Clear waters of observability

Operacon, Operata's annual company event, took place in Feb. It’s my favourite work-related time each year. It’s a time of bonding with fellow teammates from around the globe, all in one place. It’s a time of focused energy and alignment of goals. Operacon for me helps build a sense of belonging and is done over three days. Operacon is a blend of fun activities, workshops, Dragons' Den/Shark Tank pitches, strategy sessions and plenty of good food.

This year, one of the activities was white water rafting down Victoria’s Yarra River. We each paired up and kayaked our way down a picturesque and at times thrilling waterway. The guides were very knowledgeable and shared not only tips on how to navigate the rapids but also how and why they formed the way they did. Two things struck me. The first was the sheer volume of water that was corralling down the valley. 10,000 litres or 2,641 gallons per second, and the other was one of our co-founders, Andy Scott's oar as he tried to steer opposite to the way he told me to turn.

Maybe it was the bump on the head that knocked this idea into fruition, but regardless of how it happened, I began to think about how rivers are a good analogy for CX Observability.

Contact centers are a just like a river. A constant flow of calls. Sometimes it is a torrent and sometimes steady and clear waters, yet never still. We use terms in contact centres that relate to rivers too. Overflow of calls, watermarks in our capacity, a flood of calls and calls pouring in. When a contact center is drowning in calls, it’s the time when leaders are searching for why. They are dialled in trying to see what can be done to divert the flow of calls. But when things are calm, they breathe a temporary sigh of relief and stop the scramble.

The problem is that just because there are clear, calm waters in front of them, it doesn’t mean that something upstream is just about to change that. It might look calm, and the water might even look good enough to drink, and yet, hidden just around the corner, upstream, there isn’t an animal bathing itself in your water source, polluting your water. In our case, we had just navigated our penultimate set of rapids and found ourselves in some calm water and then, unexpectedly a tiger snake decided it wanted to cross the river and we had to stop. You don’t want to mess with them.

In a contact center calm time is consumed with scheduling all the value-add activities to the contact center; however, I believe it should also be a time to look at upstream issues that you didn’t know were there and that compound problems under pressure. It could be Technical, operational or experiential. Maybe it's replacing out-of-spec laptops and PCs, fixing an agent's home network setup, updating outdated softphone clients, or resolving latency issues on VPN connections. Perhaps something operational, like fixing outdated call routing rules that send customers to the wrong queue, knowledge base articles that haven't been reviewed in months, escalation paths that no longer reflect your team structure, or wrap-up codes that don't map to anything meaningful in your reporting or maybe experience-related frustrations. IVR menus that frustrate customers before they even reach an agent, hold music or messaging that hasn't been updated since a product change, post-call survey questions that no longer reflect the customer journey, or self-service options that quietly fail without anyone noticing.

What this does is it helps your contact center 'ride the wave train' - What’s the wave train, you may ask? It’s something I learned from the guides. The wave train is when you take the right path through the rapids. To do it, you need to set your approach correctly. The best path to take when you are kayaking is to look for the natural arrow that the water creates. The smoothest parts of the rapids are where the water flows deepest and smoothest. The whitecaps and smooth bobbles of water you see are caused by obstacles hiding just below the surface. The obstacles add resistance and immense pressure to the thousands of tonnes of water flow over them. It’s worth avoiding them because two things are likely to happen. You capsize or you get stuck on them, which causes congestion for the people on kayaks behind you. However, if you ride the wave train, the fast smooth arrows are caused by the path of least resistance.

This tracks with contact centers. Not all obstacles can be removed, so the only thing you can do is avoid them. But this requires the right approach and knowing how to identify and follow the wave train. With CX observability, that is possible. Real-time monitoring coupled with the right set-up with our assurance tools.

All in all, it was a great day. We bonded, we laughed, a few of us got a little wet, but we survived. And for those who didn’t, I ensured my paddle caught a little too much water in their direction. I hope next Operacon the team building activity provides just as much learning and crossover analogies as the white water rafting did. I’ve been playing with a concept of observability and flying a plane – maybe we will go hang gliding?

Whatever it is, I can’t wait.

Until then and as always, hooroo.

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Luke Jamieson has over twenty years’ of experience in contact center leadership, having overseen some of Australia’s most successful operations, guiding major CCaaS cloud migrations for leading organizations.