Customer experience (CX) has long been a digital transformation priority, thanks to the thoroughly connected and online nature of customer interactions. However, the scope of enterprise digital transformation must stretch even further now that COVID-19 has driven more customers online. The pandemic also redefined the employee experience (EX) as largely digital, thanks to remote work models that are here to stay.
For competitive advantage, the new transformation imperative must be to break down silos between constituent experiences online. GartnerOpens a new window has defined the term “Total Experience†(TX) to describe the practice of combining multiexperience, CX, EX, and user experience to transform business outcomes. The analyst firm also projects that, by 2024, organizations that have embraced TX will be significantly outperforming competitors that have not done so.
Once these data silos are broken down, it’s possible to embrace a TX strategy that supports all stakeholders with increasingly mobile, virtual and distributed solutions in the cloud. Let’s take a closer look at the cloud migration strategies necessary to assure a cohesive TX approach and the pivotal role automated testing and validation play in that effort.
Total Experience Adds Both Value and Complexity to the Digital Transformation Journey
It’s difficult to overstate the value of TX and how it’s redefining the digital transformation playbook in the wake of the pandemic. TX improves the experiences of multiple audiences with services that are more seamless, aligned, and cost-effective for the organization. It supports a more unified culture for customers and employees alike to convene around company values of quality and service. Additionally, TX allows improvements to be rolled out company-wide at once, reducing the drag, cost, and redundancy of serving both internal and external stakeholder groups.
With that said, TX can’t be addressed with a piecemeal approach to modernization, and an organization’s digital transformation is not complete without TX as an end goal. That means your digital strategy must be more holistic and embrace some enhanced best practices around migrating to the cloud and conducting the proper automated testing to gain validation and assurance around these newly expanded and mission-critical architectures.
Risk Factors From Limited Visibility in the Cloud
As companies move operations, such as contact centers, employee portals and other core elements of the TX to the cloud, they benefit from dynamic service and provisioning models that allow engineers to rapidly mature complex systems and deploy them continuously on a global scale. With that said, moving mission-critical infrastructure, like the contact center, is a major undertaking.
One of the unexpected outcomes of cloud migrations is the need for more testing and assurance. Many organizations assume that moving to the cloud with its infinite scaling capabilities requires less testing and minimizes the need for performance testing. However, we’ve seen that in reality, that isn’t the case at all. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
After migrating to the cloud, enterprise IT teams need to make sure they still have control over all the organization’s underlying systems — systems that were previously in a secure environment with total control. In addition, modern cloud platforms are built with the ability for many more technology integrations, but these integrations can also be additional points of failure. All these factors can create more risk for errors and system failures. To assure everything operates smoothly, the cloud requires more consistent, continuous testing to make sure digital experiences are flawless.
That’s why, as a client of these services, you owe it to your company’s reputation and the online experience across all your stakeholders to ensure you bring automated testing, validation, and assurance to bear on these architectures to keep a level of control as you partner with cloud providers on your TX capabilities.
A Proactive Stance on TX Quality Through Automated Testing, Validation, and Assurance
Your monitoring and validation strategy should run across all channels to uphold the cohesiveness of TX architecture. For instance, traditional infrastructure monitoring solutions give only partial visibility into contact center metrics like time to connect via voice platform, chatbot, SMS or email; or into the quality of interactions and response times involving agents. In these cases, to minimize impacts of provider-side outages and service degradation, organizations should test technology systems with an automated testing solution to avoid wasting valuable time and resources running tests manually.
Automated testing and monitoring allow you to simulate real-world user interactions across Interactive Voice Response (IVR), voice, and digital channels, providing consistent and granular measures of contact center customer journeys and employee experiences. Especially in a TX architecture where the technical silos between constituent experiences are minimized, this helps your IT team proactively catch problems and errors before they impact the entire base of organizational stakeholders.
This proactive approach to continuous monitoring and testing the TX your company is providing its stakeholders will ensure transactions remain seamless and avoid issues that may cost customers or frustrate employees to the point of leaving the company — something organizations can scarcely afford to do in today’s exceedingly tight talent market.
See more: AI Alone Won’t Solve Your Customer Experience Problems, but It Will Expose Them
Reaping the Full Benefits of TX
TX holds out the promise of competitive advantage through a more unified brand experience across an organization’s customers, employees and other constituents. While cloud-based technology is necessary for the digital transformation journey toward providing TX, organizations must add automated testing, validation, and assurance capabilities to unlock the value of TX while minimizing the risk to organizational brand and operations.