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3 Performance Challenges as Chatbot Adoption Grows

Today, many organizations are starting to use voice or text-enabled chatbots for the first time or already have chatbot systems in place. In fact, Gartner said 25% of organizations are predicted to make chatbots their primary customer communication channel by 2027. This is because consumer behavior has shifted to primarily digital interactions and away from traditional customer support channels.

As a result of today’s digital landscape, consumers are now accustomed to immediate gratification and expect instant responses and resolution from customer support, which makes chatbots an ideal solution for brands to rapidly serve customers. Due to this rising demand for instant customer service, chatbot systems have become more sophisticated and consumers’ reliance on them is increasing. This increase in adoption has led to higher performance expectations for bots and if those expectations are not met, customer satisfaction and brand loyalty will suffer.

Below, we’ll look at three major challenges tied to the growing popularity of chatbots as they handle larger and more diverse groups of customers, and how business leaders developers and DevOps and customer experience (CX) teams can tackle these common challenges with a continuous testing approach.

The Pain Points of Adoption: 3 Key Challenges as Chatbot Usage Grows

As the popularity of chatbots explodes for customers around the world, the underlying systems that handle natural language processing (NLP), latency, data security and other functions need to be stronger. This is due to a growing and increasingly diverse demographic of users, many of whom are sharing more of their personal information to address a wider range of customer needs. Common chatbot pain points can be summarized by three overarching challenges.

Challenge #1: Chatbots must contend with a larger and more diverse base of customers

Chatbots that are voice or text-enabled must be smart enough to operate securely while navigating countless variations in spelling, a wide range of spoken accents and vernacular, background noise, static from bad connections and more. Even in a single language, there may typically be only four or five “intents” from most customers in engaging a chatbot, but those intents may be phrased in hundreds of different ways. Now, the global growth in adoption raises the chance of poor connections and exponentially increases the number of languages and variations in phrasing that a chatbot must understand and interpret.

Challenge #2: Customers are trusting chatbots with more personal and sensitive data

As chatbots become smarter and more trusted by customers to meet their needs, people are getting more comfortable giving their personal data to chatbots. That increases the number of situations where chatbots are working with personally identifiable information (PII) or other highly sensitive data. Especially given GDPR and other data privacy regulations being enacted worldwide, there’s added pressure to ensure a chatbot system’s handling of this data remains secure and compliant across all use cases and geographic regions.

Challenge #3: Modern chatbots require 24/7 availability and reliability

In an era of flexible work and millennial and Gen Z audiences interacting with bots after business hours and on weekends, chatbots can’t afford to work in shifts. Users may be spread across many time zones or around the world, meaning there’s always a sizable portion of customers awake, online and looking for fast and efficient service. Because of this, chatbots must be able to handle spikes and heavy traffic 24/7.

The executive takeaway from these challenges is that modern chatbot investments must be built around dynamic systems capable of adjusting to shifting customer usage and performance requirements.

A Continuous Testing Mindset is Required for Top Chatbot Performance

Fortunately, by honoring a few best practices and making the right strategic technology investments in automated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-driven systems, C-suite leaders responsible for CX and the teams they manage can deploy chatbots capable of keeping up with the above challenges. Perhaps the most central element for success is to embrace a continuous testing approach.

For example, when a company is undergoing digital transformation and shifting its contact centers and supporting systems to the cloud, they are moving a significant amount of data, reimagining complex integrations and rearchitecting processes. In order to maintain application stability and existing integrations in the contact center, continuous testing is critical to ensure that an organization’s systems still operate effectively throughout the cloud migration process. With continuous testing, development and testing aren’t separate processes. The testing is automated and quality assurance is involved as developers submit code.

The most effective approach to continuous testing includes end-to-end analysis across all channels. Testing chatbot behaviors should mimic real-time customer interactions. This should include challenging scenarios such as unexpected user inputs and usage spikes at random times of the day and night. Automation is critical, especially in peak demand scenarios such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, open enrollment, etc. Load testing up to 1,000-100,000 bot requests per second, or more, can help ensure companies will be able to handle the increased traffic. Ideally, the testing approach should be comprehensive to include automated NLP score testing, conversational flow testing and security testing and performance testing and monitoring.

By promoting the continuous testing approach across contact center operations, executives can empower their teams to build and maintain chatbots that remain optimized on an ongoing basis and that form an essential part of providing exceptional CX. This will make a huge difference in performance and reliability as systems scale and adapt to the evolving demands of a growing customer base.

Continuous Testing Elevates Chatbot Reliability and Value

High-performing chatbots and the continuous testing that keeps them optimized at those performance levels can benefit any company by lowering risks and enhancing revenue. Organizations that become adept at applying continuous testing avoid 90% of the downtime from high-severity (SEV 1) errors, which can result in saving $2.2 million in costs over a three-year period. When continuous testing touches every stage of the development process, it identifies issues earlier and helps strengthen an organization’s ability to innovate faster and service its customers effectively and profitably.

