Making Configuration Management Work With Customer Experience Assurance

In an ideal world, making small changes to your IVR should be quick and painless. Whether it’s changing prompts, persuasion messages or open-close hours, these business as usual (BAU) changes should be streamlined as much as possible in order to preserve the quality of customer experience.

But the reality is that these BAU changes are performed by either the business or a change request to a technical team—and both methods have disadvantages. When the business performs these changes, you’re giving non-technical users access to make changes in a system they often don’t understand. And without input validation or contextual help, there’s potential for error. Raising the request to a technical team adds an unnecessary delay.

In both scenarios there’s potential for human error. If the change is time-based, such as open-close hours, the error won’t be caught until much later. Additionally, without auditing, it can be tricky to determine what the last-working values were.

Best practices tell us that regular testing of any IT platform is critical for creating a consistent customer experience. With configuration management tools, such as InProd, an engineer can design BAU changes once and make them available via a business-facing web page. Incorporating features such as contextual help, input validation and auditing empowers business users to make these changes with confidence.

Allowing business users to make these changes eliminates delays involved with adding another team. This gives the business agility and frees up technical resources to add value in other areas.

With integration of a customer experience assurance platform like Cyara, you can also use the change to update the affected test cases. This ensures that customer experience monitoring doesn’t generate false-negative alarms for each BAU change.

Now suppose that you could deploy larger changes, such as technology refreshes or major feature enhancements, using a configuration management platform that’s integrated to customer experience assurance. Production changes could be deployed and tested with a click of a button. Lengthy, late-night deployments would be a thing of the past. Think of the overtime savings alone.

This is the language of DevOps, where the speed is increased without compromising quality. DevOps is an ongoing journey—not a software solution. But having the right solutions means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And you can see the value of having your configuration management platform tightly integrated with customer experience assurance.

To learn more about InProd, visit their app listing on the AppFoundry marketplace and watch their short on-demand webinar.