A few years ago, Forbes reported that 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010. By now, that figure is certainly even higher. With CX as the new “competitive battleground”, contact centers play a crucial role for businesses by delivering exceptional customer experiences that grow wallet share and revenue.
However, consistent delivery of exceptional CX is no easy task, especially in the relatively new paradigm of cloud contact centers. That's where CX Observability comes into play, representing a "must-have" capability for cloud contact centers to remain at the top of their game. In this article, we'll explore why a DIY approach to contact center observability falls short, and why Operata's CX Observability solution is really the only game in town for cloud contact centers that are committed to improving agent and customer experience.
The Importance of CX Observability in Cloud Contact Centers
It may come as a surprise that technical issues can have a profound impact on customer experience. From poor network performance to outdated hardware and software glitches, a large variety of technical problems can lead to frustrated customers and lost revenue. For example, Operata found that poor voice quality can completely “trash” your CX and make your CSAT scores plummet.
Operata CX Observability addresses this challenge by correlating technical, operations, and experience data, providing unique insights and identifying technical root causes of issues that affect customer experience. Without CX Observability insights, contact centers are inevitably going to suffer from higher operational costs and lower customer satisfaction rates.
The Components of CX Observability
Building a robust CX Observability solution requires a wide range of technical elements. Consider the inherent complexity in building software with the following components:
Building and maintaining agent endpoint monitoring features achieved through web browser plugins for both Chrome and Edge.
Deploying and maintaining cloud infrastructure for a SaaS-style user interface with configurable dashboards.
Designing, coding, and maintaining a user interface with pre-built dashboards, SSO, RBAC, etc.
Building and maintaining integrations to CCaaS APIs and the CCaaS ecosystem.
Building and maintaining data collectors that provide end-to-end real-time monitoring from CCaaS carriers to the agent softphones and everything in-between.
Designing, deploying, and maintaining a purpose-built data platform and schema that is optimized for CX Observability queries, data analytics, and AI/ML applications.
An eventing and alerting framework to distribute important real-time events to other systems, and alerts to users.
AI/ML algorithms and applications designed to generate unique insights from vast amounts of real-time contact center data; literally hundreds of billions of data points.
Additionally, consider that developing and maintaining these components can be resource-intensive, taking valuable time away from IT, DevOps, and AppDev teams that could be working on more core business tasks.
The "Secret Sauce" for Success
As a software vendor, Operata brings additional insights to the table that individual organizations can’t achieve on their own. I.e., you can only learn from yourself, whereas we learn from the experiences of all of our customers. Based on that global community of experiences, Operata has a wealth of knowledge and learnings that can benefit your contact center. By leveraging data from various customers, Operata can identify common issues, prioritize meaningful data points, and provide valuable recommendations for optimizing your operations and enhancing CX.
But CX Observability goes beyond technology alone. It requires deep contact center IT and Operations expertise to make sense of the collected data, interpret it, and present it in a meaningful and actionable way. Operata’s collective experience enables us to know what data to look for, what to ignore, and to learn about false positives which can cause distractions and cost more to resolve.
Moreover, the contact center landscape is constantly evolving, with updates to standards, libraries, CCaaS environments, third-party software, and much more. CX Observability is more than just a one-time investment, it’s an ongoing commitment that requires continuous adaptation and improvement.
Additionally, without monitoring multiple environments, you will be unable to confirm if any problem is in your environment exclusively or a wider problem also experienced by other CCaaS customers in a region. The Operata support team can currently observe regional issues experienced by multiple customers, and we are expecting to add regional status information into Operata Platform so that our customers can see it as well.
DIY: Not "Good Enough"
You may be tempted to take a DIY approach, believing that an internal team could build something that’s "good enough" using general-purpose tools. However, “good enough” probably isn’t. While the team could use general-purpose tools like Datadog or Splunk to build something for basic technical observability, a DIY solution is likely to have blind spots that can leave you exposed to unsolvable CSAT challenges. Basically, it will only be a technical observability tool, not a CX Observability solution that’s purpose-built for your cloud contact center.
Don't settle for "good enough". Your customers deserve the best possible experience every time they call your contact center. Your company’s ability to compete depends on it.
Operata: The CX Observability Solution
Operata provides the world’s only CX Observability platform built exclusively for cloud contact centers. Our platform infuses meaningful technical insights into operations and experience data, providing unique recommendations for improving the People Experience in contact centers. With hundreds of millions of agent minutes and interactions, and hundreds of billions of data points, Operata's AI and platform are trained, hardened, and proven with extensive industry experience.
Our “secret sauce” is really made by our team, with hundreds of years of combined expertise spanning IT, Operations, Professional Services, and Software Development. We understand the challenges faced by contact center organizations, and built Operata Platform to address them.
So, we know why DIY is DOA when it comes to CX Observability. Building a true CX Observability application requires expertise, resources, and an ongoing commitment to continual maintenance and new features that most contact centers simply don't have. That's why Operata is the ideal partner to help you take your cloud contact center's performance to new heights (sorry, bad pun intended).
Ready to see for yourself how our CX Observability solution can help your organization? Sign up for a free 14-day trial and unlock the unique insights you need to deliver exceptional customer experience.
