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.