For many contact center teams, the holiday season is often marked by stress to keep up with an influx of calls, chats, and other queries—all while continuing to deliver the quality your customers expect. The holiday season is one of the biggest sales periods for many industries, and any disruption in your CX offerings can have a significant impact on your overall success.
Cyara’s automated performance and load testing solutions assure CX quality, even during periods of especially heavy traffic.
A recent study from Deloitte has predicted that 2024’s retail sales will increase between 2.3% and 3.3% compared to previous years. As many brands look to capture additional sales through promotions and outreach, the holiday season is critical. A performance issue that lasts for just a few seconds can have serious consequences during peak traffic.
That’s why it’s important to prepare ahead of the shopping rush. With automated performance testing, you can verify your infrastructure is properly equipped to handle the massive number of interactions. From your IVRs to your chatbots, it’s essential to ensure that every channel is tested and optimized, or you may lose out on key business and face increased customer frustration.
Don’t Let Your CX Slow During Peak Traffic
Every second counts when it comes to holiday sales, and even the smallest defect can have a massive impact on your bottom line.
In 2019, Costco suffered significant losses after experiencing a connectivity issue. On Thanksgiving, Costco’s website crashed and remained down for over 16 hours, during which the business lost an estimated $11 million in sales. But this isn’t an isolated incident by any means. In our current competitive landscape, customers aren’t willing to settle for sluggish websites, dropped calls, or inefficient chatbot experiences. Any delays can lead your customers to seek a competitor for better-quality service.
But CX concerns during the holiday season don’t fall solely onto retail brands. Businesses within the travel and hospitality industry must ensure that their CX is prepared for one of the busiest travel periods, while other businesses attract extra business when customers receive annual Christmas bonuses.
Even if your CX channels are streamlined to handle interactions during the bulk of the year, the holiday season will push your infrastructure to its limits, and it’s up to you to ensure performance. Just a single minute of downtime can cost your business thousands of dollars and put your customer relationships in danger.
This is where performance testing is critical. When you adopt a continuous, rigorous testing strategy, you can begin to identify your CX’s weak points, plan for improvements, and set your systems up for success. So, when the holiday season rolls in, you can rest assured that your customers are protected against long wait times, sluggish interactions, and other harmful risks.
What are the Types of Performance Testing?
There are several types of performance testing types, which have different goals and measures for assessing your infrastructure.
Here are the four most common types of performance tests:
- Load tests simulate real-world traffic to understand how well your systems are performing under stress. This type of testing identifies bottlenecks and the maximum number of interactions that can be handled concurrently.
- Stress tests are a type of load testing that pushes your infrastructure to its limits to determine the system’s breaking point and any potential issues that may occur while experiencing heavy load conditions.
- Endurance tests evaluate your system’s performance over an extended period of time. These tests aim to measure how well your infrastructure performs over time and identify any errors that occur.
- Peak tests measure performance based on how well your systems handle sudden, intense spikes of traffic among regular conditions. This test detects defects that may occur when your system experiences unpredictable traffic conditions.
By investing in an automated performance testing solution, you can take a proactive stance to handling CX issues. Instead of simply reacting to errors that lead to costly delays and downtime, you can mitigate risks before your customers and bottom line are impacted.
Prepare for the Holiday Season with Cyara
Leading global brands trust Cyara’s testing and monitoring solutions to help assure CX quality during the holiday season. Let’s look at exactly how Cyara can help you avoid massive damage and losses during this critical time.
A massive US retailer was alerted to issues in their CX on Black Friday, the most important shopping day of the year. From Cyara’s dashboard, the retailer was alerted to several issues caused by a sudden spike in traffic, including a server delay. If the issues had gone unnoticed, it would have cost the retailer hours to identify and mitigate the errors. And, during that time, they would have lost out on countless customers and sales.
But Cyara’s AI-Led CX Transformation Platform relayed the necessary information to begin troubleshooting immediately. By partnering with Cyara, the retailer quickly resolved the issue and avoided serious consequences.
When you choose Cyara, you can take your CX to the next level and deliver quality interactions all year.
With the holiday season rapidly approaching, there’s no time to waste. Visit cyara.com to learn more or contact us to schedule a demo and discover how you can benefit from Cyara’s comprehensive CX assurance solutions.
