DevOps for Customer Experience

Charlene O’Hanlon and Amy Hudson of Cyara discuss the concept of DevOps for customer experience, which takes DevOps methodology and focuses it on CX software. But there are pitfalls DevOps teams face when dealing with customer experience software. The video is below followed by a complete transcript of the conversation.

Announcer: This is Digital Anarchist.

O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Tech Strong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with Amy Hudson, who is the VP of Global Center of Excellence at Cyara. Amy, thank you so much for taking a couple minutes and talking with me today—I really appreciate it.

Hudson: I’m happy to be here.

O’Hanlon: Great, great. So, Amy, tell me a little bit about Cyara to start off.

Hudson: Oh, absolutely. Cyara has been around for about 10 years at this point, but we really focus on what we call customer experience assurance. Companies spend a lot of money in designing the right customer experience and all the technology that supports it, and Cyara is in the business of making sure that you are getting the experience you’ve invested in. And if you are, how do we help you continue to innovate and double down? And if you’re not, how do we help you fix it very quickly so you can stay ahead?

O’Hanlon: Alright. That sounds great, and I imagine your business has been booming over the last year or so, because customer really came to the forefront for a lot of organizations as they kinda had to double down on their digital transformation efforts just to stay alive over the pandemic, over the last year and a half or so. And some of them have done it really well and others have not done as well.

So, what are you guys seeing in the market right now as far as customer is experience is going?

Hudson: Yeah, no, that’s a great question, because it has changed a lot in the last year, with the pandemic. I mean, listen, customers have historically always been demanding, right? That’s in our nature as customers. But now, with their hands on the technology, customers have very high expectations right now. And switching costs are low. So, if a customer doesn’t get what they’re looking for out of an experience, you may lose them.

And so, the importance of having a good customer experience and staying ahead of it is at an all-time high from our perspective.

O’Hanlon: So, we’ve been, obviously, you know, through DevOps.com, we focus on the benefits of going with a, kind of a DevOps methodology and mindset and culture shift and all that good stuff. And we’ve seen kind of that whole premise of DevOps kind of shifted to other parts of an organization as they recognize the benefits of kind of blending two different maybe mindsets and areas of an organization together to kind of streamline operations and actually build a better product in the long run.

I imagine customer service is not—has not been left out of the conversation when we’re talking about organizations adopting those DevOps principles for customer experience.

Hudson: Yeah, that’s right. It’s interesting. So, about four or five years ago at Cyara, we started seeing DevOps fold into the contact center/customer experience space, but it was a little bit more of a rarity then. DevOps hadn’t necessarily intersected with customer experience yet at that point, but over the last three couple years or so, we’ve really seen DevOps become much more commonplace in the customer experience space. Which I think is a good thing, because, exactly what I mentioned before—you need to stay ahead. You need to be able to innovate quickly for customer experience, and I think these companies are starting to see that.

So, we’re starting to see DevOps adopted almost universally. Either somebody has started it or is halfway through or a little more mature, but it’s in the conversation with almost everybody we talk to these days in terms of customer experience.

O’Hanlon: That’s great. That’s really great to hear, because there are certainly a lot of benefits to DevOps in the customer experience space, you know, not the least of which is being able to service the customer much more effectively and quickly.

But it’s not kind of a one to one adjustment, though. You know, it seems like, especially since, when we’re talking about DevOps, we recognize that each DevOps implementation and each DevOps experience, if you will, is different. You know, everyone is kind of a snowflake.

So, how does that equate to the customer experience and how might that actually kinda trip up organizations if they’re looking to kind of add DevOps to their customer experience?

Hudson: Yeah, absolutely. So, when I first started at Cyara, I led a very small strategic consulting group, and we worked with customers on how Cyara can help them through any major transformation. And because of the shift of the industry, it ended up being a lot of DevOps transformations. And so, we’ve seen customers at multiple different points in the journey, and the struggles that they’ve bumped into. And I think there are a number of different kind of pitfalls if you will, or lessons learned from that.

And, you know, one of the first things—and we can go into as many of these that are of interest, but one of the first things and most important that pops out at us is that leadership level cultural shift. I think, so frequently—and I’m leading with this because if you don’t get this part right, it’s really gonna hold you up. But so frequently, DevOps is viewed as a technical or process change and so, it happens at the day to day level. But really, it is a mind shift, cultural shift, has to be top down, has to be embedded in the culture, and it has to be leadership driven.

O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm, yeah. I agree, agree, and that goes across an entire organization, no matter where they’re implementing DevOps, whether it’s in IT or if it’s in the back office or marketing. Because we’re seeing this blending of so many different disciplines in an organization these days as ways to advance and accelerate just their ways of doing business.

But to your point, if we don’t have, or if an organization doesn’t have that buy-in from the top, no matter where they’re implementing DevOps in an organization, it’s doomed to failure.

Hudson: That’s right, that’s right. And it’s, you know, and it’s not just the kickoff, it’s not just somebody at the C level saying “rah rah” at the beginning.

O’Hanlon: Right.

Hudson: This is, like, through the process, embedding into how you motivate, incentivize, how you reward people, how you—you know, in your regular cadences. It’s everywhere. It needs to be treated as a cultural shift.

O’Hanlon: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. Now, what about, you know, beyond kind of that initial, as organizations start to kind of adopt this mindset and these principles, what are some of the things that maybe we call it kinda DevOps Phase Two or DevOps 2.0, the Second Day DevOps—what are some of the things that you guys are seeing that organizations need to be very mindful of to make sure that they are successful?

