CX Assurance Blog

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.

In 2015, British Telecom (BT) announced it would be switching off the UK’s legacy PSTN and ISDN networks by 2025, forcing all customers to shift to IP-based VoIP (Voice Over IP) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telephony services. Rather than a chore, to me this represents an opportunity for companies in the UK to take advantage of new cloud technology and improve their customer experience at the same time.

More and more of Cyara’s customers around the world are moving their contact centers to the cloud. This is happening for many reasons, including improved flexibility and reliability, increased speed, and reduced costs. In fact, research shows that 81% of users of hosted cloud solutions say cloud has improved flexibility, while 77% say it contributes to future-proofing their technology infrastructure.

To me, cloud technology represents a unique opportunity for the industry to move beyond interactions and customer journeys to a new level of personalization based on customer lifetime value. This is because the underlying engine that gathers data and analytics about your customers is a single system rather than disparate systems that aren’t able to communicate with each other. 

While the benefits and opportunities are compelling, there is a lot of complexity and risk involved, which can hold organizations back. Risks include security concerns, cost over-runs, systems integration, the management of legacy infrastructure, and leadership inertia. 

Earlier this month, I co-hosted a webinar with Steve Nuttall, Head of CX Research at Fifth Quadrant, that focussed on the potential risks of migration and how to overcome them. We covered five key ways to assure a successful contact center cloud migration.

In this post, I’ll outline my highlights from the webinar, and how you can be sure your customers aren’t impacted when you’re embarking on a cloud migration.

When it comes to businesses, cloud-based services have aided the expansion of digital disruption as more and more processes move online. The three standard models associated with cloud computing are: Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service, and Platform as a Service.

I recently caught up with Scott Anderson, SVP, Senior Team Lead, at Bank of America, and asked him how his team makes test automation so successful. Scott is an expert in IVR quality assurance and testing and has been at the forefront of customer experience assurance.

In my role at Cyara, I regularly have discussions with our customers about forecasting, funding, and resource allocation in their organizations. In my most recent interactions with two customers, I came to realize that organizations may be overlooking a great opportunity to make their business more efficient. 

I recently met with a CIO of a major enterprise in the USA. One of the biggest victories for his team would be to stop taking escalation calls and sending apology emails every other Saturday when a production release took place and yet another bug made it past detection, and into production. More important than his personal frustration and that of the colleagues that had to escalate to him: the impact on end customers. They are the ones that suffer the most when defects make it into production. 

When we started to tell customers about our IVR discovery product, Crawler, a few years ago, I got excited. My excitement wasn’t so much about the IVR discovery capability our development team had put together—it essentially dials into your IVR, reverse engineers it to figure out what it does, and then documents it. Rather, my excitement was for the visual editor we had created that allowed us to see IVRs and call flows for the first time. We were finally able to not only talk about testing, but also about design. This fit in well with our messaging about the benefits of ‘shifting left’—the fact that the earlier you find a defect in the product’s lifecycle, the cheaper it is to fix.