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Do you remember the last time you got stuck in a major traffic jam? Like me, did the experience include a thousand brake lights rolling up over a hill and into the distance? You might have unconsciously compared the traffic freely going in the other direction. Without an idea of why you were delayed or how long it would take to start moving again, you might remember the wave of powerless frustration. Those are the same emotions that your employees and customers feel when your legacy contact center systems break down.
When the core system of your brand goes down, the expectation of the journey for thousands of people is interrupted. These types of outages have a serious impact on your reputation. To avoid this, examine the cloud-native methodology for building new world systems that will keep the traffic of customer interactions flowing predictably, quietly and without delays.
Microservices Simplified
Legacy systems, also known as monolithic systems, are designed and built as a complete unit. Cloud systems use microservices that are independently managed. In the cloud, a collection of microservices change the rules of how we build a system in the cloud.
That doesn’t mean that microservices never break. No matter what anyone tells you, cloud subsystems will go down. But true cloud systems are built with the expectation that something will break and are designed to recover automatically. In fact, the recovery of cloud-native systems is so inherent that downtime is never experienced by a business or its customers. This is what we mean when we say, “cloud resiliency”.
In the Genesys® PureCloud® platform, automation that detects microservices outages immediately redirects traffic to another working and available service. The broken service is then retired as a new service is instantiated (“starts up”). In this way, there is always a full complement of actively working services – thousands of them working in concert across multiple zones of availability.
A little-known secret is that Netflix is made of the same stuff PureCloud is made of – microservices. Netflix made tools to purposefully disrupt individual microservices to entire regions of microservices to ensure its services were properly configured to recover. PureCloud uses the same tools and the same practices. While your binge-watching “Stranger Things,” nothing strange is happening to your experience. When is the last time you planned on taking down your legacy system in the middle of the day?
How Microservices Affect Your Reputation
Microservices will keep your entire system running—without you ever knowing there was a problem. You avoid the complete stoppage, which increases your flow of opportunities to build your reputation with your customers. However, there is more at stake to your reputation than just uptime.
Not all microservices are built equally. Some cloud systems still use microservices in a way that duplicates legacy systems. They might gain the benefit of cloud resiliency, but those solutions don’t prepare you for growth. The special sauce of a properly designed microservice is the ability to rapidly integrate new technologies.
Butterball, a PureCloud customer, services 100,000 consumer calls throughout the holiday months of November and December. With only 50 agent experts, they rely on self-service IVR to give their customers a great experience through the PureCloud callback feature. When customers feel like the wait time doesn’t meet their immediate needs, they can schedule a callback and make better use of the hold time.
When the callback feature became available, every PureCloud customer (including Butterball) got it for free. There was no coordination for an update; no one had to choose between two versions of the IVR or migrate over to the new IVR.
Recently, Genesys teamed with Amazon to integrate Lex into the PureCloud IVR solution. Because of proper microservices design, the voice channel not only has access to the Amazon Lex integration but so do digital channels like chat, SMS and messaging apps. The set of microservices that power IVR are reused for all communication channels; this isn’t a legacy system where the IVR is directly dedicated to the voice channel.
When you position yourself to rely on a properly designed microservices architecture, your reputation to remain relevant increases and you can give your customers the best possible experience. “Always up and always up to date” is possible through cloud microservices.
Run Contact Center Systems Like a Well-Oiled Machine
It’s important for your reputation to keep a constant flow of interactions with your customers—giving them a great experience and engendering loyalty to your brand. Over time, your consistency and uptime translate into a long-lasting reputation in the market that allows you to consider new customer experiences instead of outage planning for another bolted-on feature.
The microservices architecture of your cloud solution is the vehicle that will enable you to build your reputation and legacy. That is something to think about the next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam behind an unending flood of brake lights.
Check out the virtual PureCloud tour and experience the platform for yourself.
