CX Assurance Blog

I recently met with a CIO of a major enterprise in the USA. One of the biggest victories for his team would be to stop taking escalation calls and sending apology emails every other Saturday when a production release took place and yet another bug made it past detection, and into production. More important than his personal frustration and that of the colleagues that had to escalate to him: the impact on end customers. They are the ones that suffer the most when defects make it into production. 

When we started to tell customers about our IVR discovery product, Crawler, a few years ago, I got excited. My excitement wasn’t so much about the IVR discovery capability our development team had put together—it essentially dials into your IVR, reverse engineers it to figure out what it does, and then documents it. Rather, my excitement was for the visual editor we had created that allowed us to see IVRs and call flows for the first time. We were finally able to not only talk about testing, but also about design. This fit in well with our messaging about the benefits of ‘shifting left’—the fact that the earlier you find a defect in the product’s lifecycle, the cheaper it is to fix.

We’re often discussing customer engagement here on the Cyara blog. I recently sat down with the person who is Cyara’s front-line guy for engagement with our customers. Cyara just appointed George Skaryak as EVP of worldwide sales, a role in which he will be interacting with current and future customers across three continents. Right before he hopped on his next flight, I caught up with him to learn more about how he sees the CX market and Cyara’s role within it.

To kick off the holiday season, Cyara is spreading some CX cheer, along with warm season’s greetings. And in the spirit of sharing, we’ve rounded up insights and perspective from both brands and customer experience (CX) experts. As we pulled together this roundup, we realized that, while the holidays come but once a year, delivering great CX is a year-round endeavor! 

I arrived at the Cyara Xchange Roadshow in Manchester with excitement. Having been briefed on the brand’s focus and expertise, I was looking forward to hearing more. It seemed to perfectly dovetail with what I’ve have been seeing in contact centres: a place where the rubber hits the road for many CX leaders.

Following the success of our inaugural Xchange 2018 conference in San Francisco in March this year, we decided to take the show on the road. Our first stop was Melbourne, Australia—Cyara’s birthplace and home to many of our founding customers. After a stop in Dallas, Texas, we moved on to Manchester in the United Kingdom. The final stop will be in Hartford, Connecticut on November 14!

I was able to attend DOES 2018, the largest DevOps-focused conference in the world, in Las Vegas last month. There were many great presentations and I came away with a lot of new insights. In this post I’d like to share some of those key insights.

My number one takeaway is that the main sticking point for DevOps adoption is not legacy technology, it's legacy thinking. Organizations need to be breaking away from the old mental models. Of course, this is hard to achieve because that legacy thinking—such as Waterfall or command and control—is the only thing anybody who's been in the workforce for a while has lived. Even if they believe in the new ways of doing things, when there's a period of pressure and stress, their muscle memory goes back to legacy thinking. This was really my biggest takeaway.

Guess what? Customer experience is important. Lots of people will even tell you that we are in the customer experience economy these days. More and more companies find themselves now competing primarily on the experiences they deliver to their customers rather than their brand or their product or even price. So, if that’s the case, then why do so many IVR teams get treated like order takers rather than a strategic partner in the customer experience economy?