6 Development and Operations Challenges for Customer Experience Teams

Simone Kovago outlines six common development and operations problems that the contact centre faces. 

1. Poorly Defined Executive Sponsorship

This is a key challenge. For a transformation initiative to succeed, it needs an empowered executive champion to drive cultural change and strategic investments.

The customer experience (CX) spans multiple departments: operations, delivery teams, marketing, sales, and service, to name a few. Moreover, becoming CX-focused requires changes in objectives, incentives and processes. Changes of this nature, especially across organisational functions, require an empowered executive to drive them to success.

There are different approaches to organisational structure. Some assign responsibility to an existing executive, for example the COO, CIO or CMO. Others create a new role of Chief Customer Experience Officer. Either model can work as long as the responsibility is clear and the executive is empowered.

2. Competing and Misaligned Incentives

Adopting development and operations is a team effort, and aligning objectives and incentives is key to making sure the teams work in harmony and are effective.

Each team will have objectives that align with their function, such as speed or a low defect rate on the development side, and high reliability on the operations side.

It is important to ensure these objectives are not at odds with one another. And, at the same time, you’ll want to complement these functional objectives with business objectives around customer satisfaction.

3. Clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Adopting development and operations means taking on a new, more collaborative, mindset as an organisation. It’s important that measurement tools and monitoring solutions are accessible across teams, and that KPIs are widely acknowledged, so that customer experience can be viewed at an operational level.

Solutions with advanced monitoring capabilities, executive dashboard and mobile application, such as Cyara’s Velocity platform, make it easy to gain visibility of KPIs across the organisation.

4. Dependence on Heroic Efforts

A project that requires late-night escalations and long employee hours to get over the finish line is indicative of many problems with both the process and the organisation.

Ultimately, this situation is unsustainable and will result in the delivery of a poor customer experience.

These types of escalations are due to unplanned work, which frequently happens because of insufficient testing. Automating testing with a solution such as Cyara Velocity makes it possible to test sufficiently and eliminates unplanned work and late-night escalations.

5. Different Configuration Across CX Delivery Environments

Moving between environments, from development to QA to staging to production, is a big source of frustration, as they are often configured differently. Time is wasted fixing bugs introduced as code moves through the software life cycle.

The solution lies in having a consistent approach, especially in the tools used, within each environment. This is best achieved through deployment automation.

6. Errors Introduced by Manual or Outdated Processes

Manual processes can lead to human error and disrupt agility. They are prone to delays and defects, which in turn creates unplanned work. They are also a source of the configuration drift described in #5 above, as unexpected differences between environments can introduce unexpected results.

Automating the testing and deployment of CX systems results in higher quality and reliability, at faster speeds.

Cyara automates testing, thereby helping to eliminate errors, accelerate development timelines, and improve quality.