MONDAY, MARCH 26
Registration – 2:00 to 5:00
Join us on the Theater Level to pick up your badge. It’s just one escalator ride down from the lobby.Cyara Ideathon – 3:00 to 5:00, Orpheum
Join the inaugural Ideathon for extending and applying the Cyara Platform to new and innovative uses! This multi-session event spanning the three days of Cyara Xchange will reward creativity and technical skills as we look to apply Cyara’s APIs (and potential APIs of the future) to real-world problems your organization is having, or may soon be having. The initial brainstorming session, prior to the cocktail reception, will get your creative juices flowing. There are no bad ideas and we’ll discuss anything you bring prepared as well as ideas that emerge on the spot from comparing notes with like-minded technical users interested in getting the most from the Cyara APIs. This 2-hour session will culminate in the forming of a limited number of teams to develop the most promising ideas and categories that would benefit from cross-organizational sharing of great ideas. Register now, as space is limited.
Welcome Reception – 6:00 to 8:00, 36th Floor
All our conference attendees are cordially invited to join us on the 36th Floor of the Grand Hyatt San Francisco starting at 6:00pm until 8:00pm. The sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge will be on full display between the Sunset and Bayview rooms. We’ve gone so far as to schedule sunset at 7:25pm. Bring your cameras – this is a photo opportunity.
Conference attendees can use this casual opportunity to mix and mingle with the Cyara team, along with old and new faces, while enjoying libations and nibbles. If you’re new to Cyara, ask a member of our team to introduce you to someone. You are not going to want to miss this kickoff networking event.
TUESDAY, MARCH 27
7:30-8:30
Breakfast
8:30-9:00
CX Transformation with Assurance
Alok Kulkarni | CEO and Co-Founder
Welcome to the inaugural Cyara Xchange conference. Twelve years ago, Cyara was founded with the vision to help companies be confident that they were delivering great customer experiences each and every time, even in a world with rapidly changing customer expectations and an ever increasingly complex technology ecosystem. Learn how digital transformation, innovative customer journeys, and new industry trends have been embraced by some of the world’s leading CX companies.
9:00-9:30
CX Meets AI in an Omnichannel World
Tom Fejes | Chief Engineer
It’s no secret that AI holds a lot of promise in the CX space across voice and digital channels. In his presentation, Tom will explore the possibilities of AI from a Cyara perspective, from the coming age of chatbots, ‘testing AI with AI’, and the evolution beyond scripting. He will also examine the potential pitfalls of AI along the way.9:30-10:00
Enabling Digital Transformation for World-Class Retail
Joe Timem | VP Credit Systems
Join Alok Kulkarni as he discusses with Joe Timem the challenges and hurdles he overcame at Macy’s to ensure the customer experience they designed was delivered. Macy’s complicated interworkings needed to be working throughout the holiday season, starting with Black Friday.
10:00-10:30
Break
10:30-11:15
Shift Left: Driving Quality Earlier in Development Lifecycle
Steve Hares Director of Quality Engineering
Chris Labonne Solutions Engineer
Do you find yourself spending far too much time finding and fixing bugs in QA only to see more found in production? How do you minimize these bugs and unplanned work so you can maximize your productive time? By building a sense of ownership for quality across the entire development lifecycle, you can begin to drive out bugs and reduce rework, freeing up time for new feature development. But how do you do that? What are the processes you need to put in place, and how do you manage that in a dispersed, global environment? Join this session and gain insight into best practices for shifting quality left and building quality into the organization.
CX Assurance is for More than Just your Contact Center Applications
Brent Ludlam Voice Manager, Infrastructure & Services
Elizabeth Magill Sr. Director Product Marketing
The way you engage with your customers extends beyond your contact center applications. The Cyara Platform offers a highly flexible solution for managing CX Assurance across all your customer facing voice and digital applications. The New Zealand Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has used the Cyara Platform throughout their CX ecosystem to ensure they deliver high quality voice and digital experiences to their customers, as well as their employees. From testing during a UC migration to assuring call monitoring system, MSD has been one of the most expansive and innovative users of the Cyara Platform to solve real world communication challenges. Join this session and learn about the various ways in which MSD has used Cyara, and the value they’ve derived.
