I had the great pleasure of attending the Gartner Application Strategies and Solutions Summit in Las Vegas last week. My objective for the week was to participate in the CX Track, learn from Gartner research and thought leadership, and better understand the challenges IT leaders face as it relates to CX.
The event overall was fabulous — from the CX Boot Camp on Sunday, all the way through the closing keynote on Wednesday. But, the session that stuck with me most was the opening keynote, featuring four Gartner leaders.
Embracing Yes
The overarching theme for this session was about embracing “yes.” The underlying message is that IT has long been perceived as the organization that says “no.” The Gartner analysts posited that by shifting your attitude from no to yes, you can more effectively partner with the business units to focus on achieving business outcomes, rather than by being governed by limitations and constraints.
My favorite part of this keynote was a story about Tina Fey, who, let’s face it, is just kind of awesome. Her quote (as told to Oprah in an AHA! Moment) is “Say yes, and you’ll figure it out afterward.” This principle has guided her through key decisions, such as moving to New York with a week’s notice to become a writer for Saturday Night Live. These were opportunities that she wasn’t sure she was quite ready for. But, she decided to say yes, and doing so led to her success.
Saying yes worked for Tina Fey. Can it work for you?
The world for IT professionals is of course different from Tina Fey’s. Her constraint was her belief in herself. IT professionals face concrete constraints with resources, time, and funding. Even so, the advice to shift to an attitude of yes is good. Just as Tina figured it out, so can we, whether it’s reprioritizing projects, making trade-offs, or adopting technologies that increase our productivity.
Enabling Yes
It’s this last point where Cyara can help. By automating your CX assurance activities — testing and monitoring — you can increase productivity, throughput and quality. You can say yes to the business. You can add that new feature. You can update your customer journeys. You can add a new channel. You can change your routing rules. And, before you put any of that into production, you can thoroughly test these changes, and ensure they all work as designed. And because testing is automated, you can test more and you don’t have to compromise on quality. Even better, because the CX you deliver is higher quality, you reduce rework, thereby increasing your throughput for new features. Once in production, you can keep an eye on all your customer journeys, making sure you are able to consistently deliver flawless CX.
So, go ahead, and say yes!