January 31, 2023
Next-Level Tech: DevOps Meets CSOps

Operations are some of the most important aspects of an organization. In tech, DevOps has dominated the conversation due to its necessity in keeping up with the rate of building products, applications and infrastructure with code. DevOps encompasses much more than a team of developers; it is a culture, a set of practices and tools that allow organizations to deliver applications with speed and scale and then effectively operate. This philosophy has been incredibly useful over the last decade but has lacked a connection with other parts of the organization. Developer teams are connected, but within their silo, their work is lacking integration with the end user, diluting the opportunity to deliver the best solutions for their customers. More immediately, developers, DevOps and ITops cannot see the breadth of impact when working in an autonomous environment, leading to poor prioritization and remediation.

Enter customer service. Another pillar of organizational strength, customer service is not only a necessity but has risen to become a strategic function for the business. They are the first responders of a business when digital services don’t work as expected or their customer expectations are not met. Customer service agents are highly trained, well-funded and armed with the latest technology so they can be the most effective first point of contact for customers. Customer service teams can learn something from developers in their organization and work within the same kind of ‘operations’ model that dictates philosophies and practices: in other words, CSOps or customer service operations.

Why CSOps?

Customer service is an incredibly powerful element of business operations, as it is tied to user experience. Consumers are not shy about announcing when they have experienced poor customer service, and the opposite is also true. End users also loudly trumpet the moments that they have received strong customer service; that goes a long way in creating loyalty, repeat business and retention. In a study from Bain & Company, it was noted that customers were four times more likely to buy from a competitor if they experienced a service-related problem rather than an issue based on price or product. Leading with customer service, like many e-commerce platforms have done, is a new standard of operating and is critical to meeting the expectations of customers. In a B2B setting, customer service is no different. Customers or users are drawn to organizations that can quickly remediate their concerns in a frictionless and efficient manner.

Customer service is now at the forefront of corporate initiatives and isn’t going anywhere. In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, analysts and executives weighed in on CIO budgets and forecasted priorities amidst growing recession concerns. With cuts coming to some areas, customer service was not one of them. The overall sentiment is that “businesses see more value than ever in tech that will enhance the customer experience and give them an edge in an increasingly tight market.”

In today’s organizations, you cannot compete with DevOps if you do not have CSOps. They are symbiotic in their relationship to the bottom line—if products or applications do not meet the customer’s desired outcome, communication from customer service teams must connect with developers and convey what’s wrong or missing. Then, developers can work to provide the proper solutions. Customer service operations feed the DevOps pipeline to create products and services that address customer needs. In other words, you cannot succeed with DevOps if you don’t have CSOps.

Creating the DevOps and CSOps Relationship

The truth is that most CSOps and back office teams like SREs or ITOps don’t have a good relationship, nor do they have effective processes to communicate with each other. This disconnect not only creates problems with customers, but the lack of internal communication creates fault lines across teams and an inability to produce results efficiently. With the trajectory of technology organizations over the last decade ignited by the SaaS model, flexible work and the rise of applications, it is important to look at best practices within an organization and understand how teams can work better together.

While developer teams continue to iterate and produce code, customer service teams are constantly fielding customer feedback, concerns and complaints. Customer service agents are often the first to learn if something is broken and where—if organizations are not using their front-line workers as a tool in remediation and incident response, they are missing out on valuable information that can help them find a solution.

Beyond just fielding complaints and reports about product and service issues, customer service teams are able to aggregate and correlate reports, as well as gather additional information from reporting users. When something goes wrong, mobilizing the required rapid response can often be difficult. If there is a lack of communication between the customer service teams and the developer or engineering teams, a customer complaint about a product or service could take too long to make it through remediation. Creating a rapid connection from the customer service team to the developer team allows customer service agents to have visibility into the problem and the solution, offering feedback to the customer in real-time as the solution is being implemented. It is this ‘Ops’ culture on both the customer service and development teams that supports the organization from end to end.

The symbiotic relationship of DevOps and CSOps can benefit any organization, but adoption requires visibility and bi-directional communication. Development teams that are in close contact with their customer service teams benefit from having better, real-world user information that can then be incorporated into new features and improvements. When customer service teams have a clear path to escalate customer-reported issues—with the right context to the appropriate teams—time to resolution decreases by eliminating silos and breaking down the walls between CSOps and DevOps.

It is time that every organization integrates customer service teams as part of delivering on customer satisfaction instead of just reporting on it. The integration with engineering and back office teams creates a culture of service-first operations.

