Shifting Your Operational Customer Experience Mindset For Cloud

When organizations make the transition to a cloud-based contact center, they also need to shift their mindset, especially from an operations perspective, in how they look at customer engagement.

There are three ways a new customer experience mindset lets you get the most out of your new contact center.

• Monitor customer experience cloud services.
• Move from change to release management.
• Treat customer experience like a product.
• Let’s dig deeper into each of these methods.

Monitor Customer Experience Cloud Services

One of the first questions I get from operations teams is, “How do I monitor my services?” When transitioning to a cloud solution, it’s also important to move from an operational mindset of focusing on infrastructure-based concepts — memory and CPU — to performance, including agent, customer, and platform performance.

I tell customers to treat their platforms more like a traditional Software as a Service solution and monitor user experience, customer experience and quality. That means watching your mean opinion scores and survey results. And it means, for example, running regular synthetic tests that simulate basic agent actions to verify the system is up and performing effectively for you.

Move from Change Management to Release Management

I work with a lot of large customers that are used to working in a traditional IT-related change management model. In this model, a vendor notifies them of every change and they run any necessary testing on their end before the upgrade release.

At first, these customers expect to be notified before Genesys makes a change in the cloud. But, in a cloud environment, we roll out changes continually. Because it’s a subscription service, there’s no such thing as software change management anymore. It’s more release management: We notify you of important new functionality and from that, you decide how you want to release new capabilities to your customers.

This involves closer alignment between your IT group and the business because, contrary to the traditional IT change management model, the business manages the release in a cloud model.

Treat Customer Experience like a Product

Companies often seek advice on realigning their business organizationally — as they evolve their digital transformation and customer engagement strategies. Having a dedicated product manager who oversees customer engagement and treats it like a product is a good way to handle this.

Companies sometimes cling to a legacy mindset of treating customer experience as a “necessary evil.” They want to lower their handle times and keep their costs down, for example. But they’re not yet fully embracing it and recognizing all the business benefits it delivers. When you apply product management methodologies to your own internal customer experience — when you ask about the experience your customers have with your brand — that’s when you can really move the needle.

For example, I worked with one company that was much siloed in its approach. It didn’t seem to have anyone manager or owner looking across the company siloes to say, for example, “What is the experience of someone buying a product on our website who runs into a delivery problem?” As a result, customers have an inconsistent, unsatisfying experience when they try to resolve their issues.

In this scenario, no one is thinking holistically about their care experience. However, by assigning a product manager to handle customer experience, you have a dedicated person to ensure that customer experience is built as an ongoing relationship — and seen as a priority.

When you make the move to the cloud, you must also change your mindset. The Genesys Cloud platform is a true SaaS solution — with the advantage that you no longer have to worry about or manage the legacy IT infrastructure. Our continuous release cycle delivers functionality, innovation, and value.