CX Assurance Blog

This week, I had an opportunity to reconnect with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). Some of you DevOps aficionados will remember her fascinating keynote presentation, The Data Behind DevOps, at the Cyara Xchange conference, earlier this year. Through her work with DORA, Nicole helps some of the world’s top companies become high-performing organizations that are able to move faster and build more secure, resilient systems.

Nicole is also the lead investigator on the largest DevOps study to date, and so has a unique viewpoint on the expanding intersection of DevOps and customer experience (CX). In this two-part blog post, we first discuss some of the study’s findings, and then, later this week in a follow-up post, we’ll talk about how these findings can be applied to development projects that focus on customer experience applications.

Today is CX Day – a day to celebrate the professionals and companies that make great customer experiences happen. So, on this sixth annual CX Day—created by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)—I’ve gathered six top insights and observations that I’ve gleaned from Cyara’s customers and fellow CX fanatics over the past year.

Part of our work in the Domain Consulting team is to advise Cyara customers on their Agile/DevOps journeys. Something we've seen among many Cyara customers, and more broadly, is the constant pressure to innovate. Technological innovation continues, but that doesn't mean organizations are equipped to handle it. In fact, quite a lot needs to change before they can truly innovate at the speed of technological advancement. Two main areas where we need to see change are funding structures and outsourcing models.

In this first of two posts, I'll outline some of the barriers to innovation in terms of funding models, and suggest some ways to overcome them. In the second post, I will examine the barriers presented by outsourcing models.

Part of our work in the Domain Consulting team is advising Cyara customers on their Agile/DevOps journeys. Through this process, we've identified a path to DevOps in the contact center that I'd like to explore in more detail.

In the first post of this series, I talked about putting in the guard rails with design-driven assurance, and in the second, about accelerating the delivery of value. In this post, I'll cover best practices for reducing the cost of failure, through building solutions with testing and monitoring in mind, automated deployment and configuration, or using test data in production.

Digital transformation and improved customer experience are key to survival in our new economy. And DevOps is a proven way to increase value delivery and stay competitive. It enables faster, better, and less risky projects.

Because of these benefits, IT teams in organizations worldwide have invested significant time, resources, and funding in the DevOps toolchain, but has it been effective?

There is so much great content published on CX, Agile and DevOps, and in every edition of our CX Assurance Newsletter, I include a list of interesting articles, videos and other content that are relevant to our readers. I find these pieces in CX industry newsletters, on LinkedIn, and a variety of other places. No matter where I find them, my goal is always to help Cyara's community of CX Assurance professionals deliver the best CX they can.

Below is a list with a summary of the recent content I curated for our readers. Take a look!

You probably are familiar with the line “Show me the money!” from the movie Jerry Maguire. In the movie, Jerry’s client asks Jerry, his agent, to show him the money.  He doesn’t want his agent to talk a good game or make a bunch of promises, he wants results. That line is now used in pop culture to mean delivering results. 

How does that apply to your IVR testing?  Well, aren’t you a lot more interested in the results of testing — finding issues and defects in your IVR — than you are in tracking how many test cases your testers wrote or how often they dialed your IVR to make sure it worked the way you wanted it to? Of course, you are. But, if that is the case, why are so many IVR testers focused on writing test cases and making manual dials into your IVR, instead of finding issues and defects?

Part of our work in the Domain Consulting team is advising Cyara customers on their Agile/DevOps journeys. Through this process, we've identified a path to DevOps in the contact center that I'd like to explore in more detail.

In the first post of this series, I talked about putting in the guard rails with design-driven assurance. In this post, I'll talk about how to accelerate the delivery of value using automated deployment and configuration of off-the-shelf contact center software, or implementing cloud contact center software. And in part three, I'll cover ways to reduce the cost of failure, through building solutions with testing and monitoring in mind, automated deployment and configuration, or using test data in production. 

Insurance is often referred to as a distress purchase, requiring the consumer to invest considerable time and effort in finding the right policy at the best price. This has given rise to many price comparison websites, which help the consumer find policies online. These sites have increased competition and disrupted the personal insurance industry, especially in the UK. And they encourage customers towards online and digital services, rather than the traditional voice or in-person channels, for their insurance needs. In response to this disruption, the personal insurance industry is undergoing a period of rapid change and adjustment.

We all know that customers want and expect to have the context of their interactions with an organization carry with them as they move from one channel to another. According to Salesforce, 75% of consumers expect consistency across channels (Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, 2016). And, 89% of customers get frustrated because they need to repeat their issue to multiple representatives (Accenture). Quite frankly, I wonder who are these people who don’t expect this consistency, and don’t get frustrated when they have to repeat themselves.