August 12, 2022
The Importance of Customer Experience Observability

Ask anyone to name their favorite brand, and they’ll often respond with minimal hesitation. Prod a little further and the importance of customer experience (CX) is sure to play a major role in their response. In fact, 96% of consumers say CX is a key factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand. This sentiment is even more powerful post-pandemic, with 58% of consumers saying they place more importance on CX when making purchasing decisions than they did pre-pandemic.

Will the importance of CX only increase? That’s a safe bet. So how does a business get to Apple, Disney or Amazon-level CX? Reliability is a good place to start.

Reliability—in the context of a digital-first business—is the ability to quickly identify and resolve issues before they reach the customer. Reliability is a critical demand of both consumers and enterprises as they pursue digital transformation, especially cloud migration and automation.

Achieving reliability may sound rather straightforward, but many factors in DevOps often work against reliability. For instance, many DevOps teams focus solely on technical performance metrics but turn a blind eye to CX metrics like churn rate or net promoter scores (NPS). Some business leaders fix this with advanced AI and machine learning technology, but too often those solutions don’t live up to expectations enough to provide a return on investment (ROI).

Observability, on the other hand, is an approach that collects and analyzes data on every component of a system, application and infrastructure—from performance to security to accessibility. This information allows DevOps teams to glean insights on the reliability of actions performed within a unique business environment, such as an interactive voice response (IVR) system or a contact center.

Gartner defines observability as the evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insights to speed innovation and enhance CX. To establish digital observability, DevOps teams should consider the following components.

Enable Automated Testing of Digital Technology Functions

Every day, companies are losing revenue due to a lack of customer experience observability. Forrester reported that more than $1 billion in potential revenue is being left up for grabs. This is largely due to poor comprehensive customer experience technology investment decisions. As DevOps teams work to deliver new CX innovations—like personalized VR shopping experiences or advanced AI-based chat support functions—they do their best to foresee potential flaws or bugs. However, flaws will inevitably creep in. That’s why consistent observability is crucial. Observability helps DevOps practitioners see these issues quickly and gives them optimum time to respond before it becomes a costly threat to customer experience.

To provide this level of observability, data must be available, accurate and analyzed in real-time. This requires automated solutions because the faster a data set can be analyzed, the more value it will deliver. Automated testing tools work by generating thousands of synthetic omnichannel interactions to test the customer journey from the outside-in—from the network through IVRs to digital apps and routing systems, all the way to agents at their desktops. Automated testing of elements such as connectivity, responsiveness, quality and functionality can help DevOps teams ensure quality is achieved throughout the entire CX development life cycle.

Determine How Test Data Will be Used to Improve Reliability

Detecting issues early also requires precision and intentionality that answers questions like: What data will be collected? Who will own and examine the data? Why does that data matter to our business? Being able to analyze, organize, manipulate and share test data helps DevOps teams have greater ownership and oversight over information that’s constantly coming in.

DevOps organizations benefit from using a platform that centralizes all voice call test data for the entire team so that nothing is missed, and the data can cover a wide array of use cases. Typical test datasets might include information on factors such as customer persona labels (for example, Gold, Silver and Bronze customers or labels by Line-of-Business), order status or payment methods. A centralized monitoring and testing platform allows DevOps teams to create and import comma Separated Values (CSV) files to create a test dataset for a specific IVR and then use it to test the organization’s other IVR systems to save time by not re-creating it manually. It’s also important for internal teams to be able to track who is modifying test data, when it’s being modified and which test cases are using specific datasets.

Dedicate an Executive Champion of Customer Experience

E ighty-four percent of businesses that focus on improving CX report an increase in revenue. Executive investment in CX is critical here and considering the ROI, should not be a difficult sell. To go even further, businesses should consider establishing a leadership role that is responsible for proactively addressing CX and reliability.

For CX digital transformation initiatives to succeed, they must be led by an executive leader who can champion the need to drive cultural change and strategic investments. Appointing an executive to this role will ensure that CX initiatives aren’t siloed from DevOps teams, but also from the rest of the enterprise, including sales, marketing, operations and more.

Some organizations choose to create an entirely new chief CX officer role so that the leader can give their full attention to CX transformation initiatives, processes and technologies. Others, depending on the company’s organizational structure, may decide to appoint these responsibilities to the current COO, CIO or CMO. Whatever the decision, the digital transformation leader must have broad authority that covers budget, people and processes in order to be effective in their role.

Focusing on observability within customer experience technology will help organizations improve their reliability as a brand. With greater observability and automated testing capabilities, DevOps teams will be empowered to innovate faster and deliver higher-quality solutions that will improve customer interactions and solidify brand loyalty for years to come.

April 13, 2022
U.S. Govt. CX EO | Mozilla Revenue | Log4j Latest

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Improving U.S. government CX, how much money Mozilla makes, and the latest on the Log4j/Log4Shell débâcle.

