SAP Service Cloud New Features – Fast and Reliable Across Channels

(5 minute read)

In the last two years, SAP has released many new features and improvements in SAP Service Cloud.  The solution was enhanced to deliver much faster resolutions and a superior customer service experience through a range of new capabilities. It provides accurate, consistent and up-to-date information across channels, with quicker response and resolutions, and increases the agent’s productivity through access to real-time business information.

In this blog, we’ll provide information about some of the unique features released in SAP Service Cloud from version 1902 to 2011.

Computer Telephony Integration/ Live Activity

The following are some of the improvements in Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and Live Activity.

SAP is now in partnership with CommBox for omni-channel, seamless and holistic customer communication driven by AI.

Customers can now embed the SAP Contact Center widget within Live Activity to support multiple chat sessions.

A brand-new 360-degree screen has been introduced for agents to see important customer details, even before accepting the call. This helps to reduce the interaction time and increase productivity.

SAP Contact Center’s call recording functionality is now integrated into SAP Service Cloud, you can record and replay phone calls from the live account screen.

The solution has also expanded its CTI integration capabilities with more options to connect to different third-party CTI vendors.

Service Channel Communications

The following are some new features introduced for service channel communications.

Agents can now decide to send emails in the background using the Action Send Later function.

The originating email address that caused incoming ticket creation is now available in the Tickets OWL page.

In the Tickets, agents can link to knowledge-base articles in their email responses to customers.

With the broadcasting feature, users can now communicate any information to all or a set of users.  Example: Providing users with information about system downtime, upgrades, new price list, etc.

Additional functionality includes the ability to configure workflow rules to enable auto-acknowledgement for emails received from customers. In addition, you can use Outbound Email Monitoring to monitor the emails sent out from the system that resulted in error.

With the new SMS Ticketing feature, the solution can identify the contact based on the SMS phone number and create a ticket for its associated account. Incoming Ticket Creation is also enhanced, allowing you to configure blocking of email addresses or domain addresses to avoid creating unnecessary tickets.

To support any customer support inquiries, service teams can now create tickets directly from Microsoft Outlook.

To reduce the ticket processing time and number of clicks, agents can select multiple recipients when sending email responses to tickets.

Interaction Feeder

For better visibility to interactions, a new timeline control has been introduced into the ticket overview screen. This feature is also available in the mobile app. The ability to compose an email via Microsoft Outlook is also available in the timeline control.

Agents now have the ability to preview email attachments before sending, as well as previewing how the email will display when it reaches the end customer.

 

Users can also drag and drop emails and associate them to tickets in Microsoft Outlook.

 

Ticket Management

For better clarity and ease of consumption, SAP ServiceCloud is enhanced to support adding inline images to the ticket description. The inline images can also be displayed in the local PDF summary document.

 

Additional enhancements to ticket management functionality include the following:

• When employees plan to be away from the office, the system allows them to set up active delegates, and new workflow settings can be configured to send notifications to active delegates so that important communications are not missed.
• For better visibility and navigation, the system provides a hierarchical view of tickets and sub-tickets from the account, contact and individual customer.
• For better visibility on the end-to-end process, users can now add an existing sales order as a preceding document to a ticket.
• Agents can create and relate appointments for the tickets they are working on, and the appointments will also be shown in the document flow.
• Agents have the ability to update one or multiple sub-tickets at the same time using actions to add a note, set a status or assign tickets to a service technician or a team.
• If the ticket is created as a follow-up document from the opportunity, the products from the opportunity are also automatically added to the ticket.
• Users can now add images to the Work Description tab in the ticket and the solution can be configured to display these images in the Ticket Summary document.

Time Recording

When a service technician submits time entries for approval, the approvers can see the ticket subject and customer information from the time entry, allowing them to approve or reject the entry.

