As an Engineering Manager with responsibilities of development, testing, and execution of contact center applications, I can tell you that my organization has long been seeking ways to add efficiency, enhance performance, and reduce effort. Essentially, we have been exploring processes and products to help us become more agile, synchronized, and efficient in how we go about delivering high-quality customer experience.
This year, Assurant embarked on the adoption of Cyara’s Platform to help automate processes while ensuring quality was maintained. As is the case with any kind of overhaul of the way you’re used to doing things and transitions to new practices, we learned some things I thought might be of value to share with others who are taking any steps along the path of moving from manual to automated testing in their contact centers.
First, let me give you a little background. From an IT perspective, Assurant was looking for an automated solution that would provide more consistent, deeper testing of contact center customer journeys than our current, manual approach. In particular, we needed to find a more efficient way to move our clients off of legacy IVRs and transition them to newly developed IVR applications, a process that requires a great amount of testing.
The benefits of automated testing within the contact center are many, and in a matter of months I’ve seen and experienced the value this has brought to our organization ( Watch my session from Cyara’s Xchange 2020 Virtual Summit,) but I was surprised to find that, as an “IT guy” just seeking testing assistance, I found myself in the middle of meetings with the business side of Assurant and our automation solution provider need to think through how to ensure security and compliance requirements would always be met after implementing the solution. While the automated testing platform we chose was built upon a robust security program that enables customers in the healthcare, banking, and tech spaces to maintain security and compliance, Assurant had unique standards, policies and practices to be addressed. In our case, Cyara’s team and ours worked closely together to navigate the regulatory and corporate security and privacy landscape.
Two key considerations that came out of those meetings may be helpful to keep in mind as you consider automation solutions, evaluate project timelines, and begin the adoption process.
- Once you select your solution(s) of choice, it may take a while to align Business, Provider, and Execution teams. For Assurant – because we are a 3rd party vendor for large mortgage companies and deal with sensitive client data – there were many review cycles between the Cyara and Assurant legal teams to ensure compliance requirements would be met throughout the contracting processes.
- Consider, once you have implemented your automated testing solution, whether you will need to use actual production data in testing. This is something to bring up with legal, security, and compliance, and your automation solution provider to ensure sensitive client data is protected. For Assurant, after we launched our use of the Cyara Platform, we have implemented the practice of deleting data and test runs after testing sprints to remove any data from the cloud and satisfy legal and security requirements.
While dotting our “I”s and crossing our “T”s through the contracting process necessitated a longer, harder look at how Assurant would be using the automation solution once implemented, getting the development and operations team up to speed and utilizing it to conduct IVR tests has happened in a matter of months, even in the face of corona virus-necessitated online versus in-person training.
And since implementation, we’ve continued to find new ways to utilize the platform to save time, reallocate resources to more important projects, and help us find issues within CX earlier, faster, and before our customers experience them.
Watch my session from Cyara’s Xchange 2020 Virtual Summit!