EO: “Transforming Federal Customer Experience”

First up this week: The Biden–Harris administration makes an executive order directing its Federal agencies to make 36 specific customer experience (CX) improvement commitments. Much of this involves using technology to improve what DevOps teams would call UX—but government doesn’t like the language of “users.”

Analysis: Customer-centricity FTW

Remarkably, a lot of interaction with government still involves paper forms. But this EO shouldn’t merely be about putting existing processes online. Work also needs to be done to solve the underlying complexity and fragmentation of services: Focusing on CX is a helpful frame.

Brett Samuels: Biden to sign order to streamline government services

[The] executive order [is] intended to cut back on the bureaucracy around government services for the public such as renewing passports, applying for loans or changing names. [It] affects 36 “customer experience improvement commitments” across 17 federal agencies, [targeting] travel, retirement, business, health and updating personal information.
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For example … to renew their passports online rather than dealing with print forms. [It] will create a single portal for … student loan debt, and small-business owners will have a more streamlined process for … loans, grants and certifications.
…
Survivors of natural disasters will also no longer be required to complete forms with several agencies when applying for assistance … and they will be able to file smartphone photos and use virtual inspections when filing claims. [That] could be critical as natural disasters become increasingly devastating, as evidenced by the tornadoes that ravaged Kentucky over the weekend, killing dozens of people and destroying communities.

Is this a technology problem? Yes, in part—but it’s also a government problem, argues Jennifer Pahlka:

Surely laws like the 21st Century IDEA Act … which required agencies to … “eliminate or consolidate websites or web pages that are duplicative or overlapping … and ensure that each website or digital service is designed around user needs,” made life easier for the customers of those agencies? What’s that you say? You’re not sure you’ve noticed that? Turns out you’re not alone.
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An EO is one of the many mechanisms our government has at its disposal for what I like to call “magic words.” [But there’s a] gap between magic words and the changes they are supposed to compel. [Failures] happen at such a staggering scale they have become entirely expected.
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We tend to assign the blame … to government technology [but] at some point, you can only improve the customer experience by addressing [underlying] complexity. … Most of the Kafka-esque nightmares people get stuck in happen because each service sees only the burden they impose, and not [what] the customer experiences.

If, like me, you’re inherently cynical about government efficiency, you’d expect this effort to be a huge failure. But let’s not be too cynical: Warning of “the hazards of selection bias,” here’s ShanghaiBill:

In the olden days, I took half a day off work to go to DMV and renew my DL. Now I can do it online in 5 minutes. … I pay my property tax online. I renew my business licenses online. I incorporated online.

$500 Million per Year—But for How Long?

The Mozilla Foundation has unveiled its revenue forecasts for this year. As in previous years, Mozilla makes the lion’s share of its cash from Google—by making it the default search engine. But there are new revenue sources.

Analysis: And not a moment too soon

The future of the browser market should be a strategic focus for DevOps teams. Mozilla’s Googley cash cow might not last. It’s often assumed the maker of Chrome keeps Mozilla alive so it can point to Firefox as “competition.” But with Microsoft’s browser Edging up the usage charts, that might no longer be true.

Frederic Lardinois: Mozilla expects to generate more than $500M in revenue

For 2021, the organization forecasts revenue of more than $500 million. What’s maybe most important, though, is that Mozilla’s new products like its Mozilla VPN service, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket and other commercial initiatives are slowly but surely starting to pay off.
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But for all intents and purposes, Mozilla remains fully dependent on Google for the time being. Diversifying its revenue sources is really the only way for Mozilla to decrease its reliance on a search deal with a company that is both a competitor, thanks to its dominant Chrome browser, and is increasingly out of alignment with Mozilla’s overall philosophy.
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There is a window here for a non-Chrome browser, with users increasingly skeptical about Google’s motivations and Microsoft’s Edge team making a few missteps in recent months. Yet at the same time, Mozilla’s efforts to bring sponsored suggestions and ads to Firefox haven’t necessarily endeared the organization to its own users either.

Why is Google funding its competitor? u/SerAaron:

Google is Mozilla’s biggest donor. … It’s basically to avoid any monopoly allegations—so they can point to Firefox and say “look, we have competition”.

Mozilla takes their money, sure, but … they don’t sell data, and they aren’t beholden to Google.

But don’t count on that cash continuing to flow, says Maelwryth:

That money is probably under threat now with Edge going for the market. Why give Mozilla hundreds of millions to show competition when you have actual competition from Microsoft?

Log4j/Log4Shell Seems Worse Every Time We Look

The list of popular DevOps tools vulnerable to Log4Shell grows by the hour. Merely finding your exploitable services can be an impossible task—let alone patching them.

