In a recent blog post, Enabling and Accelerating the Top 6 Goals of Innovative CX Leaders, we shared that many of our customers are undergoing Agile and DevOps transformations. Following on from that, we found that some of the common DevOps challenges highlighted by Mike Kavis in this Forbes article could be applied to CX teams in particular as they transition to Agile/DevOps. In this post, we examine the challenges for CX teams and look at some successful strategies for overcoming them.
1. Poorly Defined Executive Sponsorship
This is a key challenge. For a transformation initiative to succeed, it needs an empowered executive champion to drive cultural change and strategic investments. CX spans multiple departments: operations, delivery teams, marketing, sales, and service to name a few. Moreover, becoming CX focused requires changes in objectives, incentives, and processes. Changes of this nature, especially across organizational functions, require an empowered executive to drive the changes to success. There are different approaches to the organizational structure. Some assign responsibility to an existing executive, for example, the COO, CIO, or CMO. Others create a new role of Chief Customer Experience Officer. Either model can work as long as the responsibility is clear, and the executive is empowered.
2. Competing and Misaligned Incentives
Adopting Agile and DevOps is a team effort, and aligning objectives and incentives is key for making sure the teams work in harmony and are effective. Each team will have objectives that align with their function, such as speed or a low defect rate on the Dev side, and high reliability on the Ops side. It is important to ensure these objectives are not at odds with one another. And, at the same time, you’ll want to complement these functional objectives with business objectives around customer satisfaction.
3. Clear Key Performance Indicators
Adopting Agile and DevOps means taking on a new, more collaborative mindset as an organization. It’s important that measurement tools and monitoring solutions are accessible across teams, and that KPIs are widely acknowledged, so that customer experience can be viewed at an operational level. Cyara’s monitoring capabilities, and in particular our executive dashboard, make it easy to gain visibility of KPIs across the organization.
4. Dependence on Heroic Efforts
A project that requires late-night escalations and long employee hours to get over the finish line is indicative of many problems with both the process and the organization. Ultimately, this situation is unsustainable and will result in the delivery of a poor customer experience. These types of escalations are due to unplanned work, which frequently happens because of insufficient testing. Automating testing, with a solution such as Cyara Velocity, makes it possible to test sufficiently, and eliminates unplanned work and late-night escalations.
5. Different Configuration Across CX Delivery Environments
Moving between environments — from Dev to QA to Staging to Production — is a big source of frustration, as they are often configured differently. Time is wasted fixing bugs introduced as code moves through the software lifecycle. The solution lies in having a consistent approach, especially in the tools used, with each environment. This is best achieved through deployment automation.
6. Errors Introduced by Manual or Outdated Processes
Manual processes can lead to human error and disrupt agility. They are prone to delays and defects, which in turn creates unplanned work. They are also a source of the configuration drift described in #5 above, as unexpected differences between environments can introduce unexpected results. Automating the testing and deployment of CX systems results in higher quality and reliability, at faster speeds. Cyara automates testing, thereby helping to eliminate errors, accelerate development timelines, and improve quality.
Cyara is working with the world’s best brands as they implement DevOps. Contact us to see how our CX Assurance Platform can help you automate testing and monitoring and overcome many of these challenges on your DevOps journey.
