Oracle Customer Care Concepts and Procedures Release 11i April 2000 Part No. A83657-01 Understanding Customer Care This topic group provides an overview of the application and its components, explanation of key concepts, features, and functions, as well as the application s relationships to other Oracle or third party programs. Overview of Customer Care Customer care is the key differentiator for companies in highly competitive industries. As products become commodities, companies attract and retain customers on the basis of customer care management. Given that it is much costlier to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, companies are increasingly focusing on making customer interactions efficient and effective, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. Achieving customer satisfaction requires that companies more clearly understand the needs of their customers, and then use this knowledge to provide service that exceeds customer expectations. Customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention are serious concerns for all businesses and are the driving force behind the increasing trend toward improved customer care. The customer should perceive interaction with different departments of a company as seamless. To achieve this, companies are moving away from the department model and creating a single customer-facing contact center that Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright 2000, Oracle Corporation All Rights Reserved.
the customer and company to interact and exchange information. A primary focus of this "customer-centric" model is to resolve a problem during the first interaction with the customer. This is true for a business to business as well as a business to consumer environment. Oracle s customer care application provides a means for better understanding of customers and the ability to interact while having complete information readily available. Sales information, order management, support, service, billing, repair history, tasks, and contract management are all accessible through Oracle Customer Care. The Customer Care Agent Typically, a customer care agent accepts direct calls from customers on multiple issues. A customer care agent relies on intuitive systems and ready access to customer information to perform the job effectively. The primary focus of the customer care agent is on understanding the customer and the customer s issue. The customer care agent s main goal is to resolve an issue on the first call, thereby avoiding escalations and/or call transfers. Often, the agent must resolve the issue in an allotted amount of time. In addition, a customer care agent s responsibilities may include tasks such as: Viewing customer summary information Entering service requests Viewing product or transaction information to answer inquiries on products, transaction status, etc. Entering orders or RMAs (return material authorizations) Updating customer data including customer accounts, addresses, contact points, and relationships Searching a knowledge base for known resolutions to product or service problems Dispatching service agents using automated scheduling functionality 2
Registering customers in events Renewing or terminating contracts Viewing contract entitlements Discussing payment terms and/or accepting payments Updating a customer s installed base Entering a new customer Creating leads Enabling/disabling relationship plans for a customer Entering customer or interaction-related notes Customer Management Customer management involves tracking important customer data, and making it easily accessible. Organizations often need to create customer interfaces that not only keep track of important customer data and information, but also increase the quality of those interactions. Customer care agents must be able to immediately respond to the many diverse needs of a customer by accessing data and incorporating processes that span functional areas. The Oracle Customer Care application can be used to access all of the following information from one window, called the Contact Center: Customer organization, contact and address information Interaction history Customer criticality Customer profile Customer notes Service request Order information and tasks Customer dashboard Customer addresses Customer relationships 3
Customer contact points Interaction Management There are several ways in which a customer can initiate an interaction with a company. Using Oracle Customer Care, the agent can accept customer interaction from multiple channels through the Universal Work Queue (UWQ). The customer care application is fully integrated with Oracle Multichannel Manager to facilitate telephone interactions. Oracle Multichannel Manager routes the call to the appropriate agent based on skills and availability. Through the UWQ screen the agent selects a work item, such as inbound telephone, email task, or service request. If it is an inbound call, the UWQ screen is displayed on the agent s computer, populated with the appropriate customer and call information. The agent can perform a host of different functions from a single screen, such as log a service request, assign a task, place an order, and update customer information. The intuitive user interface of the Contact Center is designed to enable an agent to handle the customer interaction as effortlessly as possible in the minimum amount of time necessary to achieve the desired result. Dashboard The Oracle Customer Care Dashboard incorporates data displaying a history of previous transactions and other customer-related knowledge recorded by the enterprise. Integration with Oracle Customer Intelligence presents a graphical assessment of the customer s satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. Agents as well as managers can use the Dashboard to see the key indicators about a specific customer, such as open service requests, escalated requests, opportunity size, booked orders, etc. Critical Customer Management Oracle Customer Care allows companies to define the rules governing the criticality of their customer base. The agent can initiate proper action to prevent a customer from reaching a critical level by either resolving the open 4
