Embracing Continual Change in Customer Experience Operations

This blog post was co-authored by Genesys AppFoundry Partner, Occam Networks.

Delivering superior customer service is no longer a “nice to have;” it’s a key differentiator — and it’s mandatory for customer loyalty and acquisition. Organizations that can’t support their customers ever-evolving expectations and needs will find themselves losing business to their competition.

Delivering Change at Speed

While implementing DevOps best practices is the first step, delivering an automated testing approach throughout the DevOps lifecycle is imperative. Companies that practice DevOps within their customer experience and contact center operations:

1. Invest in testing and look to upgrade testing skills
2. Implement continuous testing to support frequent changes and delivery
3. Incorporate testers within the development and operational teams
4. Fully automate functionality testing from the carrier through to an agent
5. Shift left to test earlier and continuously throughout the development lifecycle

Continuous Testing

Facilitating a continuous testing methodology throughout the entire DevOps lifecycle delivers significant improvements and helps you realize the speed gains a DevOps approach offers. To deliver continuous testing, DevOps teams must execute automated tests throughout the development lifecycle to identify errors and issues earlier — and to reduce their impact on cost and delivery timescales.

Once changes have been delivered to a production environment, continuous testing provides feedback and insights on the impact and operation of these changes. And it ensures that systems continue to perform and operate as expected.

Considerations for Continuous Testing

Accessibility of traditional automated testing tools has made continuous testing difficult and expensive to achieve. It often creates additional bottlenecks and barriers. When choosing a testing platform, consider the following factors:

Accessibility – To achieve continuous testing nirvana, look for a testing tool that’s accessible 24/7. Users need to be able to carry out testing when required — and have access to a license that allows for unlimited testing. To future-proof your DevOps transition, the license should also support unlimited users without incurring additional costs.

Usability – Review the platform’s UX. To realize the full benefits of an unlimited user license — and to align it with your DevOps objectives — intuitive design is imperative to ensure adoption of the platform. Avoid platforms that require a specific skill set or certification to build and execute tests. These create bottlenecks and increase risk when staff members leave.

Features – When first deploying a continuous testing methodology, it’s often difficult to judge your future requirements and how quickly you’ll adopt different testing methodologies and features. To eradicate any delays, investigate testing tools that offer access to all features within a single license. This lets you match business requirements without having to consider additional licensing costs down the road.

Pricing – Do your homework; with the adoption of software as a service pricing models — and new technologies and approaches — there can be a huge price disparity between providers. To future-proof any investment, look for transparent pricing models that deliver immediate value, mitigate setup costs and are flexible enough to grow with the demands of your business.

Integrations – Genesys partners with several companies to support your DevOps initiatives. Because of full API access to all Genesys platforms, partners are continually integrating their tools and services to drive value and further automate tasks.

For example, AppFoundry partner Occam recently integrated its Discovery, Functionality testing and Monitoring features directly into the PureCloud® solution. With this integration, test scripts are automatically generated based on the PureCloud configuration; monitoring schedules can be created directly within the PureCloud dashboard, allowing customers to carry out functionality testing and monitoring at the click of a button.

To get more information on Experience Testing System (ETS) from Occam, visit their listings in the AppFoundry Marketplace, available in PureCloud, PureConnect and PureEngage.  You can also meet the Occam team in person at Xperience19 in Denver from June 10-13 or watch their on-demand webinar at your convenience.