Consumerizing the B2B Service Agent Experience

Once upon a time, circa 2004, word spread that Google was beta-testing a new email platform. If you knew the right person, you could get an invitation to set up a beta Gmail account. A few months later, Gmail launched to the public but by invitation only. And a few years later, anyone could sign up for an account.

It took some time, but wow, was it worth it. Gmail was revolutionary—it transformed the whole email experience with its intuitive interface. For years before this, I had made a valiant effort to organize my Yahoo Mail account in some sort of methodical way, but my inbox was still cluttered with about 1,000 unfiled messages. Then Gmail came along and organized it all for me, with a nifty search bar that found and displayed emails related to whatever I was looking for. Who needed folders and filing anymore?

As the years went on, new social media platforms launched with similar consolidated, scrollable feed-type interfaces, setting yet another high bar for customer expectations around usability. I only wish we could say the same for other technologies.

Revolutionize the agent console

Unfortunately, the service agent console hasn't followed the same innovative trajectory as many consumer platforms—until now. Oracle is doing something entirely new to improve the B2B agent experience.

In our recent Quarterly Update on Innovations for Advertising and CX, Oracle Service unveiled a first-of-its-kind B2B Service agent desktop. With its ongoing, searchable, and scrollable thread, Oracle Service has reimagined the B2B agent console. Now agents can navigate through all of a customer’s interactions with ease and collaborate across the organization from their agent desktop to resolve complex B2B customer issues.

Accelerate new agent onboarding

Agent turnover and the ongoing training of new agents are among the biggest challenges facing a service organization. According to Gallup, "the cost of replacing an individual employee can range, conservatively, from one-half to two times the employee's annual salary." So why not make it easier to onboard new agents and help them excel?

Oracle’s new conversational agent experience has the familiar feel of popular social media and consumer applications to kickstart agent onboarding. With a consolidated activity feed of all internal and external interactions, agents can quickly orient themselves to the desktop experience and easily access a customer’s full background and account history in one centralized location. Agents can also collaborate with other departments and lines of business through collaboration tools and append the conversation directly into the activity feed.

Improve agent efficiency

Isn’t there an old joke about how many screens a service agent has to toggle to resolve an issue? If there isn’t, there should be. The punchline: it’s a lot.

With our new agent desktop, everything an agent needs to service an account can be found within a single screen. No more jumping from one screen to another or navigating a cluttered desktop. Plus, proactively generated, dynamic recommendations and next-best action suggestions automatically pop up to increase the speed to resolution and strengthen customer relationships. These can be related knowledge articles or step-by-step instructions to help agents resolve common customer inquiries.

Oracle Service continues to deliver next-generation service experiences for both agents and customers. To learn more about these and other Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience innovations, visit Oracle.com/cx/innovations.