NOTE: This post talks about the features of our Crawler product, which has now expanded and evolved into Cyara Velocity. Read more about Cyara Velocity.
A major retail utility company was recently challenged to enroll as many customers as possible in an incentive program to switch from conventional light bulbs to LED bulbs. This incentive had cost savings for both the company and the customers. The challenge, however, was how to quickly and economically enroll thousands of customers in this incentive.
Last year, we launched Crawler, the first-ever IVR mapping solution, and it’s ideal for this type of opportunity. Crawler works by dialing an IVR and exploring and documenting the paths or options in the IVR. Crawler can also create test cases for IVR development. For this program, the utility company designed the experience they wanted their customers to have and used Crawler to create the test cases and test the options once they were programmed into the IVR. It’s estimated that Crawler can save up to 90% of the manual effort involved in writing test cases, which makes it much faster and easier to implement an incentive program like this.
How Customers Use Crawler
In addition to this example of designing and testing a special promotion, typically our customers have used Crawler for these types of situations:
- Building a test case suite: Frequent changes to an IVR are necessary in today’s contact centers, but customers often don’t have a test case library to use for testing these changes. So, our customers have used Crawler to build out this library. This enables them to quickly and easily regression test changes to ensure that they didn’t introduce a problem when adding new code.
- Migrating from one IVR to another: Customers also use Crawler when changing from one IVR vendor to another. In a case like this, the customer typically uses Crawler to generate an interactive map of the IVR they are replacing. Then, they use that map to set up the new IVR they are moving to. This way they ensure that they have the same options in the new IVR that they had in their old IVR, and their customers continue to have a consistent and familiar IVR experience.
Lessons Learned Using Crawler
Now that Crawler has been available for over a year, our professional services team has learned a few things that we can share with customers who want to use this solution. The first thing to share, which probably won’t be a surprise to anyone, is the importance of pre-planning. Before starting a project using Crawler, it’s important to identify what you are trying to accomplish. This is particularly true for a large project with multiple people who may be working at the same time. One tip that we recommend is to use functionality to assign people to the project; for example, you can assign someone to billing, someone else to reporting, another member of your team to accounts, etc. This will help you avoid having multiple people creating duplicate test cases.
Another thing that we’ve learned is that Crawler is a real workhorse for multitasking. What I mean by this is that there are tremendous savings you can realize from starting up Crawler and, at a certain point walking away, and letting it do it’s job. This is particularly true if you are with a very large company with thousands of accounts and maybe hundreds of branches and options on your IVR tree. There is a pyramid effect with Crawler, and it works like this. At the beginning of a call when Crawler is at the top layer of your IVR, the user will frequently interact with Crawler providing input in response to dialog states. However, as Crawler goes deeper into the IVR tree and the branches begin to spread out like the base of a pyramid, the number of user inputs required becomes significantly less. This enables the operator to walk away and perform other tasks while waiting for Crawler to complete the crawl.
Crawler is still relatively new technology, and in some ways, we have just scratched the surface of how it can be used. We are looking forward to seeing what other challenges our customers will throw at this tool.
NOTE: This post talks about the features of our Crawler product, which has now expanded and evolved into Cyara Velocity. Read more about Cyara Velocity.
