CX Assurance Blog

Well, for me 2020 has started with a bang! Since the new year, I’ve joined the Cyara team as Vice President of Engineering in Melbourne, and it’s been incredibly inspiring to get on board at this time in the company. I am humbled by the engineering talent and encouraged at how closely Engineering and Product Management work together to deliver our customer-centric solutions. One of the traits that makes this team so special is their relentless effort and interest in adopting new ways to work together even better so that we can more effectively scale. I wanted to share a bit about our efforts toward this goal and what that looks like from behind the curtain.

2019 was a busy year for Cyara. We delivered a wide range of innovations to our CX Assurance Platform driven by customer needs and market trends. There were four key customer- and market-driven themes that drove my top 10 picks for the enhancements we delivered in 2019. 

Change and disruption are often feared…and for good reason. In fact, 88% of the companies that were on the Fortune 500 in 1955 no longer exist. That is a staggering statistic. Every industry, from healthcare to banking to retail to travel, has been transformed by technology. At last month’s Cyara Xchange event, we explored what disruption meant to customer experience and how to lead through it.

Among all the incredible content at Cyara Xchange, perhaps my favorite was Diego Lo Giudice’s keynote on continuous testing. Diego is Vice President and Principal Analyst from Forrester, and an expert in test automation as well as Agile and DevOps. And, fun fact, a rockstar in his own right as well as a rockstar for those of us focused on software quality. His presentation covered the big picture on why continuous testing is so important and the practical steps required to execute it.

Change -- it is a word I hear everyday in my role here at Cyara as a customer success manager. Change excites me. It used to scare me, but I have learned that if you can’t embrace change in technology then your business will not survive. This is why I am so excited to be a part of Cyara -- we are led by an amazing change agent, our CEO Alok Kulkarni. As Alok stated in his opening remarks at Xchange, “change is here, do it as a team.” At Xchange, we brought together an amazing team -- this includes Cyara employees and partners, but more importantly our fabulous clients. So many partners and clients have joined us at Xchange in San Francisco to share their thoughts and experiences on how to manage change and the role Cyara's automation plays in managing change.   

As an increasing number of contact centers migrate to the cloud, another corresponding change is occurring. More and more enterprises have deployed dedicated developers to support their customer experience initiatives.

In my last blog post, I focused on how Cyara Accelerator for Amazon Connect helps companies achieve both speed and quality in their initial migration to Amazon Connect, and in their ongoing development on their new platform. In today’s post, I want to turn my attention to monitoring your CX after you’ve gone live.

Over the course of three days, in a tightly quartered conference room in Melbourne, Australia, eighteen of us across Cyara were trained in SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework). If you are not familiar with the term SAFe, Wikipedia defines it as “a set of organization and workflow patterns intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices.” This framework was designed to help companies improve their alignment, collaboration, and delivery across software development teams. We had the terrific experts from Pretty Agile, including Em Campbell-Pretty, help guide us through the various processes, concepts, and frameworks.

Technology continues to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. Never before has technology—the architectures, networks, operating systems, applications, processes and even the people designing, developing, operating or using it—been such a driving force. Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword but a reality, and the race to deliver a perfect customer experience the first time has never been more important.

We’ve moved from single channel communication (typically voice), via multichannel (typically voice, email, fax, video, SMS etc), to omnichannel, which incorporates even more channels (voice, email, fax, video, SMS and web applications—webchat, chatbot etc) and expects seamless handoff between each. In this setting, every company needs to be ready for their customers’ preferred way of making contact.

The contact center has become the turning point for digital transformation in the enterprise. Companies must now compete by delivering innovative, flawless customer experiences. To accomplish this, the vast majority of enterprises, including many of Cyara’s customers, are moving their contact centers to the cloud, for benefits including reduced cost to serve and a more personalized and responsive customer experience.

But as I covered in an earlier blog post, there are several considerations to address when you’re making this move. One of these considerations is that today, most cloud-based contact centers are based on Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), which may have an impact on voice quality.