In our galaxy… not one that’s far, far away… it’s pretty widely accepted that there’s a lot of benefit to automating aspects of your customer experience testing strategy. Automation can lead to things like faster development lifecycles, smoother deployments into contact center production environments, quicker identification of defects that may be hiding within you customer journeys, and reduction in manual, labor-intensive, and repetitive work.
But… getting to the point where testing teams can actually experience the benefits of automation within their testing practices to turbocharge productivity and ease the amount of painstaking test documentation necessary can take some effort. In fact, you might say that changing the way you’ve always done customer experience (CX) testing isn’t for wookies.
That’s why we’ve created multiple, easier ways to author test cases and experience the benefits of automated testing faster so that, instead of adopting new and foreign practices, you can focus your efforts on delivering quality CX.
Read on to learn about these different, automated methods for building your library of test scripts that you can run in automated functional, regression, and load testing campaigns, as well as CX monitoring.
Call Explorer (Test Phone Beta)
Now in public beta as Test Phone (and soon to be officially released as Call Explorer) Cyara’s latest automated IVR testing feature turbocharges the process of authoring test cases and supports the work of manual testers.
Call Explorer documents every aspect of each call, plus data that humans would never be able to capture without the assistance of this intelligent technology, so test cases are built to include everything your testing and development teams need to identify defects or room for improvement, reproduce issues for faster resolution, and retest journeys to validate that bug fixes worked.
Manual testers can move on to call the next customer journey to be tested and never have to dial that test again. Getting to the benefits of test automation to assure your customer experience has never been so fast and easy!
IVR Crawling and Cyara’s CX Models
A Cyara CX Model is a single, visual IVR representation, complete with multiple menus and user inputs mapped to all pathways.
As contact center testing teams know, manually creating a test case for each possible call flow takes time, which is why we created the ability for Cyara to “crawl” your IVR and map existing journeys directly into your Cyara Portal. Once these journeys are documented by the crawl, you can automatically generate test cases. And in addition, you can use CX Models to easily create visualizations of brand new customer journeys from scratch.
This is agile, Test-driven Development (TDD) at work, giving you the ability to convert your CX requirements to test cases even before your IVR is fully developed.
Direct Editing Via Cyara’s Portal
To easily build test scripts for each of your customer journeys, Cyara lets you quickly author a test case by following our intuitive template.
Unlike other test authoring tools, Cyara offers a simple, understandable, and user-friendly editing interface. With no coding knowledge necessary, an intuitive framework for inputting elements of each customer journey being tested, and assistance from our innovative auto-transcription technology, it’s easy to build!
Now you can quickly create a library of scripts, which can be archived and run in future functional and regression testing, load testing, and CX monitoring projects.
Utilizing REST API Programs to Build Your Test Scripts
At the heart of a Cyara test case is Cyara XML, the file format that contains all test case data, including settings, configurations, timings, Expect-to-Hears, and Replies. To easily build a test case, you can use Cyara’s API to automatically import and export these settings at will.
Following Cyara’s documented XML format, you can programmatically create test cases within your own environment and easily import into Cyara, leveraging our REST API.
This rich functionality gives you the building blocks you need to make Cyara an integral part of your greater CI/CD strategy. To read more about using REST APIs, check out this beginner’s guide to What is an API. Or if you’re ready for a meatier discussion on advanced ways to use Cyara’s REST API to do more with automated CX assurance, read this post.
Summary
It doesn’t take someone with a high midi-chlorian count to understand that customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, they will choose to do business with companies that provide positive customer experiences. That’s why getting CX right is the number one priority focus for most companies, and absolutely vital to the success and survival of your business.
So, use The Force – the Automation Force! – to support your development and QA teams in testing and monitoring your contact center systems for the fastest, easiest path to assure that they are always performing flawlessly.
