CX Assurance Blog

It's Friday! And, boy, it's been a long week. On Monday I posted tips for quickly setting up a home-office, followed by a post on Wednesday with some advice for secondary things that may make your mandatory work-from-home status a little easier. Today, I'm sharing a few ideas on ways to make this period of time as pleasant and productive as possible.

On Monday I shared the first of three blog posts I put together on the fly with tips for initial set-up of your home-office that you may have had to move to through a mandatory work-from-home order, which many business are - understandably - enforcing at this time.

Right now, there are so many great examples of fantastic, humanitarian efforts getting organized to counter-act the social and economic effects of COVID-19, like free educational services, temporary halts on things like evictions and utilities shut-offs due to late payments, and lightning-fast set ups of food and supply shelters. There’s a lot to be proud of!

In the wake of what’s happened in the last month, local and national governments have advised, where possible, that those who can work from home do so in an effort to limit exposure and prevent the spread of the virus. As a company with offices around the globe and a workforce made up of 75% remotely located employees, Cyara is lucky to be able to say that work-from-home is business-as-usual for us, but we realize that this is new for many others.

In the last few weeks, we have witnessed dramatic stock market swings, governmental actions and WHO announcements all related to the expansion of COVID-19 to pandemic status. Needless to say, the turbulence is unsettling to us all. While the reality is that these events have had or will have an impact on business as well as what we do in our lives outside of work, I want to share a message of hope and positivity.

A quick Google search for where the best US March vacation spots are will return a result of Florida, which is probably why the organizers of the upcoming enterprise communications and collaboration event – Enterprise CONNECT 2020 – chose the warm, sunny, and absolutely beautiful location of Orlando to host this must-attend conference! (Not going to lie, it’s also one of the reasons the Cyara team is already packed for this event).

Next month in Melbourne, Cyara is hosting Xchange 2020 Roadshow, a premier one-day event generously sponsored by our partners and friends, including Amazon AWS, Genesys, and Cloudwave. The schedule is packed full of valuable presentations, networking, panel discussions, and demos. We’re inviting customers, prospects, and thought leaders who are driven to build better customer experiences faster – and that includes you!

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.