In the world of customer service, you could argue that nothing matters more than efficiency. According to a survey by Genesys, 54% of customers say resolving their issue on the first try is the most important service outcome, while 50% say getting a fast response is their top priority. More respondents chose those two outcomes than any other, including friendly service, knowledgeable agents, and brand trustworthiness.
Clearly, efficiency matters in service.
That makes weeding out inefficiencies a crucial task for contact center executives. Wherever there is friction to a fast, smooth customer experience (CX), there is the risk of losing a customer and damaging your brand reputation.
Contact center testing is one of the most effective ways to find and eliminate inefficiencies in your CX. Whether there are road bumps in the customer journey or problems executing during high-volume times, testing can help you isolate the causes hiding beneath the surface. Here are five ways to use contact center testing to uncover and correct CX inefficiencies — and how the Cyara platform is uniquely built to address these needs.
1. Monitor the Remote CX Environment
The COVID-19 pandemic forever shifted the balance of remote vs. in-office work in countless industries, and contact centers were among those most impacted by these changes. Many companies have accelerated their transition to cloud-based contact centers and expanded their remote operations. According to a survey by TTEC, 27% of contact centers expect to keep nearly half of their workforce remote.
Remote work introduces new challenges to achieving contact center efficiency. Remote workers may find it harder to access resources for their jobs. Home networks, meanwhile, introduce another layer of CX uncertainty via potential call quality issues and outages. These remote challenges demand expanded testing and monitoring.
Cyara’s CX transformation platform is tailored to tackle these very challenges for cloud-based contact centers. ResolveAX, in particular, enables you to keep tabs on everything in the remote agent environment. Running in the background of agent workstations, this solution monitors network connections, headset performance, call quality, software updates, and more, to ensure your remote CX is up to your standards.
2. Correct Testing Inefficiencies
CX assurance requires extensive amounts of testing. One bad experience will send more than half of customers packing, so you can’t afford to allow CX flaws to make it into the live production environment. That means you have to test everything — and test often.
Unfortunately, many contact centers rely on waterfall testing methods, in which testing waits until the end of the development cycle. This leaves developers to correct massive problems when they’re discovered late in the game. In contrast, a continuous testing approach weaves the testing process throughout the development lifecycle, allowing developers to address issues before they become major problems. It’s a far more efficient approach and shortens development cycles by as much as 70%.
For maximum efficiency, continuous testing should be automated as much as possible. By relying less on manual labor and processes, you can vastly expand your test coverage and reduce testing bottlenecks to keep releases moving on schedule.
3. Test the Effectiveness of Buyer Journeys
Buyer journeys have become ever more complex in recent years. As service channels have multiplied, so have the potential pathways from prospect to loyal customer. While this creates endless possibilities for personalizing each customer’s experience, it also introduces more opportunities for inefficiencies.
Every time a customer switches channels or agents, there’s a risk of dropping the call or creating friction in an otherwise smooth interaction. If the customer has to repeat information to the next agent or start over in a new channel, it slows down service and incites frustration. It can also produce confusion for agents, who become uncertain about whether they receive sufficient information in customer handoffs or encounter workflow problems when taking over service interactions midstream.
Avoiding these potential inefficiencies requires testing every stage and channel within the customer journey. From self-service web chats to SMS exchanges to IVR and live-agent calls, you need to know that your customer can make each switch effectively and with minimal friction. Today’s contact center testing must be up to the omnichannel task. Cyara Velocity lets you build your ideal customer journeys and write test scripts to fit those journeys all in one go so you can ensure seamless transitions at every stage.
4. Push Tests to the Limit
Many contact center inefficiencies remain hidden until the moment of truth. Whether it’s a big new release or a high-volume event, you don’t know what the system can handle until it’s put under maximum pressure.
That pressure doesn’t have to come from live customers, however. Load and performance testing is designed to stress test your system and find weaknesses that would only show up when you can least afford them to. It’s far better to find out that your chatbots or IVR aren’t ready for full volume before open enrollment or tax season, for instance, than to discover these shortcomings during a traffic spike.
Here again, Cyara’s CX transformation platform delivers solutions that can put your system performance to the test. With Cruncher and Botium for load and performance testing, you’ll get a clear, realistic view of your IVR and chatbot performance thresholds so you can overcome barriers before the big day.
5. Collect and Act on Real-Time Feedback
As important as it is to find and eliminate inefficiencies before they enter the live CX environment, errors can still occur at any point throughout the customer experience. Continuous testing is thus incomplete without live monitoring and customer feedback collection to capture insights into further improvements that can be made.
Cyara Pulse provides real-time alerts for live CX interactions, such as when interactions exceed designated time limits or a call is dropped. This helps you spot incidents across multiple channels and address them more quickly, well before they create significant CX bottlenecks.
CentraCX takes this further by automating customer feedback collection and delivering key data to agents and contact center leaders to help you identify and solve issues. This provides yet another layer of critical insights, helping contact centers uncover more hidden inefficiencies lurking in the CX weeds.
Maximize Efficiency with Comprehensive Contact Center Testing
When it comes to ensuring efficiency in your contact center, there is no substitute for effective CX testing. With automated, continuous testing and monitoring solutions, contact center leaders can look under every rock to find the little problems creating big barriers to efficiency. Only by testing every channel and putting your system under maximum pressure can you discover how to deliver a truly flawless customer experience.
Ready to see how it works? Watch a free demo of Cyara’s award-winning CX transformation platform.
