In a world of digital transformation and accelerating customer expectations, every contact center is striving for the same thing: agility.
Business leaders can no longer afford to be tied down by static, legacy equipment, and complex hardware. As such, many contact center teams are moving to the cloud to embrace a future where employees can deliver excellent experiences from anywhere, on any platform, at any time.
CCaaS also allows contact centers to be as fluid and dynamic as their customers’ needs are, bolstering DevOps initiatives that pave the way for rapid updates, growth, and innovation.
Here’s how DevOps is transforming the contact center as we know it.
The Rising Demand for DevOps in the Contact Center
DevOps is an operational approach to innovation, ideation, and development, and is often the ideal option for today’s transformative contact centers.
After all, IT teams in the cloud can move on from the monotony of maintaining and priming servers and refocus their time on building, testing, optimizing, and embedding new contact center workflows.
That prospect is helping to push the value of the CCaaS space forward, with the market expected to be worth a whopping $54.6 billion by 2027.
Max Lipovetsky, Executive Vice President of Product at Cyara, doubles down on this point. He notes that “the desire for flexibility, agility, and innovation, in addition to cost-effective and higher availability operations," is increasing overall CCaaS migrations.
Moreover, the DevOps approach helps break down the silos separating IT development and operations, streamlining collaboration between both departments. As a result, companies can often evolve, adapt, and grow faster.
Indeed, DevOps helps companies make the most out of the flexible CCaaS environment, giving businesses a foundation to build an agile growth strategy. This may lead to:
- Faster problem solving and solution delivery
- Greater resiliency
- Improved performance via automation
- Significantly reduced costs
- Improved customer satisfaction.
How to Bring DevOps into the Contact Center
For companies making the transition to CCaaS, embracing a DevOps mindset might seem relatively straightforward. After all, DevOps and the cloud work so well together.
However, embracing the power of DevOps in the contact center requires companies to invest in a concentrated effort to update their culture and processes.
Step 1: Update Company Culture
Most people refer to DevOps as a methodology or practice, but it’s more of a mindset. There are no specific tools or technologies included in a DevOps strategy. What really makes this concept work is the right company culture and attitude.
According to a report on the “State of DevOps” from 2021, the most common cultural hurdles that prevent DevOps from thriving in a business include “discouraging reach,” setting “unclear responsibilities”, and devising poor feedback loops.
Eliminating these problems in favor of a more streamlined, collaborative, and experimental company culture allows DevOps to thrive.
Lipovetsky adds that, in fact, company culture can be the roadblock to successfully adopting DevOps altogether. He states:
“The key element of culture that stops this is the attitude to risk. To be truly agile, you need to accept a certain level of risk, and be confident that rapid iteration is going to manage the downside of this approach.”
Step 2: Implement Agile Practices
Both creating a powerful CCaaS environment and thriving in the DevOps landscape require companies to embrace a more “agile” approach to business.
Implementing agile methodologies, like rapid development strategies, analytics, and continuous testing can help companies start discovering the true benefits of DevOps in the contact center.
Yet, such a process requires contact center DevOps to become a team sport. As Lipovetsky says:
“Effective agile practices require empowered cross-functional teams, with representation from the business, development, operations and quality assurance.
“Bringing everyone together and aligning them to outcomes and risk appetites enables faster innovation and better customer results.