CX Assurance Blog

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.

Customer experience IT leaders know that a well functioning, complete ecosystem of technology—from IT monitoring, defect tracking, and software development systems to IT ticketing—is key. With this ecosystem in place, companies are empowered to iterate rapidly with quality using Agile and DevOps methodologies in their CX initiatives. 

Cyara’s customers use a wide range of solutions to streamline their software development and operations in support of delivering better customer experiences. So we’re excited to announce new Cyara Platform integrations to three popular solutions: Jira, ServiceNow, and Splunk. These new integrations help with IT monitoring (Splunk), defect tracking (Jira), and ticketing and support (ServiceNow), and are in addition to our existing integrations with configuration management services from blackchair and InProd, and test management with MicroFocus ALM. 

In my last blog post, I focused on how Cyara Accelerator helps companies accelerate their migration to Amazon Connect by automatically documenting existing IVR applications, and automatically generating call flows in Amazon Connect. By automating the process of generating a baseline IVR, brands can get their new system up and running much faster.

Adoption of Contact Center technology in the Cloud is a trend that is well under way. According to IDC, nearly 50% of contact centers have deployed cloud-based solutions and an additional third are in the process. And, this isn’t just small contact centers. According to Forrester, 1 in 4 large contact centers currently deploys hosted, hybrid or cloud contact center environments, and 30% are expecting to move to subscription-type services.

Business users want an efficient and trouble-free way to make changes to IVRs. InProd and New Zealand’s Ministry of Social Development (MSD) have developed a new feature as part of the InProd product, that gives business users what they want.

IVRs need to be continually updated to help customers resolve their issues and make the customer experience as frictionless as possible. Business users often have minor changes, such as, changes to prompts (pre-recorded IVR voice messages) and changes to where calls should be sent. They need changes quickly and often do not want to wait for an IT resource.