11:30-12:15
How to Get a Quick Start to Monitoring Your CX
Mark Downing Contact Center Telephony Application Management
Andriy Zakharchenko Manager of Solutions Engineering NALA
Assurance isn’t just for the development cycle. A comprehensive assurance program extends to monitoring your CX in production. But where do you get started? Join this session and learn how Ford was able to rapidly activate Cyara Pulse by getting started with just two monitoring test cases. Narrowing their scope enabled Ford to get some quick wins by identifying defects that could negatively impact the customer experience. With these early successes, Ford is on track to expand the scope of their monitoring, to ensure that they are able to deliver a flawless CX, each and every time.
Best Practices in Automating Functional/Regression Testing
Scott Anderson Senior Team Lead – Quality Assurance & Testing
Sasikanth Kurra Manager, Software Quality Assurance & Release
Matt Schwarz Customer Delivery Manager
To deliver a high quality CX requires constant enhancements and ongoing improvements. To ensure the enhancements are high quality, the development cycle requires testing throughout the development cycle. Automated testing makes it easier to test sufficiently without delaying schedules. Join this session and learn best practices from industry pioneers in harnessing the power of test automation to ensure you get the most out of functional and regression testing.
12:15-1:45
Lunch
1:45-2:30
Automating IVR Discovery
J.T. Evans Consultant
John Leonardelli Solution Consultant
Is your IVR documented? How do you keep that documentation current? For many organizations, updating your IVR starts with the tedious process of discovering and documenting your existing IVR. Join this session and learn how Forty7Ronin is saving dozens of hours by automating the discovery of IVRs, documenting the existing IVR journeys, and using that as a baseline for communicating updates and revisions.
Performance Testing Best Practices
Pete Dhadwar Sr. Manager, Contact Centre Technology
Chandra Golla Sr. Consultant
Ensuring that your CX applications perform flawlessly in production is no easy feat. A key step in that process is performance testing. Beyond basic load testing, there are many other use cases including soak testing, disaster recover testing, or conducting system performance baselining to name a few. Join this session and hear from RBC and Cyara experts on their approach to performance testing, best practices in when to conduct them, and lessons learned in effective approaches to managing performance tests.
2:45-3:30
Main Stage Panel
Transforming Your Development Organization to Support an Agile World
Anil Ravula Staff Vice President
Mitch Glaser Contact Center System Manager
Mark Remington Vice President of Application Services
Amy Hudson Global Head, Domain Consulting
This lively panel discussion with three of Cyara’s most innovative thought leaders will be moderated by Amy Hudson, Global Head, Domain Consulting, and will cover the reasons that transitioning to Agile and DevOps helps businesses respond to the ever-changing demands and requirements put upon them on a continual basis. The emphasis will be on how to get to market faster with high quality to ensure a good CX.
3:30-4:30
The Data Behind DevOps: Becoming a High Performer
Dr Nicole Forsgren | CEO and Chief Scientist
How do you become a high performing technology organization? Over the past four years, the State of DevOps Report has shown how high-performing IT teams decisively outperform low-performing peers. The report has also investigated the effects of burnout, culture and employee engagement on organizational performance. Nicole Forsgren shares insights into the key leadership, technical, architectural, and product capabilities that drive these outcomes. She offers highlights uncovered over the last four years from the 23,000+ responses.
5:00-5:30
Book Signing
Nicole will be signing copies – all Cyara Xchange 2018 attendees receive a complimentary book – of her newest book co-authored with Jez Humble and Gene Kim, releasing on March 27th. Accelerate is based on four years of groundbreaking research and set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance – and what drives it – using rigorous statistical methods.6:00-10:30
Gala Dinner
La Mar Cebicheria Peruana, Pier 1½ The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 La Mar San Francisco’s executive chef Victoriano Lopez has always been dedicated to sharing the traditions and cultures of his native country, Peru. A recent homecoming trip through Peru, led him to the creation of beautiful and delicious new dishes that enhance the offerings at what is a favorite dining spot of San Francisco locals. Join us as we take you on a Peruvian extravaganza that starts with pisco sours and includes modern and traditional cebiches to iconic empanadas. The family-style menu throughout the evening will take you on a creative voyage through Peru, showcasing the diverse landscape and ethnicities that make up the country’s culture. Enjoy the waterside view and atmosphere within the historic ferry building. There is truly something for everyone and nobody does Peruvian better than Chef Lopez.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28
7:30-8:30
Breakfast
8:30-8:45
Opening Remarks
James Isaacs | President
Start the second day with an engaging review of the top 10 best practices that we have learned in partnering with hundreds of customers in their journeys to innovate, operationalize, and deliver great CX.8:45-9:15
Robots, CX and the Pending Apocalypse
Merijn te Booij | Chief Marketing Officer
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a top discussion item for most business and IT executives because of its potential disruption. For most enterprises, the proliferation of customer engagement channels threatens efforts to provide personalized service. Adding AI to this mix raises critical questions: How will AI advance digital business? To what extent will AI augment the role of humans? To what extent will AI displace humans altogether? How can AI be used to both drive down costs and increase customer loyalty? Or is it just the looming Apocalypse from now, and if so, will it at least be fun?
