CX Assurance Blog

We’re often discussing customer engagement here on the Cyara blog. I recently sat down with the person who is Cyara’s front-line guy for engagement with our customers. Cyara just appointed George Skaryak as EVP of worldwide sales, a role in which he will be interacting with current and future customers across three continents. Right before he hopped on his next flight, I caught up with him to learn more about how he sees the CX market and Cyara’s role within it.

To kick off the holiday season, Cyara is spreading some CX cheer, along with warm season’s greetings. And in the spirit of sharing, we’ve rounded up insights and perspective from both brands and customer experience (CX) experts. As we pulled together this roundup, we realized that, while the holidays come but once a year, delivering great CX is a year-round endeavor! 

I arrived at the Cyara Xchange Roadshow in Manchester with excitement. Having been briefed on the brand’s focus and expertise, I was looking forward to hearing more. It seemed to perfectly dovetail with what I’ve have been seeing in contact centres: a place where the rubber hits the road for many CX leaders.

Following the success of our inaugural Xchange 2018 conference in San Francisco in March this year, we decided to take the show on the road. Our first stop was Melbourne, Australia—Cyara’s birthplace and home to many of our founding customers. After a stop in Dallas, Texas, we moved on to Manchester in the United Kingdom. The final stop will be in Hartford, Connecticut on November 14!

I was able to attend DOES 2018, the largest DevOps-focused conference in the world, in Las Vegas last month. There were many great presentations and I came away with a lot of new insights. In this post I’d like to share some of those key insights.

My number one takeaway is that the main sticking point for DevOps adoption is not legacy technology, it's legacy thinking. Organizations need to be breaking away from the old mental models. Of course, this is hard to achieve because that legacy thinking—such as Waterfall or command and control—is the only thing anybody who's been in the workforce for a while has lived. Even if they believe in the new ways of doing things, when there's a period of pressure and stress, their muscle memory goes back to legacy thinking. This was really my biggest takeaway.

Guess what? Customer experience is important. Lots of people will even tell you that we are in the customer experience economy these days. More and more companies find themselves now competing primarily on the experiences they deliver to their customers rather than their brand or their product or even price. So, if that’s the case, then why do so many IVR teams get treated like order takers rather than a strategic partner in the customer experience economy?

Today, a client of mine cancelled their meeting with me five minutes before we were about to start. Having meetings cancelled on you is a fact of life when you’re selling software. But I always find the reasons why they have cancelled the meetings interesting.

This is the second of a two-part interview with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). In the first post we dove into some insights from her latest report: Accelerate: State of DevOps. And in this post we follow up with a discussion of the importance of Agile and DevOps methodologies to customer experience.

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. Chief among these is funding structures and outsourcing models.

In the first post of this series, I outlined some of the barriers to innovation in terms of funding models, and suggested some ways to overcome them. In this post, I will examine the barriers represented by outsourcing models.