Analysis: Defense in depth is key

Searching for and patching your vulnerable code is not enough. You’re also going to need to shore up your network defenses, by auditing internet-visible services and by tightening your application firewall rules. And—ironically—keep a close eye on your logs for signs of attempted exploits and IoCs.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We Are in So Much Trouble

Log4j is used a lot. And, when I say a lot, I mean it’s used in hundreds of applications [including] Druid, Dubbo, Flink, Flume, Hadoop, Kafka, Solr, Spark, Struts, Apple iCloud, … LogStash, GrayLog2, … Steam, Twitter, and … VMware.
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Log4Shell is both easy to exploit and can be used to grab complete control of vulnerable servers. … Even as you’re reading this, odds are decent you’re being attacked. [But] even if you patch it in your systems, it’s all too likely to be hiding in other applications.
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Log4Shell may be the worst security problem in a generation. … This is going to be a long, hard ride.

Hyperbole? Even December 25 isn’t close enough for government work. Catalin Cimpanu:

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has told federal civilian agencies to patch systems affected by the Log4Shell vulnerability by Christmas Eve. … Federal agencies have ten days … to test which of their internal apps and servers utilize the Log4j Java library, check if systems are vulnerable to the Log4Shell exploit, and patch affected servers.
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Despite being a recent vulnerability, it is already considered one of the worst security flaws ever discovered, primarily due to its near-ubiquitous use among enterprise software makers, its simple and easy-to-use exploit, and the ability to hijack systems remotely. … Days after being disclosed, the vulnerability has been massively abused. … The first attacks were seen on December 1.

There’s always another shoe. Here’s Teri Robinson:

Maybe Log4j vulnerabilities are like rats—for every one that’s visible, multiple others scurry beneath the surface. … Apache said the fix addressing “CVE-2021-44228 in Apache Log4j 2.15.0 was incomplete in certain non-default configurations,” according to … CVE 2021-45046.

The Moral of the Story: In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

Image: Bernd Dittrich (via Unsplash)

December 15, 2021
How DevOps Can Address CX Challenges

Delivering a seamless customer experience (CX) has become a top priority for companies undergoing digital transformation initiatives, as 85% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. However, customers aren’t only willing to pay more for a positive experience–they’ll go elsewhere if their experience isn’t positive. In fact, 33% of customers will leave a brand they previously loved after just one bad experience, and 92% of customers will completely abandon a company after just two or three negative experiences. So, delivering a positive CX has become a major priority for companies that want to retain their current customers while winning over new prospects from competitors.

To assure CX quality for customer-serving technology products and services, established DevOps processes and strategies should be applied to the unique aspects of customer experience software. DevOps for CX enables the delivery of software where the customer’s experience is paramount and quality is imperative. However, there are six major pitfalls in deploying DevOps for CX that customer-serving organizations must overcome.

What is DevOps for CX?

To understand the challenges, we must first understand the purpose of DevOps for CX.

DevOps for CX refocuses the DevOps software methodology on the unique aspects of CX software to enable greater efficiency and quality. The constant delivery of expanded CX capabilities through new software developments and features has become a priority in organizations undergoing digital transformation. But when it comes to software products for CX and customer services, quality cannot be sacrificed for speedy development. At the same time, companies must still meet the demand for rapid innovations and tight deadlines on software delivery.

Customers have higher expectations than ever before. These days, there aren’t any second chances when it comes to a customer’s experience. Social media has empowered customers to broadcast CX failures for the whole world to see. Due to the visibility of CX mishaps and negative customer interactions, a brand’s CX reputation depends on flawless execution from the customer’s first impression.

The customer is always right; so, the customer’s perspective must be the primary consideration in software development and testing. This puts significant demand on the DevOps solutions and processes specific to user experience (UX) design, as well as CX testing and monitoring. Software must be designed, developed and continuously tested and monitored in real-time. Companies need to know all the different ways a customer might use the software to accomplish their goals and quickly identify and fix any potential issues before the customer experiences them.

6 Potential Pitfalls of DevOps for CX

Underinvestment in Executive Sponsorship and Cultural Evolution

For CX transformation initiatives to succeed, they must be empowered by an executive leader who can champion the need to drive cultural change and strategic investments. An executive leader is necessary because CX initiatives typically span multiple departments: Operations, development, marketing, sales and services, for example.

Whether the leader taking on this responsibility is an existing executive or a brand new position will depend on the company’s organizational structure. Some companies assign this duty to the COO, CIO or CMO, while others create an entirely new chief CX officer role so that the leader can give their full attention to the CX transformation initiatives at hand. Regardless of the DevOps for CX champion’s title, they must have a broad authority over budget, people and processes to make their role effective.

