Testing. It’s time consuming and expensive. Do I really need it?

Here in Australia, there has been a lot of media coverage about Amazon’s push into the Australian retail sector, and the disruptive forces the market will experience when a global leader such as Amazon and their buying power commence operations on these shores. The chief executive- elect of one of Australia’s biggest retailers, Westfarmers, surmised that the challenge for his group to remain competitive was to:

1) Become more productive and 2) to differentiate based on customer experience.

Indeed, this is the challenge that so many businesses face. The difficulty lies within that these two objectives are in direct competition with each other. How do you manage to become more productive, and at the same time not only maintain your levels of customer satisfaction but actually improve them? If we look at the Value Triangle of Quality, Service and Price it becomes clear very quickly that achieving all three is no simple task.

Contact centers are a huge part of an organization’s customer experience and are in no way immune from this central challenge. In a world where a competitive edge is increasingly being fought on the battleground of analytics and big data, businesses are facing more and more pressure to divert valuable resources towards the second point of the challenge.

So what needs to give? It makes sense for business’s to scrutinize every aspect of their project and operational spends and look at ways that they can:

1) Achieve more output with the same amount of input or, 2) Achieve the same output with a lesser amount of input.

Far too often when we look at ways to reduce costs and project schedules, it is often the testing process that suffers. Traditionally the testing function was viewed as a time consuming and expensive exercise, but an equally essential component to ensure the quality of the organization’s customer service levels were maintained.

Test scripts took an age to develop and required a large number of hours to manually execute them. The scripts often differed depending on the type of testing, be it functional, regression or performance testing, leading to duplication and inefficiency. You had call costs to take in to consideration. Then once you had completed testing and identified all your defects, you needed to repeat the same process all over again!

And because the process took so long to complete you started to only execute a subset of test cases meaning not all flows were tested which lead to, you guessed it, a detrimental impact to the customer experience.

The first step was to make the development of test scripts simple to create, maintain and execute, removing the need for specialist resources. The same scripts could also be re-used across every aspect of the testing function, be it functional, regression, performance testing or a simple IVR health check.

The second requirement was that the tool needed to be able to execute the test scripts at speed and on- demand, so that a high number of test cases could be run within a short time frame. This was achieved by making Pump testing scalable, from 2 concurrent calls all the way up to 10,000. The tool also needed to be flexible enough to be able to adjust parameters mid test, as well as retrospective applying new parameters to test data even once the test run had been completed.

And finally, because Pump was built from the ground up by Genesys developers and engineers, Pump has natively built into the tool all the data they wanted to see from a test tool. From network traces, in depth audio analysis, RTP statistics and ability to provide the Genesys ConnIds and user data for each call to assist in call matching between Pump and the Genesys Customer Experience Platform. All these features helped expedite the identification of issues as well as their resolution.

The end result was a simple- to- use, automated and scalable testing tool with a complete suite of detailed data captures that could be run continuously, all under one fixed price.

So whether you are a service owner, a project team or a managed services provider, if you have any requirement to test your contact center, ask yourself these questions:

1. Am I getting value from my regression and performance testing functions?
2. Am I able to rapidly test changes on demand or schedule them whenever I choose?
3. Could my business benefit from test automation?
4. Could my business benefit from a scalable solution that can test all the way up to 10,000 concurrent calls with a small infrastructure footprint?
5. Would my engineers benefit from increased logging and data captures when troubleshooting issues?

Testing. It drives confidence in our technology and ensures the quality of the customer experience. But thanks to automated tools such as Pump, it can also be simple, quick and a productivity tool to help deliver your projects faster.

Want to learn more? Check out the latest Pump brochure here and Pump Case Study.

This post has been co-authored by Ben Ng, Northern Region Practice Manager, and the Contact Centre Practice team at Byte. Byte CCP is an Australian based company that consist of a group of talented and passionate individuals who have been delivering innovation and change for Genesys customers globally for over 6 years.