Oracle Service Cloud... two years of mixed feelings

last year we rolled out a 2.0 version of a customer facing application and migrated our customers to it. The standalone cobrowse product from Oracle Service Cloud made this process significantly smoother

We hear from customers regularly that they appreciate having the ability to chat while they're inside our app.

In using the Feedback component during chat sessions, we're able to quantify customer sentiment and find where we can streamline processes and departmental handoffs.

We've had to spend a huge chunk of time and money on maintaining Oracle Service Cloud, not worth it compared to the value we get out of it as an organization. I spend close to 70% of my time handling it (surprise data purges, overzealous spam filtering, performance issues and crashes, Oracle releasing updates that break things like cobrowse within chat and click-once installation, even just grappling with Oracle Support can be a full time job) and since we only use chat and cobrowse, it's hardly worth it.

Standalone co-browse - it's consistently intuitive for end user, agent, and administrator

Basic reports - if you have some BI/report writing experience, you can easily figure this out (however the tool is OTBI so it's very limited) and it comes with a lot of canned reports that are easy to copy and customize

Editing workspaces (the UI where your agent will interact with a ticket, a chat, the knowledge base, etc) is so clunky.

The rules engine in the .NET desktop version is unforgiving . First, from a UI perspective it's just scary. I've seen the demo of the Rules 2.0 on the browser UI and it looks a lot better, but frankly, the bar was pretty low! Second, it has some squirrelly way of writing escalation rules that just makes no sense - we hired an Oracle Consulting expert to write those rules and she got stumped too. Also it has some missing features like ability to export... we and a lot of customers have pretty extensive rulebases, it's hard to view everything on the screen the way we need, so an export would be nice.

Setting up profiles and navigation sets (just to control user permissions and views) is a headache.

Managing spam and other filtering of emails (if you connect your email channel to Service Cloud) is awful - you have three or four places you have to check for filtered emails including a third party vendor portal. And there's not a lot of detail, and none of the various portals has an intuitive user experience. I had to ask Support several times how to do something simple like throttle down my spam filter.

Submitting tickets to Oracle Support - their own portal is slow, complex to navigate, and the dropdown options that I HAVE to fill in make no sense to me. Takes me at least 20 minutes just to fill in their form before I can write up my actual issue. And then I always have to specify that i did in fact read the article in the knowledge base or they will just send me a link to their crappy documentation.

Lots of little nooks and crannies, such as if you want to add a chat queue, you'd have to add the queue to a customizable list, then you'd have to add it to each profile (a group of users) so they can access it, and then you'd have to make sure it was written into your rulebase. It's easy to get lost.

Administering the product environments (upgrades, interfaces, mailboxes, utilities, etc)- some of this is done from the console, some is done from a portal called Configuration Assistant, some is done from their Support Portal, and I think there are a couple other portals I'm forgetting. None of them have single sign on, and heaven help you if you need to be on a PCI or HIPAA pod, because then there's even more complexity to logging into their various portals. So if I need to do something simple like check when the Techmail utility was last run, I go to portal A. Then if I see it's not running I have to go to Portal B to find out if it's enabled.