is specific to the “Fetch” API.

  1. Chat SOAP: You can use Service Health Metrics APIs to monitor these legacy SOAP based Chat APIs. Additional details of the Chat SOAP API can be found at Chat SOAP API https://documentation.custhelp.com/euf/assets/devdocs/unversioned/Chat_APIs/Default.htm.
    • Consumer: Tracks the efficiency of the end user Chat SOAP APIs. Data includes metrics like usage count, latency, error count and HTTP Status.
    • Universal Queue: Provides performance metrics for the universal message queue, and used for integrating B2C Service Cloud with third-party routing services.
    • Legacy: This API set is used by the legacy B2C Console, and provides usage data for the .Net Console. Data includes metrics like usage count, latency, error count and HTTP Status.

Note: We highly suggest you use the latest REST APIs for improved performance.

 

How can I enable Service Health Metrics for my site?

To access the Service Health Metrics APIs, a one-time setup is required using Configuration Assistant, which must be performed by site administrators. Subsequently, authentication is handled through JSON Web Token, Bearer Tokens, necessitating the inclusion of a JWT in the Authorization header of GET API requests.

To monitor chat metrics using Service Health Metrics APIs, please open a Service Request with the Oracle B2C Service Technical Support team:

  1. Go to CX Support Site
  2. Submit a Service Request
  3. Please include the following information in the SR
    1. Subject (copy & paste):
      1. Service Health Metrics: Enable Chat Service Metrics
    2. Within the request
      1. Please include the name(s) of your site(s)
    3. Request Example (you can copy & paste this information into the field):
      1. Our organization plans to utilize Service Health Metrics. Please enable Chat Service Metrics for this site: <site name>
      2. Our organization plans to utilize Service Health Metrics. Please enable Chat Service Metrics for these sites: <site name 01>, <site name 02>, <site name 03>, etc

Additional Safeguards:

  1. Submitting this request, changes the routing for chat traffic. There is no downtime expected with this change, however, this update should be made after hours.
  2. Submitting this request, changes the routing for chat traffic from ‘common domain’ based routing to ‘site specific custom domain’ based routing. This update enables the collection of metrics for each chat site.

 

Where can I find more information about Service Health Metrics?

For more information about Service Health Metrics, please visit