9:15-9:45
A Point of View vs. Data Driven Insights
Beverly McIntosh | President, Managing Partner
Are your insights about your CX based on opinion and operational assumptions or hard data? Beyond best practice testing for IVR script accuracy and routing integrity, Cyara monitoring technology provides data on a technical area impacting the customer experience – voice quality. We listen to calls to understand the interaction drivers of customer loyalty, but those drivers are impactful only when our telephony platforms enable clear and effective communications. Join this session to glean customer loyalty insights across diverse industries, shatter a few long-held customer experience biases, and uncover pragmatic steps for improving voice quality and the customer experience. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian educator, scholar, and visionary said it best: “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
9:45-10:15
The Road Ahead for Cyara Products
Mike Monegan | VP, Product Management
Come learn about the strategic investments and follow-through refinements Cyara is making in the base platform and its associated add-ons. 2018 is going to bring some exciting innovations in areas such as CX Models, Automating The Automation™, Automated Troubleshooting, Test Data Management, Omnichannel Journey Testing, and Conversational Testing for ChatBots, Assistants and NLU IVRs. Whether you are relatively new to Cyara or a hands-on veteran of the Platform, you will gain perspective on the four major themes that guide the path forward and how you can participate in the process of product refinement and rollout.10:15-10:45
Break
10:45-11:30
Validating Global Routing
Clay Blanton QA Manager
Wayne McMahan Customer Success Engineer
Airbnb is a global company with a footprint extending to 191 countries. This requires a global contact center infrastructure that can support most languages. How do you ensure that calls are getting routed to the right agent with the right set of skills, and that the correct data is being passed? Join this session and learn how Airbnb is using Cyara solutions to validate upwards of 100 different routing schemes. You’ll gain insight into key techniques Airbnb has deployed to cut down time and increase quality of voice service delivery.
The Value of a Comprehensive CX Assurance Platform
Patrick Fisk Contact Center Telephony Application Manager
Linda Chen Chief Marketing Officer
Only 4% of customers will tell you when they’ve had a bad experience. That’s why it’s so important to ensure quality of your CX applications. Done properly, CX assurance occurs throughout the development lifecycle. Join this session and hear how an industry leader manages their CX assurance holistically from automating testing during development to monitoring to assure enhancements are working as designed.
11:45-12:30
Managing Omnichannel CX Assurance
Luan Tran CTO, Co-Founder
Mark Ryan Solutions Engineer
Your customers engage with you when and how they want. They aren’t constrained by channels, and in fact more and more customer journeys span multiple channels of interaction. Join this session and learn from industry experts how they are assuring quality across voice and digital channels, as well as testing and monitoring journeys that hop across channels.
Effectively Managing Your Test Data
Gauthier Delmee Domain Consultant
To test and monitor a sophisticated CX requires that you test the data calls your systems perform. To avoid exposing sensitive, private data, you need test data. But managing test data is one of the thorniest issues for testing and monitoring. Join this session to learn how others are tackling this issue, and share your inputs on what Cyara can do to help make it easier.
12:30-1:45
Lunch
2:00-5:30
Training
Velocity Training at Xchange Now it’s time to get hands-on with Velocity and find out how it can work for you. In this 3-hour session, we’ll guide you through how to create your own CX models and automatically generate test cases. You’ll spend time becoming familiar with the test case auto transcription feature and how to apply this under various scenarios. Bring your laptops as you’ll be creating your own Velocity test cases! To reserve a space in the Velocity training session, register here. Certification at Xchange Have you completed a Cyara Academy training course but haven’t been certified? We are running online certifications on every course on both days at Cyara Xchange at a discounted cost of $100 per certification. All you need to bring is your laptop. Please email Cameron Esposito catraining@cyara.com to register your interest, together with the Cyara Academy courses you would like to attempt the certification in.
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