Automated testing in 2022

Ajay Dawar, Alok Kulkarni, James Isaacs, and Linda Chen from Cyara discuss their 2022 predictions about real-time quality assurance, adopting automated testing, balancing employee experience and innovation, how to deliver innovative customer experiences, why AI won't displace humans for customer support, how enterprises can achieve digital transformation success, and much more.

To Stay Competitive, Brands Need to Look Outside Their Industry for CX Innovation 

When it comes to delivering innovative customer experiences (CX), in 2022 brands must begin to look outside of their own industry for inspiration, to stay ahead of the curve. An example where this was done successfully is Tesla’s mobile app, which allows customers to check their tire pressure, locate service centers, and schedule service appointments with the touch of a finger. This type of innovative thinking and applying technology to solve a common problem can benefit CX in almost every industry. For instance, why not apply the same real-time tracking approach that DoorDash uses for orders, to see when the cable company, maintenance person, or cleaners are arriving at your home, so you make sure you’re available? We will start to see the adoption of this strategic thinking as there’s so much potential here for innovative brands to set themselves apart. - Ajay Dawar, SVP, Product, Cyara

Ajay leads the global Product Development team at Cyara, which drives product strategy and constantly strives to innovate and improve product capabilities and user experiences. He is based in San Mateo, California. Ajay holds over two decades of experience in product development at companies ranging from early-stage startups to public enterprises, including Conga, EverString, Model N, PivotLink, SpringCM, LucidEra, Venturi Wireless, and more. Throughout his career, he developed specializations in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Customer Resource Management (CRM), Conversational AI, natural language processing (NLP), quality assurance, and customer service, making him a natural fit to further innovate and improve on Cyara’s Automated CX Assurance Platform and solutions. Ajay holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from the University of Michigan, as well as a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

Real-Time Quality Assurance Becomes a Business Necessity 

Enabling and optimizing remote work has been a constant focus of corporate leaders throughout 2021. Research shows that enterprises highly value digital transformation. As a result, many organizations have invested significant resources in digital and cloud technology, such as cloud-based contact center technology and automation. This allows employees to execute business processes from their homes and distributed locations around the world. Many contact centers have also adopted bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies to address hardware shortages and at-home agent needs. However, once solutions for remote work are established another challenge emerges: how will companies make sure those remote technology solutions and devices are functioning properly? If customer-facing communications are not functioning properly, companies risk compromising customer experiences.

To address this issue in 2022, enterprises will invest in real-time quality assurance solutions, which are powered by AI-driven automation, to identify and rapidly fix any IT issues that could negatively impact CX and business processes. This will serve a two-fold benefit:

1. supporting employee productivity and engagement, as their systems will always be functioning properly - reducing frustration and delays in production

2. reducing costs to increase revenue margins, as IT teams will spend less time fixing software issues and contact center agents can spend more time effectively solving customer problems. - Alok Kulkarni, CEO & Co-Founder, Cyara

Alok founded Cyara with the vision that an easy-to-use CX Assurance platform could help enterprises be confident that they were delivering great customer experiences each and every time, even in a world with rapidly changing customer expectations and an ever-increasingly complex technology ecosystem. Prior to Cyara, he was Director, Solutions Engineering, at Genesys where he led the team that architected contact center solutions for the Asia Pacific market, driving Genesys to the top position in that market. He also held various engineering roles at National Australia Bank, NEC, Lincolne Scott, and Boral Building Technologies. Alok has an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Technology from Melbourne Business School and a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering from Monash University, Australia. Alok is married with two boys and his passions include all things technology, traveling, spirituality, and playing golf.