Hudson: Yeah, another thing that we’re kinda bumping into at more of the kind of operational level is, as you know, the importance of flow in DevOps, right?

O’Hanlon: Right.

Hudson: You don’t wanna disrupt the flow. And to do that well, you have to think about automation, right? It’s just—it’s a no-brainer. It’s a pillar, right? And to me, when I think about automation, there’s a lot of different pockets you can automate. But for me, I think primarily around deployment automation and testing automation.

We did an interview—or I did an interview with a consulting, one of the big four consultants with the DevOps expertise and a customer. And both of them agreed that automating the testing, while it’s not always completely simple or straightforward, it is, they would almost consider it the low hanging fruit, right? Get the testing automated so you can just kind of plug and play that part of it, don’t disrupt the flow.

From a deployment perspective, there’s a number of different environments, right, to get something into production. So, the more you can automate from that perspective, the more you can continue to push things out and learn fast and fail fast, if you will.

And so, finding those pockets of automation and having a strategy on how you can automate as much as possible as to not disrupt the flow is something that we’re really recommending to folks to realize the total benefit of the transformation.

O’Hanlon: What about from a people perspective? You know, DevOps is as much about culture, as we know, as it is about the processes and the technologies. So, are there ways that organizations—maybe they’re not thinking about particular things when it comes to culture and people in their adoption of DevOps specifically for customer experience?

Hudson: Yeah, sure. So, I would answer that a couple different ways. The first one I would talk about is essentially around—this is, again, it’s a culture thing. One of the pillars of DevOps is to create an environment that encourages learning and a safe place to fail. And so, you want your teams to be encouraged to fail if they have to and learn from it and get better the next time and feel safe doing that. So, that’s one from a person perspective.

The other thing I would mention is just around measuring, key performance indicators, right? You can’t know if you’re successful without measuring, right?

O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

Hudson: And then publishing those KPIs so they’re transparent. Transparency is really important, so everybody is charging towards the same goal, and everybody feels like they are part of achieving that goal. So, let’s get the performance indicators out there, let’s be clear what we’re trying to achieve, let’s make people feel safe in that process. And, you know, that’s kinda the culture you wanna build around it.

O’Hanlon: So, when we’re talking about customer service applications and software versus, say, an internal process or internal DevOps process or an internal application that is being advanced by these DevOps processes, what is the difference when we’re looking at what may be what those KPIs are or what the service level objectives are, things like that? Are there certain things that an organization needs to be more mindful of when they’re working on a customer experience type software rather than maybe more internal focused or maybe other customer that’s not maybe customer facing, end user customer facing?

Hudson: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And what we’re trying to do within our industry is create this mind shift where you are thinking about the end customer all the time—not just in the production environment, you are always thinking about the end customer experience through every step of the journey.

And I’ll give you an example of what I mean by that. Traditionally, the contact center space, how they would monitor things in testing or production is kind of server loads or capacities, right? If it’s reached capacity, it’ll set off an alarm and that’s a problem, right? You don’t want it to be at capacity.

Great, but you might not know what the customer experience is if that server is at capacity, right?

O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

Hudson: And so, at Cyara, what we’re trying to do is say—absolutely, that server might be at capacity and that’s a problem, but what is the customer experiencing in the moment right now in production? But we also wanna test in Dev and QA and UAT and performance testing, what the customer experience would be. So, if there’s an issue that comes up, you know it could be a pretty serious one, it could be calls being disconnected. If, in your revenue generating phone lines or chat windows, customers can’t get through—you wanna know that before it gets into production.

O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

Hudson: You don’t wanna know necessarily that—or it may be less helpful to know if a certain piece of technology is at capacity. What’s most valuable is to know what the customer would experience in that moment, even before it gets into production, if you can do that.

O’Hanlon: Interesting. You know, it’s really fascinating to have the conversation about DevOps in different vertical markets, because everybody’s got something different that they’re really, really focusing their efforts on, but at the end of the day, it really is all about just making sure that the end user experience is the best it can be, and that the application is working as advertised and certainly that there’s a level of security as well within that application.

So, I do imagine that security is also a big part of the equation, especially with the customer experience and the amount of sensitive data that a lot of contact centers, to your point, that they’re dealing with on a regular basis. So, heavy emphasis on Sec on DevSecOps?

Hudson: Oh, absolutely. And that’s really from two ends. One is that customer data, right? There’s—you have to protect that. There are sensitivities, and those need to be protected, and we need to invest in those, and you need to be able to test that in production or prior to that if possible, right?

But the other side of it, too, is around the regulatory requirements, right? Customers will—our customers, large companies—will get fined if certain requirements aren’t met, right? And so, from a pure business perspective, you’re motivated to make sure the customer is experiencing that requirement. But then from their own protective perspective, you’re also motivated.

And so, DevSecOps, we really encourage people to fold security in very early in the discussions. It’s often one of the last things to come up—“Oh, wait, did we talk about security, did we bring in that team?” Fold them in early, complete transparency, get the conversations in and weave them into the process, because it’s critical.

O’Hanlon: Excellent, excellent. Amy, this has been a great conversation. I’ve really, really enjoyed it, and would definitely love to have future conversations with you about other topics related to DevOps and the customer experience, because I really think that this is something that is—it’s not gonna be a one and done conversation. It’s like DevOps. Customer is an evolving conversation.

But for now, thank you so much for taking the time and having the conversation with me. I do appreciate it.

Hudson: Thanks for having me. It’s a privilege to be here.

O’Hanlon: Alright, great. Alright, everybody, please stick around. We’ve got lots more Tech Strong TV coming up, so stay tuned.

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