Key Stages of the DevOps Evolution in Your Contact Center

Technology is the single most significant factor in how quickly our planet continues to change. However, organizations often struggle with managing this constant change.

Even today, the idea of increasing throughput while simultaneously improving the resilience of a system is no longer new. And the results of implementing a DevOps approach speak for themselves—organizations still operate in an isolated manner and with little exposure to the effect, their work has on the entire business. Often, it’s a lack of direction, rather than desire, that discourages organizations from taking that first step toward DevOps.

Understanding the DevOps Methodology

DevOps is a development methodology that combines software development and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to shorten the systems development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently and automatically—in close alignment with business objectives.

But DevOps isn’t a technology; it’s a mindset and a cultural shift. It’s unreasonable to expect organizations to adopt it overnight. But small steps, such as improved collaboration and shared results across one critical functional boundary, can create a ripple effect across organizations of any size.

DevOps in the Contact Center

Companies who have successfully implemented a DevOps mentality learned that by focusing initial efforts on foundational operations—areas of the business where continual change delivers the most significant value—makes it easier to recognize the net result of change. The positive results justify the approach and validate the decision to deploy the DevOps methodology to other areas of the business.

Contact center operations are a good start for DevOps—they’re usually the first interaction that a customer has with your organization. And the success of subtle changes to procedures can be easily identified through existing continual monitoring, such as first contact resolution, Net Promoter Score and average handle time.

Testing 1, 2, 3

The successful implementation of enterprise testing provides organizations with the building blocks, patterns, and strategies that enable them to take a DevOps-centric approach to the development and deployment of their customer experience initiatives. This not only drives and delivers continual improvements but also lets companies take advantage of ever-evolving technologies as they become available. And this enables them to effectively respond to customers’ ever-changing demands and expectations.

Five Stages for Implementing DevOps  

Successfully implementing a DevOps mindset within your company requires some thoughtful planning. Here are five key stages of the move.

1. Build the Foundation

With the Genesys® PureCloud Premium app status and VXML ingestion tool, development and operations teams (and frequently other stakeholders, such as testing or security) can rapidly use the Occam Enterprise Testing Suite (ETS) as the foundation of their new collaboration and sharing methodology. This provides instant access to current configurations, files, knowledge, pain points, and technologies.

2. Normalize the Technology Stack

With a centralized repository, users can ingest information, execute tests, validate current documentation and easily export findings through a variety of channels. Once this information is in place, organizations can eliminate redundant, disparate systems used by individual teams and make a coordinated move toward a single platform.

3. Standardize and Reduce Variability

Unlimited access to testing allows dev and ops teams to work together to initiate a standard customer experience testing process. This standardization, coupled with automated testing capabilities, delivers changes and improvements faster while eradicating human errors and reducing errors that arise from inconsistencies.

4. Expand DevOps Practices

Once the testing suite has been deployed and teams are fully trained on the platform, they can fine-tune their testing process. Using this as the conduit for the DevOps approach, developers can ingest the required changes—manually or automatically using the IVR discovery feature. QA and testing teams can execute required tests across the appropriate environment and present the validated changes to a development team for deployment to the production environment.

5. Enable Self-Help Capabilities

When an issue is identified in the live environment through monitoring, all teams are alerted to the problem immediately. This enables them to quickly ascertain who is best placed to resolve the issue.

With the confidence that the pre-production environment is fully documented and that it mirrors the live setting, a hotfix required by the development team can be thoroughly tested—without having to wait or rely on the QA or ops teams. The results are then documented and immediately available to the operations team to act upon.

ETS streamlines the movement of code through the development, test and deployment phases, eliminating manual tasks that simultaneously reduce the potential for human error. To learn more about how ETS can provide the foundation and help catapult your DevOps strategies, visit the application listing on the AppFoundry Marketplace.