CX Assurance Blog

In 2015, British Telecom (BT) announced it would be switching off the UK’s legacy PSTN and ISDN networks by 2025, forcing all customers to shift to IP-based VoIP (Voice Over IP) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telephony services. Rather than a chore, to me this represents an opportunity for companies in the UK to take advantage of new cloud technology and improve their customer experience at the same time.

More and more of Cyara’s customers around the world are moving their contact centers to the cloud. This is happening for many reasons, including improved flexibility and reliability, increased speed, and reduced costs. In fact, research shows that 81% of users of hosted cloud solutions say cloud has improved flexibility, while 77% say it contributes to future-proofing their technology infrastructure.

To me, cloud technology represents a unique opportunity for the industry to move beyond interactions and customer journeys to a new level of personalization based on customer lifetime value. This is because the underlying engine that gathers data and analytics about your customers is a single system rather than disparate systems that aren’t able to communicate with each other. 

While the benefits and opportunities are compelling, there is a lot of complexity and risk involved, which can hold organizations back. Risks include security concerns, cost over-runs, systems integration, the management of legacy infrastructure, and leadership inertia. 

Earlier this month, I co-hosted a webinar with Steve Nuttall, Head of CX Research at Fifth Quadrant, that focussed on the potential risks of migration and how to overcome them. We covered five key ways to assure a successful contact center cloud migration.

In this post, I’ll outline my highlights from the webinar, and how you can be sure your customers aren’t impacted when you’re embarking on a cloud migration.

When it comes to businesses, cloud-based services have aided the expansion of digital disruption as more and more processes move online. The three standard models associated with cloud computing are: Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and Platform as a Service.

I recently caught up with Scott Anderson, SVP, Senior Team Lead, at Bank of America, and asked him how his team makes test automation so successful. Scott is an expert in IVR quality assurance and testing and has been at the forefront of customer experience assurance.

In my role at Cyara, I regularly have discussions with our customers about forecasting, funding, and resource allocation in their organizations. In my most recent interactions with two customers, I came to realize that organizations may be overlooking a great opportunity to make their business more efficient. 

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!