Configuring Customer Interaction

SAP Service Cloud's Live Activity Center is where Agents interact with customers through real-time communication channels such as phone and live chat. The agents use Click to Call to make outbound calls directly from a contact in the Live Activity Center.

For Live Activity Center to be used to receive and make phone calls, SAP Service Cloud requires a Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) desktop client to connect to the organization's phone system. Sinch Contact Center, formerly SAP Contact Center, can be this CTI desktop client, or any equivalent third party CTI provider.

As SAP Service Cloud does not have a native CTI, a CTI client adapter is also needed and is included with it. The adapter is used to integrate with the Live Activity Center the many CTI functions including accepting, rejecting, ending, and transferring calls. The CTI client adapter must be installed on every device that will be using Live Activity Center.

CTI Phone Communication Process

The CTI Desktop Client sends the phone event, such as a call, to the Live Activity Center through the CTI Client adapter. The Live Activity Center looks up the customer or ticket using the data received and allows the creation of a new customer or ticket. In addition to voice, attached data can be captured through interactive voice response, or IVR, and associated with the call as well.

If we assume that the CTI client is already set up with the organization's phone system, then the steps to configure CTI are as follows:

1. Enable CTI for the SAP Service Cloud system
2. Give service agents visibility to the Live Activity Center
3. Add the SAP CTI Adaptor

SAP Service Cloud can receive emails and automatically create tickets based on the sender.

To configure the system for email and to create tickets from email, you need to enable the communication channel for email, then create the addresses you want to receive the email.

Enabling the communication channel for email involves accessing the SAP Service Cloud implementation project to select the scoping option Service Request Management, then selecting these business configuration questions:

1. Service requests can be created for incoming emails
2. Email channels are supported for both individual (B2C) and corporate (B2B) accounts

Once the communication channel is configured, the next step is to define the list of addresses to receive the customer emails. This is done in the Administrator Work Center under Services and Social.

To configure which email address is used when responding to a customer, enter the appropriate email address in the Addresses section for each organizational (org) unit that has been defined as having a customer service function. Each org unit represents a service team or queue.

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that service agents can leverage as they need in processing the tickets they receive from customers. For example, agents can readily provide customers relevant documents or articles relating to the subject of their tickets. While SAP Service Cloud doesn't have a built-in knowledge base, it does allow you to easily integrate with third party knowledge bases, as well as with the knowledge base feature of SAP Jam.

An example third party knowledge base provider is MindTouch. MindTouch (and other providers) has OpenSearch standards, so the integration of this knowledge base with SAP Service Cloud is easily configured as a mashup. The agent would access the knowledge base from Service Cloud via the Solution Finder tab on the ticket.

Configuring the mashup to integrate SAP Service Cloud with a third party knowledge base with OpenSearch standards comprises three steps.

The first step is to enable knowledge base integration in scoping. To do this, make sure these questions under Service > Customer Care are selected as in scope:

1. The Knowledge Base question "You can capture and share your knowledge in a central repository."
2. The Service Request Management question "Do you want to enable the knowledge base integration feature of the agent workspace?"

The next step is to configure a web service for SAP Service Cloud to access content from the knowledge base. To do this you need to provide SAP Service Cloud the URL for the knowledge base and any other parameters such as user name and logon password that the knowledge base vendor specifies.

The last step is to then configure a data mashup. You do this by specifying the mapping between, on the one hand, the search parameters used by the SAP Service Cloud system and, on the other, the web service input parameters of the knowledge base.