Competing and Misaligned Incentives

DevOps is a multi-team effort. Ensuring that the teams’ objectives and incentives are aligned is key to ensuring that DevOps for CX projects are executed harmoniously. Each team should have objectives that fit their team function but do not oppose other teams’ objectives, such as speed or a low defect rate on the development side and high reliability for the operations side. These functional team objectives should be centered around respective business objectives for customer satisfaction.

Unclear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Adopting DevOps forces organizations to take on a more collaborative mindset. Due to the multi-team, collaborative nature of DevOps for CX initiatives, it’s critical that KPIs are clearly communicated, widely understood, and monitored across teams. KPIs should also be widely distributed so CX can be viewed at an operational level.

Lack of DevSecOps Prioritization

Many organizations fail to recognize the importance of DevSecOps from different aspects of DevOps. Not only must customer data be protected, but larger organizations that operate globally must also ensure they are complying with regional data privacy regulations. Organizations that don’t comply with regulatory requirements risk fines and other punitive setbacks.

You must be able to test security features in production to protect both customers and your organization itself. Unfortunately, security is too often one of the last DevOps aspects to be discussed.

Different Configurations Across CX Delivery Environments

Shifting between development, quality assurance, staging and production is a major source of frustration for DevOps teams, as the environments are often configured differently. As code moves through the software life cycle and different environments, having a consistent approach to the solutions and environments via deployment automation will prevent wasted time fixing bugs that suddenly pop up when the code is moved.

Errors Introduced by Manual or Outdated Processes

Manual processes introduce opportunities for human error, causing delays and defects that result in unplanned work. Performing software testing manually is a sluggish process that not only causes quality issues and delivery delays but also reduces the amount of time developers have to execute any unplanned work or rework that must be done post-testing. Automating the CX systems’ testing results in higher quality and reliability at faster speeds, providing more time post-testing for developers to ensure the product meets quality requirements.

DevOps for CX enables companies to innovate CX rapidly by delivering high-quality software and maintaining exceptional customer interactions. As CX leaders innovate new products and services through software, DevOps for CX practices will continue to be honed over the coming years. In the meantime, following the best practices outlined here to avoid the six major pitfalls of DevOps for CX will ensure customer experiences are maintained at an elevated level.

August 26, 2021
Five Tips For Creating Design Systems

Design systems were all the rage half a decade ago, with an explosion of open source resources made public by Google, Salesforce and Shopify, for example. Not long after, design tools like InVision, Sketch, Adobe XD and Figma featured ways for product teams to maintain design systems within their apps. If you want to build a scalable, consistent product that increases build velocity in design and engineering teams, a design system is integral.

Throughout my own design career, I have become an advocate for building and maintaining design systems. It has become a niche passion of mine, and I hope to share some of what I’ve learned through the years as a design system nerd.

But wait – first, what is a design system? A design system is a library of style, components and other patterns documented so that building and adopting products is more efficient and cohesive for designers, developers and end users alike.

The key benefit of a design system is that it creates consistent, repeatable patterns that make end users think less. A product experience that delights is usually designed with persistent visuals and consistent interaction. Users want to feel comfortable knowing that no matter where they navigate, they won’t be surprised by what they find. Repetition, in the case of product design, is not boring, but welcome. Design systems create trust with users.

Another benefit is the increased build velocity from design and engineering teams. As designers, we are tasked with solving problems. We want to create a simple understanding of how our users can accomplish tasks in a workflow. Of course, we are tempted at times to invent new patterns to solve design problems. We often forget, in the minutia of design iterations, that we’ve already solved a particular problem in a prior project or in another part of the current product. This inefficiency can lead to wasted time, especially if those existing patterns and components have not been documented. In a single-person design team, the negative effects may not be as visible, but one can imagine the exponential nature of a larger design team consistently duplicating existing work or creating new patterns that, ultimately, create an inconsistent user experience.

Instead, we want to empower ourselves as designers to focus on solving problems without the need to invent new interfaces every time we are posed with a design challenge. Design systems are always vital, but are especially so when design teams scale up and the product experience reaches a level of maturity.

Hopefully, you’re now convinced that design systems are the backbone of the best design teams and delightful user experiences. Below are a few tips to help you create a usable design system in your own organization.

Start Small

Create that button symbol. Save that primary color or header text style. Audit your designs and see what patterns emerge. You get the idea! It doesn’t matter where you are in the design process; any remnant of documenting a pattern will do wonders for saving your precious time and creating beautifully consistent experiences for end users.

Prioritize Design System Documentation

Whether it’s as simple as a shared page, internal minisite or a full-fledged website, documenting your design system and making it easily accessible to the right people is fundamental to its success. You need to determine the level of complexity that is needed for your organization and teams that you collaborate with. Talk to your engineering team to see how to best document and stay in sync between design and code.

