Contact us What’s New in SAP Service Cloud 2008
A regular upgrade to the newest version 2008 of SAP Cloud for Customer, which is now part of SAP Customer experience solutions (formerly C/4HANA) was launched this weekend. Of course only on the test tenants for now, deployment into production will take place on August 15-16. So let’s take a look at the most interesting news of this release.
Before we get to them, let us remind you once again that the end of Internet Explorer support is coming in November this year. The alternative for it is every new browser. You can even click on their official list from the notification that you will get, if you are still using it, so you do not have to worry, that this information will not reach your employees.
News in LIVE ACTIVITY
Implemented based on suggestion from customer influence.
SMS Chat – a live chat with the customer via SMS, provided either by standard integration with SAP Contact Center 365 or with 3rd party providers via live activity events. The technical support will be able to respond to requests from any communication channel.
Blocking of incoming emails
Administrators will be able to block email addresses or their domains to prevent the creation of unnecessary tickets – this reduces the amount of redundant data and the effort required to manage the global email requests, which reduces the complexity for service teams or administrators doing the process management.
Ability to copy and assign an email interaction to an existing ticket – ensuring a link between all ticket responses to avoid unnecessary work redundancy.
Selecting multiple recipients – agents can select multiple recipients when sending email responses – fewer clicks, logic can be defined to determine the default response and signature when a customer agent responds to a ticket coming from an Email / SMS / portal. 
Reworked query options for my team emails
The technical support staff will be able to see emails from all teams to which they are assigned. So they will see not only unassigned emails displayed based on their primary team (as till now), but also – unassigned emails for all teams to which they are assigned.
Reports for templates across other channels
This enhancement will provide a better overview of the use of templates, so the ones used only occasionally can be quickly deleted or updated.
Keeping the interaction history even after deleting an email
So far, interaction history has been lost with the deletion of the first email. Now, this history will be preserved even after deleting the first email interaction. For a technician, this means more flexibility and less room for mistakes when working with tickets.
News in SERVICE CHANNELS EMAIL TEMPLATES
Ability to copy the template directly from the list of work objects. Simplifying work and maintaining coherence across objects. Notes – Non-administrative users cannot copy branding templates. When a user copies a branding template, the branding label is turned off and set to false.
UTM for document templates
Enabling transports also for document templates, not just the text templates. There is no need for manual intervention when traversing document templates across the cloud, which ensures the availability of these templates in production and implementation tenants.
News in SERVICE MANAGEMENT
The rule for restricting access to tickets based on the organization
Making tickets available to all employees within the organization. Until now, this was only possible based on the organizational unit. The benefit of this option lies in the possibility to share work among the technicians more easily.
Validation on tickets in status Closed
An error message pops up when you try to add more items to the ticket with a closed status, helping to prevent incorrect invoicing.
News in SERVICE INTELLIGENCE
If the customer provides the serial number of the product in his request, when creating the ticket, the system will be able to fill in this product automatically. The customer support employee will immediately see, for instance, when the warranty on the given registered product ends. We also assume that the reliability and number of cases of correct assignment of the product by artificial intelligence will also increase. For example, we’re curious about a scenario where a customer writes their request in a non-standard supported language but provides a Serial ID. Especially in such cases will this functionality come in handy.
Analytics
New indicators will be added – Duration and Average duration for Ticket and Ticket History data sources.
Thanks to them, we can monitor weak points or in what status the tickets remain most of the time and adequately respond.
QoL(Quality of Life) improvements
Details simplifying the work.
Live Activity
Identification of several callers by BADI enriching – agent will be informed about the existence of several customer records with a given number, instead of selecting one randomly.
News in SERVICE CHANNELS
Mobile application timeline – users will be able to view events in a clear chronological order. 
Automatic replies and email signatures
It will be possible to set BADI for predefining responses and signatures, adjustable according to the source of the incoming communication to relieve redundant activities.
Creating tickets from Outlook
Tickets can be created directly from the Outlook Add-in.
Adding control on ticket actions
The user can confirm the number of parts delivered in advance only up to the available amount, which is calculated by subtracting the already approved amount for the given item. This functionality will be activated automatically after the release deployment without the need for additional setup.
News in SERVICE CATEGORY
Only minor changes were made here, such as improvement in error messages when uploading files, where they will now appear on the screen immediately after uploading the file. Like this the user can immediately correct errors in the uploaded CSV.
Help dialogue box enhancements
– extended with new fields – Description, Catalog ID and Version,
– Note: These fields will be hidden by default – the user will need to activate them through personalization to display them.
When setting up predictive scenarios, a link to the “Help” page will be available.
Changes were also made in:
- Time recording
- Service contracts
- Installed base management
- Maintenance plans
- Warranties – e.g. possibility to use an external source for its determination – ERP
- Registered products – replication of registered products with inactive involved parties
- Van stock
Do you want to know what else has the 2008 release brought not only to the Cloud for Customer but also to the Marketing Cloud? You can read about it here:
SAP C4C Platform and integration
If you are interested in the SAP Sales Cloud news and would like to know, even more, contact us or subscribe. Anodius provides world-class certified services and consulting in all areas of SAP CX.
Tomáš Potzy, CX Consultant
