2019 was a busy year for Cyara. We delivered a wide range of innovations to our CX Assurance Platform driven by customer needs and market trends. There were four key customer- and market-driven themes that drove my top 10 picks for the enhancements we delivered in 2019.
1. Real-Time Incident Management and Accelerated Time to Resolution
Pulse Mobile App
Customer Experience (CX) has become business critical for companies and is reflected in the high demand for we are seeing for Pulse, our CX monitoring solution. Customers requested mobile CX monitoring so we launched the all new Pulse Mobile app which makes it possible for organizations to monitor their CX across voice and digital channels, quickly identify issues, and accelerate issue resolution. The core of the application is a customizable dashboard that serves up Pulse test results tailored to individual users. So, IT operations leaders can drill in from high level trends to individual test case details to accelerate issue resolution, where as business users can understand if overall SLAs are being met. For more on the Pulse Mobile App, read the press release.
2. Robust CX Design Environment
CX Model Enhancements
A second market trend we responded to was the need for faster and easier CX design. To address this, Cyara invested in making our CX Models an even more robust design environment. We want our customers to be able to accurately express their complex IVR designs in a CX Model so that it can serve both as the source of the truth for IVR documentation as well as the basis for automatically generating test scripts. During the year, we added new element types, including decision elements, which allow for the expression of business logic (such as branch based on time of day, or customer group), and also improved usability with the ability to more easily search, duplicate and rename. With these enhancements, CX Models will better meet the design needs of Cyara customers.
3. Contact Center Migrations to the Cloud
Digital transformation is driving contact centers to move to the cloud. We are hearing from many companies that they need solutions to simplify, accelerate, and ensure the quality of their cloud migrations. This trend is driving a lot of organizations to rethink their development processes, and increase automation, including test automation. A number of our 2019 innovations have focused on improving our ability to support companies moving their contact center to the cloud.
Cyara Accelerator for Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect has really shaken up the industry and accelerated the move to the cloud. In fact, we have definitely seen a growing trend among our large enterprise clients in moving to the cloud, and Amazon Connect is among the top cloud contact center platforms we encounter.
To support migrations to Amazon Connect, we launched the Cyara Accelerator for Amazon Connect. This innovation helps businesses streamline and manage the complexity that exists when transitioning from an on-premises solution to the cloud. It speeds up the entire development lifecycle and makes migration as simple as possible. You can learn more by reading this blog post.
Cyara Accelerator for Genesys PureCloud
Very similar to what we did for Amazon, we also created a version of the Cyara Accelerator for Genesys PureCloud. There are many Genesys PureCloud deployments going on and customers are asking for help moving to this new, cloud based platform.
Cyara Virtual Agent (CVA) for Cloud Contact Centers
Integral to assuring cloud contact centers is validating the agent experience, and specifically agent routing and data passing. But, the requirements for testing WebRTC technology, which is widely used for agent voice connectivity in cloud contact centers, differs from physical desktop or application-based VoIP phones. Hence, Cyara has been developing new approaches to assuring the performance of WebRTC-based agent interfaces, and 2019 announced support for Genesys PureCloud and Genesys PureEngage Cloud. You’ll see a lot more about this in the 2020.
4. Integrations, Integrations, and More Integrations
The final overarching customer-driven requests in 2019 was integration, and in particular connecting Cyara to the technology used to manage Agile and DevOps methodologies, as well as IT ticketing and support systems.
Pulse Integration to Splunk for Consolidated IT Monitoring
To accelerate mean time to repair (MTTR), many of our customers were looking to aggregate Cyara’s outside in test results with other sources of data, such as log files or network monitoring, to improve troubleshooting and accelerate issue resolution. That’s why we launched a new integration between Cyara Pulse and Splunk in the Fall of 2019. You can read more about our integration to Splunk in this blog post.
Velocity Integration to Jira for Defect Tracking
Cyara and Jira are the peanut butter and chocolate of defect identification and resolution during the development process. Cyara Velocity is the ultimate bug finder. And Jira is used to track bugs and make sure they are resolved. By connecting these two systems, you ensure that all the bugs that Cyara finds are tracked and resolved in a programmatic way. And, by automatically creating defects in Jira based on Cyara Velocity test failures, you eliminate rework, and ensure that sufficient detail is readily available. You can read more about our integration to Jira in this blog post.
Pulse Integration to ServiceNow for Streamlined Ticketing and Support
Very similarly to the integration with Jira, but on the operations side of the house, Cyara Pulse’s ability to find defects complements ServiceNow’s IT ticketing capabilities. In this case, we use defects found in Cyara Pulse to create tickets in ServiceNow, carrying over the details you need to resolve the issue. You can read more about our integration to ServiceNow in this blog post.
Pulse Integration to PagerDuty for Streamlined Ticketing and Support
Similar to the way we support ticket creation in ServiceNow based on defects found in Pulse, we do the very same for PagerDuty. But, with this integration, we go a little bit further and we can auto-clear tickets based on successful test runs.
Enhancements to APIs to Connect with the Broad Technology Ecosystem
But wait, there are more integrations being requested. Cyara continues to invest in our APIs to make it easier for our customers to integrate into any part of their technology ecosystem, and we have seen particular interest in connecting Cyara to their CI/CD pipeline.
We continue to listen to our customers and keep our finger on the pulse of the market. Watch this space as we roll out more innovations to Cyara’s CX Assurance Platform in 2020. And, contact us to learn more about how you can get access to these fabulous new features.