Keep Evolving Your Design System

Ask yourself and your team if certain parts of the design system are actually helping solve problems. Iterate on a component that needs to be more flexible or add a new one if there is an important use case that needs to be addressed. Audit your component library to see if there are components that are not used, or if there are multiple components that can be merged.

Have a System for the Design System

It’s easy to get lost in the moment and forget to create an important, requested component or remind a developer to build a part of the UI as a component. Having a project management system and workflow for your design system can help prioritize needs and keep communication organized. Whether it’s logging tickets in Jira, moving cards over in Trello, or simply annotating or resolving comments in Figma, there needs to be a workflow that is consistent and works for the entire team.

Collaborate

I’ve fallen into the trap of being inside a design tool bubble. As designers, we’re often stuck inside software that is great for communicating a user experience but poor at staying in sync with the actual code that is being written. This causes an inconsistency between design and code. Design systems are no exception to that problem. From the outset, advocate for working with a developer to build a design system that works as a fruitful collaboration between design and engineering.

These five tips will help you start creating a usable design system that will make your collaborators and, most importantly, your users, happy. Ready to get started?

May 13, 2021
How to Build a Home-Screen Worthy CX

I’ve built apps, in some shape or form, for about 20 years now. During this time, I’ve always started the same way—design the user interface, build the backend services and connect everything together, adding in appropriate logic along the way. Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my design philosophy has changed. It’s less about how screen A interacts with screen B and more about how the app works naturally with the way the user interacts with everything else on their phone and the world around them.

Consumer expectations of apps have changed to something far less rigid than individual app silos. It got me thinking, what does this new consumer experience mean for app developers like me? I realized that I had started designing apps based around this notion that I wanted my apps to be worthy of being on someone’s home-screen. The more I thought about it though, the home-screen was my way of defining a design philosophy that I had unknowingly been building for.

Get on the Home-Screen

The Google.com homepage used to be considered the most valuable space on the internet. Today, this is the home-screen of mobile phones, with companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon all battling for dominance. In fact, 2 in 3 users in the U.S. keep their most used app front and center on the home-screen, with 21% of 18-34 year olds deleting apps because they didn’t like the way it looked on their home-screen. That’s a scary thought.

As much as we would love to create the next app which users can add to their home-screen, the likelihood of that is pretty slim. It doesn’t mean you can’t tap into the success of these apps, though. Rather than trying to build an app which competes against social giants, you can use their reach to get your service in the hands of more users.

When designing your UI, don’t think of your app as a walled garden that users have to open to use. To be successful, think about the CX of your service as it may appear in other apps—specifically those already on the home-screen. Digital disruptors, such as Lime and Uber, are leading the charge through integrations with apps like Google Maps.

We are also seeing more traditional companies like Spirit Airlines allowing airlines to buy flights and change reservations directly through WhatsApp. Vero, the new kid on the social media block with an estimated 3 million users since it’s launch in March 2018, offers app developers an amazing opportunity for their service to be discovered early, and secure a place on the home-screen.

Build for the Message, Not the App

With social media now a part of the fabric of our lives, it is no surprise that communications and social apps are the most popular category of mobile apps. This gives mobile app developers a huge opportunity to improve the CX of their apps—as it is a pretty safe bet that almost every user has the capability to receive some sort of social media message, and every single phone has the ability to send and receive text messages.

When building your next app, in addition to designing the screens, make sure you design the message flow. Ask yourself, is the message urgent? If so, utilize text messages or push notifications to immediately capture a user’s attention. If the message is not urgent and more likely something a user may want to search for, rather than forcing the user to log into your app to find an order or receipt, why not use email as that archival system of record? With nearly 4 billion email accounts worldwide, and 90% of users checking their emails at least once a day, even if a user doesn’t have your app installed, they will still be able to find important records about your service. What’s more, most customers want the option to choose which channel they receive messages on. Knowing a user’s preferred channel for engagement helps developers build a better experience.

The Lock-Screen Is the Next Battleground

Let’s take a step further. What happens if you design the app without a UI at all? Doing so removes all of the distractions and forces you to think about how a user will gain value from your app. What are the services you need? What is the process you would follow? How will you get users’ attention? This last point—attention—is critical. With people’s attention span lasting approximately 8 seconds, building your app to grab someone’s attention at the right time is important. We’ve all been bombarded with spam and robocalls that constantly fight for a slice of that 8 seconds. Our natural inclination is to block out all messages. To solve this, I’ve started designing my apps around the notion of getting on the lock-screen.

If you think about it, the lock-screen is even more valuable than your phone’s home-screen. To have your app or message appear on the home-screen, the user has to explicitly allow it, thereby signaling the importance of your service. This is incredibly powerful for an app developer to consider, especially when wearables, smart homes, connected devices, cars, etc., continue to grow and expand the potential surface that your users could engage with your app. Next time you build an app, consider how your app will grab someone’s attention via the lock-screen, then challenge yourself to think how you would do it if there was no UI at all.