Additional enhancements to the Time Recording functionality include:

• By enabling employees to create and submit time entries for other users, business scenario flexibility is increased and time management in exception cases is easier. Example: Employee takes extended leave, goes on a holiday, etc.
• If approved time entries are sent from SAP Field Service Management (FSM) to SAP Service Cloud, they don’t need to be approved again. They will be imported automatically to the time report for release to ERP CATS.

Contracts

Enhancements to Contracts functionality include the following:

• Improved external pricing capabilities allow the service team to view and edit price elements directly from the items view in the contracts screen.
• Users can now create tickets from the service contract screen, with most of the relevant information copied from the contract to the newly created tickets.
• SAP ECC price agreements can be replicated and seen within the Contracts module.

Installed Base and Registered Products

Customers can now track sales orders by installed base and registered products, a new sales order tab has been added to these objects to display the list of sales orders

Service teams can now get a detailed view of the availability of van stock, so they will know which van stock has the requested parts for the service. This helps to determine which technician can be assigned to a ticket.

Additional functionality includes the following:

• Van Stock now displays the stock level for batch-managed or serial-number managed parts replicated from the ERP system.
• SAP ERP equipment with involved parties can now be replicated as registered products in SAP Service Cloud.
• Tickets can be created directly from the Registered Products tab of the Account/Individual Customer and Contact detailed screens.

User Interface Improvements

Definitely one of the best improvements in the recent releases are new Kanban board tiles on the home page. It is possible to create Kanban board tiles for most of the objects in the solution.

SAP also introduced a new theme, called Safira. This theme has a modern look and feel and improves efficiency through click reduction.

 

Library Content Management

Customers that maintain a large volume of attachment files can make use of the library content management solution to organize them logically and authorize access.  It provides the functionality to create folders and navigate up to three levels of hierarchy.

The system also provides a drag-and-drop feature that allows users to drag and drop documents from their local device folders to SAP Service Cloud.

Based on the needs of the organization, you can set authorizations at the folder or the document level.

The new library capability also allows you to share links to documents and/or folders with colleagues.

Mobility

Usability of the mobile application has been improved. Users can now take multiple pictures at one time and upload them to the mobile application. They can also select multiple images from the device gallery and upload them into one shot.

All analytical interfaces, such as reports, dashboards and KPI overviews have been optimized for a better viewing experience on a smartphone.

Users can switch between the portrait and landscape view for reports in the mobile application.

You can also configure the solution to send push notifications to mobile users.

Integrations between SAP Service Cloud and SAP Field Service Management (FSM)

To enhance field service execution capabilities and keep the FSM and SAP Service Cloud systems synchronized, SAP has released many out-of-the-box integration scenarios between SAP Service Cloud and the FSM solution. Below are some of the interfaces:

Users now have the ability to link consumed reserved material or returned reserved material from FSM mobile to the planned advance shipment part item in the SAP Service Cloud ticket.

The following enhancements are also available:

• Skills master data from SAP Service Cloud can be replicated to FSM. This includes skills associated to the SAP Service Cloud employee, product, product category, registered product, and service ticket.
• The FSM activity checkout PDF document can be replicated as an attachment in the SAP Service Coud service ticket.
• Contacts from FSM can be replicated to the SAP Service Cloud solution. If the contact is deleted in FSM, the contact and account relationship in SAP Service Cloud will also be deleted.
• Registered product attachments from SAP Service Cloud can be replicated to FSM as an equipment attachment.
• Service calls created in the FSM mobile app can now be replicated as tickets in SAP Service Cloud.
• Activity start and end dates from FSM can be replicated to SAP Service Cloud.

• SAP Service Cloud ticket attachments can be replicated to FSM as service call attachments.
• FSM service call or activity attachments can be replicated to the SAP Service Cloud service ticket.
• Functional locations master data can be replicated from SAP Service Cloud to FSM.
• The FSM service call can be displayed in the SAP Service Cloud ticket document flow.

• FSM smart forms, expenses and effort entries can be replicated to the SAP Service Cloud solution.

If you would like to learn more about the SAP Service Cloud solution, please contact us, or visit our SAP Service Cloud webpage.