In my previous post, Improve Customer Experience by Eliminating These Top 10 Hidden Issues, I shared the top ten customer experience impacting issues I’ve seen in projects with Cyara customers. In this post, I’d like to share a common scenario, which comes from a project where we used Cyara’s Crawler® solution to discover and generate Test Cases for the customer’s pilot project.
In the project, the customer’s IVR started to crash over a period of several hours. Test Cases that ran perfectly in the morning were now failing in the afternoon. Using the built-in troubleshooting features in the Cyara Platform, I was able to ascertain that the IVR had actually crashed. I tried several manual test calls and found I was unable to contact an agent. In conversation with the customer the next day, it became obvious that they had not realized what had happened. The team were then able to confirm that there were technical issues at their end.
This is not uncommon among enterprise customers where the business owner, QA, Production, IT and Networking, and backend teams are not collaborating. The customer asked if Cyara could monitor the IVR in real time to catch these issues when they occur and if we could help improve their testing process to avoid Severity 1, 2, and 3 defects in their production system. My answer was that Cyara could help with that as well as improve the collaboration across all the teams.
CX Production Monitoring
Pulse is Cyara’s production monitoring solution, and continuously monitors the end-to-end availability and performance of IVRs and contact centers from an end user’s perspective. Pulse’s ‘outside in’, hands-off monitoring approach ensures you can hear and benchmark end users’ calling experiences without requiring any contact center integration. Should any issues arise, Pulse can generate automated email/SMS alerts.
I would run various Campaigns with the following testing strategy:
- Does the IVR answer within X seconds?
- Average Speed of Answer Test Case every 5 minutes
- Is the IVR Routing to a specific agent group correctly?
- Place a call every 15 minutes and abandon the call before answered by a live agent
- Is the Call Routing sending the call to the correct agent?
- IVR Routing to specific virtual agent in a dummy queue every 15 minutes and confirm the agent answers the call
- Is the latency from caller inputs to IVR response within 5 seconds?
- Call every 15 minutes to measure the latency of the backend servers when inputting a 16-digit test account number and its subsequent PIN input
I would then set alerts to be notified if any of these Test Cases fail based on an acceptable response time range.
Functional and Regression Testing
Cyara’s Replay solution performs application testing and functional testing of applications for IVR, Speech, Biometrics, and Voice Callback systems. Replay tests applications and any changes to them to ensure the modifications do not negatively impact other unchanged parts of the system/applications. This allows you to test every call flow to make sure those flows and any prompts match the specifications and requirements.
This is a proactive approach to Quality Assurance testing to ensure the applications are working as designed and the changes made are correct. This will require a complete “Left to Right” testing strategy that will cover the initial DevOps Design and Build stage, Quality Assurance, and the final Production stage. Cyara provides guidance on the best approaches to this methodology.
Our automated testing Platform can increase the coverage of testing up to 100% instead of the typical 10% testing coverage managed by a manual testing methodology.
I have also worked on projects with many Contact Centers that were well designed and whose self-service functions helped me get what I needed without agent involvement despite the issues this Cyara customer was having. And if I needed an agent or I chose to bypass the IVR, I got the right agent who knew who I was and who was able to handle my interaction quickly and easily.
