The ultimate goal of the contact center is to simplify the customer journey, but the technology behind the contact center itself is anything but simple. From the build phase to the design phase, contact centers are complicated. I think of the contact center as the front door to an organization that can either delight or frustrate the customer. It is the key platform to a “live engagement” where delivering a high-quality customer experience (CX) is of critical importance.
In this blog post (which is part one of a two-part series), I’ll share insights from my consultations with several business customers over the last year. Working collaboratively, customers have shared root cause analyses that showed how our tools were able to help identify issues. Early identification through automated testing catches defects before they cause a Severity 1 outage in production. The complexity surrounding most call centers is unavoidable, so being prepared and knowing how to react when you know something is wrong is key. Here are some real-life examples of CX impacting issues:
- Session Border Controllers and Voice Gateways with incorrect hardware provisioning or Quality of Service configurations causing audio issues
- Audio jitter, robotic voices, echoes, and buzzing continuing on SIP trunks
- Voice media gateways crashing within 20 minutes of a four-hour performance load test because of an inability to handle peak traffic loads over sustained periods
- Problems after a hot fix, software update, or hardware change not being tested properly
- Low audio, distortion and noise on incoming circuits preventing the speech recognition system from transcribing properly and causing frustrated callers to zero out to an agent and sit in queue for 45 minutes listening to distorted and noisy music on hold
- Poor design/logic (calls should be addressed in self-service but are landing on agent phones due to various issues)
- Default routing instances where licenses were not provisioned
- CLID data not triggering a screen pop and thus frustrating agents with no idea of call purpose
- Complex integrations of multiple different platforms and technologies being tested manually with no consistency, defined Test Case management, or workflow across teams resulting in a Severity 1 failure
- Chat interactions with long delays, disconnects, and the application itself crashing
A variety of factors can cause these issues. The fact is that your customers want the best experience possible. Whether or not they are trying to make a purchase, check their balance, or ask a question, it needs to be easy and painless. The most seamless customer journey will increase your NPS scores and improve your brand recognition. In turn, this will drive revenue growth and reduce churn. In part two of this blog post series, I’ll share an actual customer case study of how Cyara helped eliminate a hidden issue.
