Flawless Customer Experiences with Cyara

Over 300 leading global brands trust the Cyara CX Assurance Platform to improve the experience they provide their customers. Chief Marketing Officer, Linda Chen shares how they help organizations achieve flawless customer experiences through automated testing and monitoring that simulate real world customer interactions across IVR, voice and digital channels.

Please give us a bit of background to Cyara and the solutions you provide to customers?

Cyara provides some of the world’s leading brands with automated customer experience (CX) testing and monitoring for quality assurance to help them deliver the best possible experience to customers. Companies use Cyara’s solutions to test and monitor their CX channels, such as chatbots and contact centers, to quickly identify and fix any performance issues or disruptions. Automating CX monitoring and testing saves companies the time, cost and resources required by manual testing while improving the organization’s CX quality for greater customer satisfaction.

A key strength of Cyara’s solution is its omnichannel functionality, which automates the testing of journeys on a variety of channels including, voice, web, chat, chatbot, email and SMS. These capabilities give CX teams a unified view of the entire customer journey. This comprehensive view of the customer’s journey is so important because it enables IT and customer support agents to ensure that customers are experiencing high-quality and seamless interactions every time they engage with the brand.

What is the difference between CX and CRM?

CX and customer relationship management (CRM) are different, yet they function together to provide businesses with a comprehensive view of the customer base and how customers can best be served. The difference between the two business processes comes down to perspective. CX is your customer’s overall experience with your company, while CRM is the technologies and strategies used to manage your relationship with your customers behind the scenes. Even though CX and CRM systems measure and address different factors, both ensure that customers are satisfied and are likely to return.

What are a few key aspects that business owners should consider when implementing a CX platform?

This is truly the age of the customer in an on-demand world. Consumers today are used to getting what they want, right when they want it, wherever they want it. These are the expectations consumers have when engaging with a business. If you don’t deliver on those expectations, the competition will. That said, CX issues arise. They always do. Maybe someone’s uncle in Illinois didn’t get that sweater you gifted him in time for his birthday. Or maybe it’s in the wrong size or color. When people call in or go to your website to resolve the matter, you must make sure your CX platform is built to facilitate operational agility, speed and quality because this is a critical moment. It’s not just about resolving an issue, this is proactively preventing future issues, so you don’t lose a customer. Providing this level of stellar CX when there’s an upset customer can even strengthen that customer relationship.

Having an automated system in place for CX testing and monitoring is also key to success. Not only will it enable you to operate faster at scale and test for any issues, but it also allows you to troubleshoot problems before they impact customers. Many also talk about how automation can help you do more with less, but in a way, it’s also doing more with more, because while, yes, you lean less on humans, you’re also empowering them to create more profitable and efficient contact centers.

How is AI transforming the digital customer experience?

One area where AI is having a significant impact on CX is personalization. Imagine if your customers could have more personalized experiences throughout their customer journeys. The best AI-driven chatbots and voice bots, for instance, are learning to recognize and respond in kind to a variety of different languages, accents and dialects. Furthermore, chatbots are better at recognizing all the different ways a customer question or instruction might be phrased. This helps to quickly establish intent, so that the customer’s need can immediately be met, whether it’s resolving an issue or being handed without delay to the right human customer service rep.

There are also AI-driven systems that can analyze customer data to help organizations understand and serve them like never before. This means going well beyond traditional customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to get to the heart of what a customer really feels about your organization and what they want from it—not only now but later, too. By analyzing behavior patterns, AI can predict which customers might be on the way out the door, giving organizations time to save the customer relationship before they leave.

Do you have any advice for companies starting the journey about mistakes that could be avoided and how to take the most common challenges in CX?

It’s true that first impressions are everything, but so are all subsequent impressions. Even today, many organizations value sales over CX. True, sales bring the customer in, but it’s solid CX that ensures continued sales feeds into continued growth. One area where I’ve seen enterprises fail is in assuming just because customer journeys and communications are working on an internal level, then they must also be fully functioning on an external level for the customer. If you don’t have visibility into the flow of customer journeys and communications, you’ll never know what’s missing or going wrong.

Take for instance a customer who reaches out to your company to resolve an issue via email but later needs to travel somewhere and prefers to speak with someone on the phone. Your company’s communication platform may show that the customer was transferred seamlessly between email and phone to different agents when, in reality, the customer may be left on a hold line due to a faulty transfer or miscommunication between agents. Unless you’re constantly validating CX processes, communications and customer journeys from the outside in, you’ll never have a true end-to-end view of your CX capabilities.