Balancing Employee Experience (EX) and Innovation Will Drive Companies to Adopt Automated Testing in 2022

The pandemic and lockdown drove an explosion in web, digital, and phone contacts with customers. Companies realized that the only way to handle the sudden volume increase was through cloud deployment. Whoever was holding back on the cloud is not holding back anymore. Additionally, companies rapidly recognized the benefits of enabling remote work through cloud migration: more opportunity for hiring top-tier talent around the world, and decreased expenses as a result of not paying rent or taxes on a physical office. As a result, the business world has gotten more comfortable with innovation in this distributed world and has also recognized that providing a positive employee experience (EX) leads to increased productivity. That said, savvy companies and IT leaders are still skeptical of brand-new, cutting-edge software solutions; but leaders also want to maintain a positive EX by enabling their workforce with new and innovative solutions that make their jobs easier.

Company leaders must balance their desires to both validate new technology solutions before investing in a gamble and to ensure a positive EX by not withholding useful tools from employees. To do this, companies across industries will begin leveraging automated testing solutions to validate the capabilities of their existing platforms and potential new tools to weigh the benefits of new investments against the capabilities of existing infrastructures. - James Isaacs, President, Cyara

James is responsible for all customer-facing, operational aspects of the company on a global basis including marketing, business development, sales and pre-sales, professional services, domain consulting, customer success, education and training, support, channels, and customer satisfaction. He is based out of Cyara’s Redwood City office in the heart of Silicon Valley. James has a BA in International Relations with an emphasis in Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Silicon Valley with his wife Page and has three children. When James isn’t at the office you will find him cycling the foothills around the San Francisco Bay area.

AI Will Not Displace Human Beings for Customer Support 

I said this in 2020 when looking forward to 2021, and it still holds true for 2022. When you look at the use of AI in consumer-facing operations today, it’s mainly used in AI-supported chatbots and customer personalization features. If we look at how consumers have taken advantage of AI-supported features during the pandemic, we can see that they’re actually using them to resolve issues faster through human agents. Companies like Bank of America, which has a consumer-facing AI-powered chatbot named Erica, saw consumers using Erica to find the best course of engaging customer support teams. Rather than asking Erica questions to fix any issues directly, customers simply asked Erica how they should go about reaching out to the customer service team to rapidly resolve their problem with the appropriate human agent. The tipping point for AI is fast approaching, where it will become intelligent enough to truly pass the Turing test, but it will not happen in 2022. - James Isaacs, President, Cyara

Customer Experience Becomes an Evaluating Factor of Digital Transformation Success 

Research shows that digital transformation success is defined differently by corporate and IT leaders. The more senior an individual’s role is, the more they perceive digital transformation initiatives as more successful. Senior leaders are typically more optimistic about digital transformation, as they view it as more of a continuous journey rather than a destination. Companies are never fully "done" because the bar keeps rising in terms of customer expectations. In 2022, we will start to see organizations driving towards identifying a unifying metric by which they can measure digital transformation success. Key performance indicators (KPIs) centered on customer experience (CX) can be a point of consensus for decision-makers struggling to align internally on measures of digital transformation success.

Wherever companies may be on their digital transformation journey, they must ultimately remember that customers will be the final judge of whether the digital transformation was successful based on the consistent and modernized experiences made possible by digital technology. A unifying agreement that CX can serve as a metric of digital transformation success aligns with the expectations of all leaders and teams within an organization. - Linda Chen, GM & CMO, Cyara

Linda brings 25 years of general management and leadership experience across a variety of top-tier multinational branded companies and B2B enterprise SaaS companies. She has blended experience working as a cross-functional leader in both large and small organizations. Prior to joining Cyara, Linda was the EVP of Marketing and Strategy at Equilar, the leading executive compensation and governance solutions provider, where she led products, marketing, operations, pre-sales/sales, and client success. She was also VP/GM at Deem, Inc. Linda also spent more than 10 years at Intuit, where she led go-to-market for the company’s Small Business mobile and SaaS solutions, QuickBooks, and Quicken. Earlier in her career, she drove global marketing for Crest toothbrushes at Procter & Gamble and graduated from the Technical Leadership Program at GE. She has an MBA from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California Berkeley.