The days of businesses and brands not understanding the value of delivering high-quality CX and investing in improving their assurance processes are long gone. New research has found a staggering 96% of customers do not voice complaints, yet firms with a strong CX strategy are able to retain a massive 89% of customers. This is compared to those with a weak customer experience strategy that is only able to retain 33%. The bottom line? For companies to not only stay afloat but enjoy revenue growth customer experience remains key. But how do business leaders know if their CX strategies are actually working in real-time? To find out, CX Today welcomes Eric von Paternos, Principle GTM Architect at Cyara, to tell us how automated testing can help, and why it should be at the forefront of the minds of every forward-thinking business leader.
‘Automated testing is essentially the streamlining and reduction of those manual, repetitive tasks.’ von Paternos dives right in with the meaning of automated testing, which – to elaborate in comparison to the slow, repetitive manual testing alternative – helps companies achieve faster release cycles of their products and solutions by reducing costs and lowering risk.
The jump from manual testing to automated needn’t be a leap of faith due to the ease of the transition with solutions on offer highlighting the rich benefits of automated testing. But before we get to them, von Paternos gives some examples of the disadvantages of manual testing and how it immediately puts businesses on the backfoot.
He says: ‘In those previous post-pandemic times we’d all be in offices, and if agents were in the process of manual testing – despite its many deficiencies – they could literally just jump over across the aisle, get the attention of a colleague, say “Hey, can you come and look at this?” and it was easier to collaborate.
‘But with millions of us now working remotely it can be so much more difficult to relay information and harder to convey what has been heard, what happened or what broke just through notes, messages, emails and tickets and there’s a lot that has the potential to get lost in translation. Sometimes issues are time-sensitive also. This is why it’s so important to have automated testing solutions in place. It allows a business, its agents and the customers to all have that single source of truth, with a record of what happened.’
The impact automated testing can have on businesses is tenfold. It can dramatically reduce the risk of exposing consumers to CX issues – and the subsequent costs involved in doing so – and can increase the pace of customer experience innovation and helps monitor the ongoing health of the production customer experience.
von Paternos elaborates: ‘Automated testing can really help maximise the overall value of customer interaction and a far better understanding of what customers want, which in turn streamlines the business. And it can really help folks capitalise on innovation, and at speed, churning out more changes. For some companies, it may be a new change to their strategy every day, but for other companies, faster innovation might mean one every year. But the important thing is they can make those changes – big or small – at their own pace.
‘Another effect of automated testing is mitigating risk. The more companies automate the entirety of their CX processes the more they’re able to get full coverage of procedures that could have a bad impact in the long run, with the ability to stomp them out faster than manual testing. The business avoids things like fines and penalties as a result.’
He adds: ‘Finally, automated testing can improve communication. Companies that automate their testing can more efficiently include key stakeholders and make sure that teams – especially in big, siloed firms – are talking to each other. A lot of people get stuck in their teams because that’s what we as humans do, we huddle together. Automation helps everyone speak the same language and achieve the same goal and that sort of communication breaks down those barriers that teams set up sometimes artificially.’
The benefits von Paternos speaks of should be more than enough to convince business leaders to take that all-important step towards automated testing. But there’s more. Automated testing can drastically boost agent experience as well as the overall experience of the customer. One of the main benefits is that in highlighting areas agents may be going wrong in customer interactions employees are able to get the support they require in their roles, thus increasing job satisfaction. That improved communication helps streamline interactions with customers too, making them smoother and more enjoyable.
von Paternos adds: ‘Another key driver when it comes to automated testing and agent experience is a better recording of processes meaning all employees have access to the same paper trails and as a result, are all on the same page. With everyone looking at the same picture, this reduces the amount of frustration in the agents’ daily life. Essentially, it just makes things so much easier. And this is particularly useful when agents are working remotely and unable to tap the shoulder of the agent next to them or the supervisor for help with a customer.’
Cyara offers the only automated CX assurance platform that spans the entire development lifecycle for contact centre technology. This makes it possible to test more and in less time, with reduced effort and at a lower cost – all while reducing risks associated with manual processes.
von Paternos says: ‘We’ve been hard at work at Cyara and have developed and cultivated a customer experience assurance solution that assists throughout the whole project lifecycle. One of the many things we take great pride in when it comes to the platform is that it’s flexible and agile, meaning it adjusts just as businesses need it to.
To conclude, agility is vital particularly when a wave of businesses are now either experiencing digital transformation due to the COVID-19 pandemic or coming out of that transition. Agility is also crucial because recent research has found 46% of customers expect a response within five seconds or less when using a chatbot, 43% expect the same using online live chat and 33% when using a phone or video call. To put it bluntly, if companies aren’t quick they’ll lose the race to their competitors.
Cyara cites two customers who have benefitted from automated testing. These are Electrolux and Vitality. Electrolux reports reduced testing cycles from a couple of weeks to overnight execution, increased test automation coverage, improved quality while reducing needed resources and clear real-time visibility of all contact centres and integrations. Vitality reports that defects are identified and fixed before they go into production, the prevention of production downtime, no more Monday morning defect fixes and no more P1 issues after upgrades or changes.
For more information on Cyara’s platform, click here.
