The journey to delivering seamless customer interactions isn’t easy. There are many issues and challenges that can emerge throughout the development lifecycle, requiring continuous testing and monitoring to ensure that you’re eliminating potential risks before your customers are impacted. For each CX channel, you need to leverage a range of testing types including regression tests, performance tests, and functional tests.
Learn how Cyara helps leading brands assure CX quality at scale, even under pressure with our automated performance testing solution.
While it’s critical to perform these tests to assure your CX quality, it’s equally important to have a firm grasp on what each of these tests accomplishes, and how they contribute to providing a larger picture of your CX performance.
Performance testing allows you to confirm that your CX channels won’t crash in the live environment. Stress tests and load tests are only two types of performance testing necessary to identify and eliminate downtime and bottlenecks that can negatively impact your CX offerings and your ability to satisfy your customers.
Though load and stress tests are an important aspect of an effective CX strategy, there are several distinct differences that set them apart. By understanding what you’ll learn from executing each test, you can more effectively leverage performance testing and set your CX up for long-term success.
What is Load Testing?
Load testing is a type of performance test that is used to verify how well your system performs under different levels of real-world traffic. Typically, load tests are used to determine performance under expected load types, allowing your team to identify problems such as slow response time, downtime, bottlenecks, and more.
Note that load tests aren’t meant to determine your system’s breakpoint. Instead of pushing your infrastructure beyond its limits, load tests verify performance under usual load. For example, a business looking to assess chatbot performance expects 1,000 users. In this case, the load test would simulate 1,000 interactions—or possibly 1,100 to provide room for error.
In this example, the test would showcase any issues that emerge under regular load conditions. If the chatbot experiences downtime during the test, it means that improvements must be made for the business to properly serve its customers.
By conducting load testing, you can benefit from several key advantages, including:
- Identify CX defects ahead of customer impact.
- Reduce the cost of issue remediation.
- Create seamless interactions that boost customer satisfaction.
What is Stress Testing?
Stress tests are another type of performance test. Whereas load tests determine performance under expected conditions, stress tests are used to identify whether your system is stable under periods of extreme load. Stress tests help determine your infrastructure’s breakpoint and the load at which your system experiences failure.
By gaining insights into your system’s point of failure, you can also discover how well and quickly you can recover functionality. Returning to our example above, you may verify that your chatbot can perform seamlessly under an expected load of 1,000 interactions. Then, with a stress test, you can increase the number of simulations until your system crashes.
This test is critical for understanding exactly how many interactions your chatbot can handle until failure, and how quickly it will recover. You can also determine critical factors such as whether data is lost or can be restored.
Stress tests provide several key benefits, including:
- Establish your system’s upper limits.
- Identify potential risks that appear only under extremely heavy load conditions.
- Determine future improvements to mitigate the risk of system failure.
The Need for an Automated Testing Solution
While load and stress tests have separate goals and purposes, each test provides valuable insights to create a stronger CX strategy. While load tests provide confidence that your system is always working as intended and meeting your expected needs, stress tests help you take your CX channels to the next level by identifying your system’s breakpoints and recoverability. Simply put, load tests prepare your infrastructure to perform under realistic load conditions while stress tests ensure you’re developing a more reliable system that recovers well after a crash.
Because both load and stress tests are designed to help you prepare for heavy usage and prevent system failure, it’s necessary to execute these tests often. Even the smallest update or change can drastically change your system’s performance, and it’s up to you to verify that your CX channels are still meeting performance standards, or you may face increased customer frustration or financial and reputational risks.
However, manual performance testing is costly and time-consuming, requiring hours of rigorous effort to verify just a fraction of your infrastructure. That’s why you need an automated testing solution.
With an automated performance testing solution, you can generate thousands of interactions to simulate real-world customer activity and verify that your system is performing as intended in a fraction of the time. Compared to manual testing processes, an automated testing solution makes it possible to conduct thorough and easily repeatable tests, so that you can confirm each element of your infrastructure and identify defects better than ever before.
Whenever it’s time to deploy a new CX channel or release the latest system update, an automated testing solution is there to help you ensure that your CX channels are equipped to satisfy your customers, even under heavy load conditions.
Assure Flawless CX at Scale with Cyara
Cyara’s AI-Led CX Transformation Platform helps you assure CX performance through every stage of the CX development lifecycle with automated testing and monitoring solutions. With Cyara, you can transform your CX strategy by scheduling automated performance tests to verify that your digital and voice channels are always equipped to meet your customers’ needs. Quickly identify and address potential defects ahead of customer impact when you leverage Cyara’s automated solutions.
Cyara makes it possible to ensure that your CX channels are always prepared to deliver quality interactions, even during periods of heavy traffic. Cyara Cruncher, our performance testing solution, simulates real-world customer interactions, so you can be confident that your entire infrastructure is working as designed.
With Cyara, you can:
- Test individual pieces of your architecture.
- Find and fix breakpoints.
- Confirm incremental changes to improve overall CX quality.
Performance testing is critical to ensuring your overall CX success and delighting your customers. By understanding the difference between load and stress tests, you can effectively verify your system performance and make the necessary improvements to assure CX quality at scale.
The path to delivering flawless interactions isn’t easy, but Cyara is here to help. Visit cyara.com to learn more about our automated CX assurance solutions or contact us to schedule a personalized demo today.
