Oracle aims to automate the complete customer service lifecycle

Oracle this week unveiled new AI-powered capabilities for Oracle Fusion Cloud Service and Oracle Fusion Cloud Field Service. The ambitious aim is to-some-marketing-agencies-an-opportunity-for-others">to automate the entire customer service lifecycle. These enhancements come at no additional charge, said Jeff Wartgow, VP of product management, CX Service at Oracle: “Oracle does not believe in charging for AI advancements within applications. If you buy a license to Oracle Service, this is included in the license. We want service costs to go down for our customers, not up.”

At a press briefing, Wartgow made it clear that Oracle is not just tweaking capabilities within its service and field service clouds, but is on a journey to radically transform them. The future of service, according to Wartgow, is “perpetual automation” which he sees arriving in four phases:

Improving self-service with conversational AI.
Improving human service productivity with AI assistance.
Improving execution by automating service and field service processes.
Transforming service with automated execution plans.

It would probably be fair to say that 1. above is increasingly common and 2. has seen some adoption. The final phase comes close to putting service almost entirely in the virtual hands of AI, and that might not be just around the corner.

“We are striving for complete, total, perpetual service automation,” said Wartgow. “We are looking at creating processes that automate, quite literally, all your customer service. Let the robots take care of it all.” One motivation is the pressure on the human service teams. Contact centers are understaffed, he said, agents are feeling “acute stress” — and it’s widely recognized that human agents often churn before they’ve been on the job long enough to perform optimally.

“Instead, you have all these automated service tools available, like the ones coming out from Oracle, that are 96% cheaper, that you can deploy anywhere, that don’t eat and don’t sleep and speak all the different languages. There’s a better solution right in front of you,” said Wartgow.

Specific product announcements. This week’s announcements included:

Automated Service Agent. This AI agent will help service reps understand customer issues and cut resolutuon time. The agent is expected to have command of context, customer history and internal information relevant to the issues, eliminating the need for the human agent to research the issue from the ground up. [Note: Terminology in this space is evolving; other vendors would call this a copilot].
Call and chat summarization. This new summarization capability will use genAI to transcribe and summarize customer interactions.
Field service knowledge search augmentation. This is aimed at improving the efficiency of field service agents, using genAI to produce succinct, actionable plans based on its automated review using knowledge-based articles and other resources.

While the new capabilities are exciting, we wondered if some aspects were a little utopian. GenAI, after all, does make mistakes. What if it makes a recommendation to a field service agent, based on its scanning of countless knowledge base documents, to undertake an action that is not suitable for the task — or even dangerous?

“You’re still going to need a trained field service agent to do a lot of this stuff,” Wartgow responded. “It’s going to need the judgment of the field service tech. ‘It tells me to drain the fluid before I turn off the engine? I am not going to do that.’ But they can make a note and genAI will update that, correct it. The field service techs will constantly retrain the model.”

The AI, in other words, will capture the knowledge of experienced agents and be able to pass it on to newer employees.

Why we care. The customer experience space is moving and mutating at breakneck speed right now. Just a few years ago, some of the big vendors stopped talking about their marketing clouds and started referring to their CX clouds — because, after all, they were now offering customer service as part of the suite. Was that much more than just relabeling? And were vendors content with the formula sales + marketing + service = CX? Possibly so.

Thanks to rapid developments in the generative AI space, service is emerging as an area critical to a customer’s experience of a brand. This is not to reduce CX to customer service but to see customer service rising, as it were, in the ranks. Announcements this week, including this Oracle news, show the possibility of AI completely transforming the customer’s most direct interactions with the brand.