When golf great Billie Jean King said: “Champions keep playing until they get it right,” she could have easily applied that idea to performance testing in the contact center. Repeated stress testing reveals flaws. When we know the weak points, we can take measures to correct them.
Or consider Michael Jordan’s admission. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Jordan’s revelatory comment about failure also provides us with an important clue. He consciously put himself in the middle of significant adversity – repeatedly. And he failed – a lot. But then he won – massively. So, it goes with customer journey testing tools.
It just so happens to be the path to improving contact center efficiency. Put the operation under simulated stress tests, and you’ll discover the weakest points in your contact center customer journey. Know your weaknesses. Amplify your success.
The stakes are high. Recession looms. The pressures on businesses require that we accomplish more with less. For the contact center, those requirements are greater than ever.
“The contact center is where you can consistently take care of your customers,” said Jim Cantwell, VP, Product and Technical Services at Hammer. ”If you take care of them there, they’ll stay with you no matter what the economy looks like.”
Contact Center Fitness. Test Hard. Test Often.
How does a contact center stay in shape for an unexpected spike in activity? How does it prepare for unforeseen outages? Or latency in the IVR / IVA? How do you ensure the agents are getting the right information to effectively serve, especially with customers who are increasingly impatient, less forgiving, and expect more personalized service?
These five tests provide the answers.
1. Load and Performance Testing
Uncertainty is a constant companion in the contact center. Frequent changes to voice-driven services, pushes of security patches or updates to voice infrastructure create instability and performance issues.
Moreover, changes in business hours or spikes in customer inquiries create unpredictability across the contact center experience.
With on-demand performance testing companies can create and execute whenever needed. They may also identify issues to be addressed before they impact the customer. Stress testing the IVR to assess points of failure is an excellent example of this.
2. Quality Confirmation
Once upon a time, quality assurance of the voice channel was resource-intensive and inefficient. The result was inadequate testing, long test cycles, and minimal test case coverage. All that’s history now.
Today, automated, frequent performance testing is possible across the customer service infrastructure, as well as align with the security patching and quarterly upgrades of infrastructure.
3. Network Reviews
Remote contact center agents are outside the scope of the corporate network. That creates a constant quality of service risk.
An automated voice quality testing and monitoring solution for remote agents will identify quality issues in home networks.
4. Failure Double Checks
Contact centers have many moving parts. Staff can’t be everywhere at once. Automate to make sure that everything runs smoothly, from the carrier to the IVR, to the agent.
Automation verifies that call flow modification and channel shifts are precise as expected.
5. IVR / IVA Testing
It’s crucial to test and monitor IVA performance. Machine learning tools automatically discover, create test scripts and document customer journey test scripts throughout the entire software development cycle.
By testing IVA with machine learning tools, contact centers can keep constant tabs on its performance, lower documentation efforts, develop persona-driven testing, and accelerate cloud telephony migrations.
Run Each of These Tests for Free
Customer journey testing tools provider Hammer is offering a free one-week assessment of your contact center experiences, measuring SIP call connectivity, IVR responsiveness, and more.
Harnessing the results of these tests, you can find faults within your technology architecture that frustrate customers and may lead to systems outages.
Yet, for those more interested in continuously monitoring contact center performance, the vendor is also offering a customized demo. Visit the Hammer website to find out more.