issues for the customer or escalating the resolution process. The agent has the ability to manually override the criticality threshold for the customer. For example, there are situations when the profile engine may not determine a customer as being critical based on the rules setup, but the customer still needs to be flagged as critical in order to show up as such in all the relevant Oracle Customer Care screens. The agent can override the system-determined criticality in order to deal with temporary or exceptional situations, giving proper justification. Relationship Plans The Relationship Plans module is designed to enable companies to automate their customer service practices and to provide proactive and consistent care for all their customers. It enables the organization to create and execute different plans for different customers. The Relationship Plans module provides flexible plan definitions that enable business needs to be defined. Examples of relationship plans include: Account plans Premium customer plans Critical customer management plans Nonprofitable customer plans Customer instructions Reference programs Service level plans Customer retention plans Product plans Preventive maintenance plans Product recall plans Product Integration Oracle Customer Care is fully integrated with Oracle Support, Oracle Customer Intelligence, and Oracle 1 to 1 Fulfillment, as well as Oracle Scripting, Oracle Contracts, 5
Oracle Order Capture, Oracle Depot Repair, and Oracle Sales. Using the Contact Center This topic group provides process-oriented, task-based procedures for using the application to perform essential business tasks. The Contact Center is the interface that a customer care agent uses while interacting with a customer. Most customer care actions can be performed through the Contact Center. It is often the first window referred to in the application, and most customer care actions can be performed through the Contact Center interface, for both the business to business customer as well as the business to consumer customer. The Contact Center provides instant access to important customer information, including: Master data Customer contact and addresses Customer profile information including orders and service requests Interaction history Installed base Notes Service requests and orders can also be entered, tracked, and escalated from the Contact Center. Tasks can also be created, assigned, or viewed from the Contact Center. The following tabs are accessible from the Contact Center: Dashboard Organization Contact Interaction Tasks Service Request Addresses 6
Relationships Notes Starting the Contact Center Use this procedure to access the Contact Center window. Steps 1.Log on to Oracle Applications. 2.Choose Customer Care from the Responsibility menu and click OK. The Customer Care Navigator window appears. 3.Double-click Customer Management (or other desired task) from the list of selections. 4.Highlight the desired choice from the expanded list of selections, and double-click to open the Contact Center window. Accessing Caller Information for an Existing Customer Use this procedure to access caller information for an existing customer. Steps 1.Choose Person, Organization, or Group from the drop-down list in the Caller Type field. Organization is the default entry if no choice is made. 2.Enter the name of the organization, or choose the name from the List of Values (LOV). The application will also search on other caller information, such as the caller s name, telephone, or account number. 3.Select the contact from the LOV for first name, last name, or middle name. This will default the Relation, Party number, Address and Phone fields. The relevant information about the customer is displayed in the header level fields. 7
4.Click More to link another address or telephone number to the customer specified in the Contact Center window. 5.Click the appropriate tab to continue accessing or entering information during the customer interaction. The customer name is validated against the list of customers in the customer master, and the system returns relevant the information. Entering Caller Information for a New Customer Use this procedure to enter caller information for a new customer. Steps 1.Choose person, organization, or group from the drop-down list in the Caller Type field. Organization is the default. 2.Click New. The Caller Information window appears. 3.Enter the relevant caller information in the caller information window, and click OK. 4.The caller information fields in the Contact Center are populated. The system automatically assigns an account number and party number. Also, the customer master is updated with the relevant information. Viewing the Customer Profile Customer Profile information is displayed in the upper right hand corner of the Contact Center window. It summarizes customer information and may also contain a customer analysis. It also indicates whether or not a customer is critical. The profile entries appearing in the customer profile are typically set up by a system administrator, and contain a set of predefined checks. These checks are configurable, as are the actual range values and value definitions. 8
