A little while back, Cyara’s Senior Strategic Accounts Director, Kelly Zunker, wrote a post on our blog about how much a SEV1 costs an organization. The piece covered the general definition(s) of a SEV1, or Severity 1 error, presented SEV1 examples, and explored the costs of a SEV1 error considering three main factors:

• Extended caller hold times
• Customer satisfaction
• Unplanned agent overtime

A New Answer to the Question: How Much Does a SEV1 Cost Your Organization?

In his post, Kelly doesn’t just talk about the problem… he suggests a way to solve it. The best way to lower the cost of SEV1 errors is to use testing to find errors before applications are deployed into customer experience (CX) journeys, and continuous monitoring to detect errors in contact center systems that may have crept through into production.

If you missed it the first time around, or would like to freshen up on Kelly’s post, you can revisit it here. The bottom line? How much a SEV1 will cost your organization is a lot, but that number will change depending on many factors, including when the error is covered and how difficult it is to diagnose and repair.

Let's Get More Specific

Recently, though, we’ve been able to add some real numbers to that less-than-specific answer, helping to paint a clearer picture as to why automating the testing and monitoring of your contact center systems is vital to keeping IT costs and error risk low while doing more for your CX with less.

Forrester Consulting recently conducted a Cyara-commissioned, in-depth study that digs deep into real-world examples of how testing and monitoring can return some great results relating to cost savings, investment payback, and better resource allocation.

The full study, The Total Economic Impact™ Of Cyara Automated CX Assurance: Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Cyara, is available and free to download. You’ll find details on things like how much organizations can save by repurposing testers, and recapturing value of abandoned callers, as well as unquantifiable benefits, like improved customer sentiment, but for the purpose of today’s post, we’re sharing some findings that help answer the question “how much does a SEV1 cost your organization?”

What the Study Found

To arrive at the numbers included in this study, Forrester conducted interviews with four long-time Cyara customers to explore their experiences. What they found with regards to SEV1 errors, was that before implementing the practice of pre-production testing, these customers found themselves discovering SEV1 errors only after outages occurred.

The after-the-fact discovery of these errors directly led to lost sales and long hours spent on remediation. The interviewed companies shared their SEV1 stories with Forrester who then crunched the numbers. What Forrester found was that companies like these, on average, experienced a cost of $100,000 per hour of downtime, accumulated from lost consumer business, and time spent by development and operations spending time on remediation, and any additional allocations that were required to repair brand reputation and damage done by broken customer experiences. Anecdotally, we’ve heard numbers more like 50 times that.

Want to look at the granular information that led Forrester to these numbers and see the risk-adjusted, 3-year total savings estimate? Download the full Forrester TEI® study.

Of course, the costs vary by the number of SEV1 errors that occurred, the length of time spent on fixing the issues, number of development and/or operation team members, and a company’s average number of calls per hour.

Based on the results from the study, though, and scaling these calculations to match the size of your company and team, does this help you answer Kelly’s final question from his original post: what would a SEV1 cost your organization?