Winning the CX Battle

A home-screen worthy design breaks down the boundaries of traditional mobile app development. Gone are the rigid constraints that a user must do everything with your app. By approaching app design that leverages how users already expect to interact with their phones—preferred apps, preferred channels and immediate attention—developers can make something different, something more engaging, something that immediately adds more value to the customer. When consumer expectations change, you’ll already be two steps ahead of everyone else.

— Quinton Wall

April 6, 2020
How to Apply Agile and DevOps Principles to Accelerate Customer Experience Innovation
These days, it’s not enough for companies to offer quality products or services; they must deliver an exceptional customer experience. In fast-changing environments, continual innovation on the front lines of customer service requires an agile and nimble approach.

How important is the automation of development and monitoring for accelerating customer experience (CX) innovation? I recently posed this question to Dr. Nicole Forsgren, research and strategy expert at Google and former chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). Her response:

“I would say that, today, this is almost just a given to operate effectively. DevOps is definitely more than tooling, but you can’t do it without strong technology solutions that provide automation, monitoring and visualization to people throughout the value chain. This gives visibility to key stakeholders, so you can ensure you are delivering value and your feedback loops are happening.”

This is not a simple concept to execute well. The diverse array of applications and systems that organizations deploy to engage their customers is complex and spans many different technologies, platforms and channels. Ensuring all those applications and systems work together seamlessly to enable customers to consistently accomplish their goals is a daunting challenge. What’s clear today is that how customers perceive their interactions with businesses, shapes brand loyalty.

It’s interesting then, that while most companies recognize the importance of providing an outstanding experience, many have yet to embrace an automated approach for the development of their CX applications. Those enterprises that have successfully accelerated their CX innovation share a common attribute: They have automated both the testing and monitoring of their CX development projects.

DevOps + CX = Faster Speed, Higher Quality, Fewer Failures

Customer-facing applications, such as call center technology, websites, SMS and even chatbots, are the central artery of customer experience. If these applications are not designed, built and deployed properly, it will be costly. To ensure success of CX innovation projects and reduce the risk associated with development/deployment, we must build solutions with testing and monitoring in mind, automate deployment and configuration, and use test data in production to accurately monitor variance from the design.

What’s holding your organization back? There are four important steps organizations can take to boost the speed and quality of CX software development, while reducing their failures.

1. Strive for automation, anywhere you can find it

Aim high—strive for 100 percent automation and take a creative approach to integrating different phases of development. Whether it’s JIRA, Bamboo, Udeploy, Cyara or any other technology that helps automate different parts of your software delivery life cycle (SDLC), have a vision that automates and integrates wherever possible. Success here will deliver smooth and seamless movement of work and deployments into various environments.

2. Don’t underestimate the importance of the feedback loop

In order to improve our CX, we must first understand what challenges customers are encountering right now. This requires real-time monitoring of the actual customer experience—but from the customer’s perspective, not from a hardware perspective, as is traditionally done. If you can monitor and measure customer interactions in the moment and capture them concisely, then you can channel this critical information back to business decision-makers, so changes can be implemented quickly. It’s one example of a feedback loop, and if you can repeat it over and over, you can significantly improve and refine your CX.

3. Take the time to reflect, align and improve

Instill a culture of learning and humility—not finger-pointing and blame. For example, I recommend teams adhere to well-defined Agile Retrospectives, a ritual that enables teams to create a continuous improvement culture in which they reflect on past experiences and define future actions. Retrospectives are only one of the many ways to instill an open-minded culture, constantly focused on improving collective capabilities.

4. Integrate business objectives and measurements with the technology side of the house

I see this as a two-way street. First, help ensure the technology teams understand the impact of their work and give them access to the metrics that are important to the business team, through regular progress reporting. Second, make sure the business team shares their goals and key objectives with the technology teams, rather than simply specifying a requirement. I think it’s important that developers and operations teams understand the business impact of success and failure—and, therefore, the importance of their work. This is a great motivator. Plus, more visibility and tighter integration with business objectives can also result in more creative problem-solving from the innovative thinkers on the IT side.

A Parting Thought: Find Your Anchors

The right decision or strategy is not always clear, but finding two or three pillars as your anchors can be clarifying during decision time. In the CX innovation space, I find two anchors are particularly helpful:
- The customers are the reason why we are in business. Are you prioritizing the end-customer experience in this decision? Are you improving it, understanding it better or measuring it more effectively?
- What is the business goal you’re aiming to attain? No matter how granular the technical change you’re making, there is almost always a business reason driving it from the top down. Do you know what that driver is? How, exactly, will your change move you closer to that business goal?
— Amy Hudson
March 8, 2019