Viewing Installed Base Information Viewing the Dashboard Using the Organization Tab Click the Installed Base button in the caller information block of the Contact Center window to view customer installed base information. The installed base window shows by defaulting the customer information from the Contact Center. Installed Base information can also be queried from the Quick Menu. The Dashboard tab incorporates data showing customer status, transactions, and other customer-related knowledge. It is basically an extended version of the customer profile. It also enables categorization of the profile checks, for example, all orders-related profile checks can be grouped together under the orders category. You can select one of the dashboard indicators and drill down to details by clicking the View Details button. For example, to view a list of all the open tasks, select the Open Tasks indicator and click View Details. A window listing the open tasks appears, with a summary of information about each task. Click on any given record to view further information about a specific task. Click Refresh to refresh the indicator values. Click Customer Intelligence to display loyalty, satisfaction, and profitability graphs for the customer. Click the Organization tab to display the data for the organization hierarchy of the customer. You can update the information in the Organization tab and save it to the customer master. Click View Chart to view the customer s organizational chart. Click OK to close the chart and return to the Organization tab. 9
Using the Contact Tab The Contact tab displays all the information about the contact shown in the caller region of the Contact Center window. This includes information Using the Interaction History Tab The Interactions tab displays the current interaction and its related activities in an H-grid format. It also displays a history of previous interactions up to a maximum number as specified by means of a profile option. Use this procedure to view interactions from the Contact Center Window. Steps 1.Click the Interactions History tab to display the current interaction and its related activities. 2.Optionally, click on a listed interaction to drill down to a previous interaction. 3.Optionally, to drill down to any document associated with an interaction, double click the document number in the Doc # column. Searching for a Specific Interaction Use this procedure to search for a specific interaction. Steps 1.Click All Interactions in the Interactions tab. The Customer Interaction History window appears. 2.Enter appropriate search criteria, such as a range of dates, and click Search. The interaction fitting the search criteria is displayed. Using the Address Tab Click the Address tab in the Contact Center window to view various addresses associated with the customer, including the Ship To and Bill To information. This information comes from the Customer Master. This is a read only tab and will not allow any updates to be made 10
to the fields. Use the pull-down list at the head of the tab to select addresses for either the organization, person (or contact), group, or relationship. Each of these addresses will be queried based on the values of the customer in the top region. Using the Service Request Tab Click the Service Request tab to create a quick service request. The owner, type, severity, urgency, status, and date fields are defaulted from the customer profile information. Use this procedure to create a quick service request. Steps 1.From the Contact Center screen, click the service request tab. The owner, type, severity, urgency, status, and date fields are mandatory and are defaulted from the customer profile information. 2.Enter a description of the service request in the summary field; this field is mandatory. 3.Optionally, enter any other desired information, such as a note. 4.Click Submit. The information entered is saved to the Oracle Service Request table. For more complex service requests, use the Service Request form, which can be accessed by clicking the Service Request button. Using the Notes Tab Using the Quick Menu Click the Notes tab to create a note about a customer interaction. The Quick Menu can be invoked from the QM icon on the menu bar of the Contact Center. It is a configurable menu and can be user defined. The Quick Menu lists the following modules: 11
UWQ (optional) Tele Contact Center (optional) Contact Center Customer Management Critical Customer Interaction History Customer Information Orders, Return Scripts 1 to 1 Fulfillment Relationship Plans Summary Plan Definition Plan Inquiry Installed Base Maintain Products Define Products Systems Transfer Products Support Service Request Escalations Knowledge Base Resource Manager Maintain Employees Maintain Partners Maintain Vendors CRM Resource Setup Task Management 12
Maintain Tasks View Tasks Create Tasks Task Templates Setup Setup Customer Profile and Dashboard Contact Center Others See Setting Up Quick Menu for more information. Using the Tasks Tab To create a new task, click the Tasks Tab on the Contact Center screen. Enter the owner, task name, priority, and a brief description of the problem and the estimated start and end dates. The assigned by field should display the name of the agent who is creating the task. Implementing Customer Care This topic group provides general descriptions of the setup and configuration tasks required to implement the application successfully. Setting Up Customer Profile The customer profile module provides 15 seeded profile checks. It also allows customers to define their own profile checks, and combine multiple checks with complex criteria. It is also possible to define critical customer criteria by using customer profile checks. The customer profile engine is the part of the customer profile module that runs periodically to checks and store changes. 13
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