Agility is perhaps the defining characteristic of contact centers today.
In the past, speed was the name of the game. How can a contact center be as efficient as possible, maximizing the volume of calls each agent can handle and minimizing average handle time? While these factors still play a role in contact center operations, customer experience (CX) now takes center stage. This CX is fluid and omnichannel, which means your contact center should be as agile as possible.
So it’s only fitting that DevOps, an operational approach that grew out of the Agile software development practices of the 1990s, is finally catching the attention of more contact center executives. As more and more contact center managers have embraced cloud technology, a more agile and faster approach to CX development and delivery has become possible.
How the cloud paves the way for DevOps
Contact centers are rapidly shedding old on-premises technologies in favor of the cloud. The Global Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) Offerings Market is Expected to Grow by 26.1% per year from 2022 to 2027, increasing from $17.1 billion to $54.6 billion.
While there are many reasons for this change, it ultimately comes down to customer experience and cost management. The cloud allows contact centers to scale more efficiently, providing more flexible and personalized CX solutions while reducing the cost of service. It enables a more seamless blend of human agents with artificial intelligence technology in an omnichannel service environment.
The cloud does more, however. It also paves the way for a DevOps approach in the contact center. Consider a few key changes that come with migrating to the cloud:
- Silos break down and communication opens up. When a contact center is not tied to a physical location, collaboration and communication become essential ingredients for delivering customer service.
- Automation becomes easier. Cloud contact center technology is built on a modern architecture, which makes it more compatible with the small, frequent changes that characterize DevOps. Automating key processes, from CI/CD to testing, becomes key to realizing the DevOps vision.
All of these changes lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive shift to DevOps in the contact center. Because it is rooted in the Agile software methodology, DevOps relies on the open and collaborative culture inherent in an Agile approach. It relies on breaking down silos between development and operations so that these two departments can work together throughout the development cycle to deliver faster and better software releases.
In the contact center, it’s much easier to embrace this kind of mindset shift when the overhead of legacy technology is no longer an obstacle. And when contact center management embraces this change, it lays the foundation for even more powerful results.
Continuous Testing in DevOps: The Perfect Recipe for CX Insurance
At the heart of the DevOps mindset is the commitment to continuous iteration and continuous development (CI/CD). Rather than separating development and testing into distinct stages, DevOps connects them throughout the software development lifecycle.
This shift from a dev-test-release approach to a more fluid exchange between the three relies on continuous testing. Instead of isolated checks at the end of development, which often lead to significant delays or failures in discovering software issues, “change left” testing occurs much earlier in the cycle. This allows development teams to discover issues much earlier, resolve them more efficiently, and reduce costs associated with premature deployment.
When done right, the result is a massive improvement in execution. According to 2021 Accelerating State of DevOps According to Google Cloud DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), organizations with elite DevOps teams are outperforming those with low-end DevOps teams by leaps and bounds. Consider some striking comparisons:
- Elite groups are 6,570 times faster at making software changes and restoring service outages.
- They deploy code updates 973 times more often.
- The changes they deploy are a third less likely to fail.
What do these types of performance improvements mean for the contact center? By deploying CI/CD, automated testing, and other DevOps approaches, contact centers can reduce outages, improve voice quality, improve chatbot performance, and more. And while it’s possible, in theory, to do this without fully embracing the DevOps mindset, a complete mindset shift will dramatically improve what’s possible for the CX contact center.
Adopting a DevOps approach in your contact center requires a change in mindset. You can no longer treat your system development and upgrades as separate from CX – they should be an integral part of it. At Cyara, we call it “DevCXOps.”
Our CX Assurance Platform helps the world’s most prestigious brands accelerate the transition to DevOps because the entire system is CI/CD-based. Using powerful automation, our clients deploy functional, regression and performance testing, as well as live CX monitoring, to get a complete view of the customer experience.
This type of automated continuous testing and monitoring allows development and operations teams to ensure that CX software, whether it’s an existing version or a new update, is working at optimal levels. Instead of detecting service issues in a piecemeal fashion or after they’ve already impacted CX, Cyara helps detect them proactively so they don’t become serious issues.
One of our clients, a canadian major bankuses Cyara to get a unified picture of its contact center operations and an end-to-end view of the customer journey that helps it detect issues in real time and resolve them faster.
Just one example: countless other contact centers have used Cyara to kickstart their transition to a DevOps way of doing business. If you’re ready to deploy DevOps in your contact center, you don’t have to do it alone. look at this White Bookr to learn more about how Cyara can help you.