Configure Your Oracle Utilities System

Before you can use CX for Utilities applications, you must ensure that the related features are set up appropriately in your Oracle Utilities system. The following information identifies each item that needs to be set up, provides implementation details, and refers you to related documentation that can assist you.

All of the documentation listed in this topic (unless otherwise noted) can be found in these libraries in the Oracle Help Center, along with additional information about using and configuring your Oracle Utilities system:

Task Details Documentation

Configure Zones in the Customer 360 and Dashboard Portals

Only the zones that are configured to display for the user in the Customer 360 portal are available from the Agent Home Page. Therefore, if you want CX for Utilities Agent Service users to view a particular zone, you must configure it to display in the Customer 360 portal in your Oracle Utilities system.

For each zone that you want to display in Customer 360:

  • Confirm the Display option is selected.

  • Update the sequence in the portal preferences.

You can also update user preferences to define favorite links and scripts to display in the side panel dashboard.

See these topics:

  • Configuring Zones in the Business User Guide

  • Portal Preferences in the Administration Guide

Configure Insights

Contextual Insights provide a powerful way to surface focused intelligence and alerts to users in the context of their customers. Customer insights are configured in your Oracle Utilities system, and can be displayed as noted below.

See Configuring Insights in your Customer Information System

Configure Person Data Options

You can store customer data that is important for your business process, such as, but not limited to:

  • Name types

  • Contact routing

  • Contact types

  • Contact status

  • Other required or optional characteristics

You must configure the administration data so that the appropriate types of customer information can be stored with person and business records within your Oracle Utilities system.

See these topics in the Administration Guide:

  • Setting Up Person Options

  • Defining Characteristic Types

Configure Notification Preferences

You can configure notification types for sending messages out of your Oracle Utilities system and maintaining customers’ communication preferences for receiving these messages.

Once these communications are configured, you can set notifications preferences for each of the customer’s billing accounts.

See Setting Up Notification Preference Options in the Administration Guide

Configure To Do Types

Customer service agents need access to service requests and to do entries from their Work Queue. To get the to do entries to display, you must complete the following tasks so that agents have access to the appropriate to do entries:

  • Configure to do types

  • Configure to do roles

Once this configuration is complete, agents can view and manage accessible to do entries from the Work Queue or from within your Oracle Utilities system.

See Defining To Do Types in the Business User Guide

Configure Start, Stop, and Transfer Processes

Processes to start, stop, or transfer service can be launched after creating or identifying a customer record in the Customer List.

To enable these processes, you must configure customer service request types that are used to orchestrate customer service processes related to service agreements and contracts at customer service locations.

See Setting Up Customer Service Request Types in the Administration Guide

Inbound Web Services (APIs)

The following information is integrated into CX for Utilities using inbound web services:

  • Person synchronization

  • Person context

  • Customer activity history

  • Work queue items

Inbound web services in the web service category of Customer Experience should be set to active for the message options so that they can be used in CX for Utilities. This web service category includes values of C1-CX, D1-CX, and X1-CX.

See Inbound REST Web Services in the Administration Guide

Schema Constants

Some optional Fusion features rely on schema constants to reference specific administrative entities configured by the customer.

Schema constants are defined on a Feature Configuration record of type Schema Constants.

  • If your implementation assigns a name to billing accounts using an account characteristic, reference the corresponding characteristic type as the Account Name Characteristic Type schema constant.

  • If your implementation captures the geocode of a premise using a geographic type, reference the code of this geographic type record as the Lat/Long Geographic Type schema constant.

See Defining Feature Configurations in the Framework Administrative User Guide

Extendable Lookups

This task should have been completed during initial setup.

Extendable lookups are used to control some items within CX for Utilities, such as:

  • Available locations for knowledge icons

  • The ongoing person data integration

Use the extendable lookup with a business object of F1-KnowledgeManagement to identify available locations to attach articles.

The person synchronization is controlled by an F1-DataSyncControl extendable lookup business object of C1-CX4U-PERSON. The status of this lookup record must be active to enable the synchronization and the external system and message sender must be configured.

See Defining Extendable Lookups in the Administration Guide

Data Synchronization

This task should have been completed during initial setup.

Person data synchronization is used to trigger updates to CX for Utilities and other Oracle systems when person record changes are made. To set up the synchronization, be aware that:

  • The maintenance object of PERSON is delivered with a generic audit algorithm of F1ONGDATASYN for ongoing data synchronization plugged in so that a generic outbound sync request can be processed by the F1-SYNRQ sync request monitor batch process.

  • This batch process should be scheduled to run as frequently as ongoing updates need to be synchronized to CX for Utilities and other systems.

  • This is a generic batch process that can be used for many objects but has parameters that can be used to control which sync request BOs to process, such as F1-GenericDataSync.

See:

Populating Old Account ID

If your utility converts from one CIS to an Oracle Utilities CIS, you can store account ID numbers from your legacy system in the ‘Old Account Id’ field (table field name OLD_ACCT_ID). This field is used in the Utilities CIS system to ensure that payments made after a conversion are attributed to the correct accounts.

In CX for Utilities Agent Service, the Prior Billing Account ID search parameter in the Person and Premise Search will return valid results only if this field is populated in your CIS.

See:

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