Guide to Capacity Testing in Contact Centers

Capacity testing is used by contact centers to evaluate the performance and load capability of the various individual components that make up a Contact Center environment for when it’s needed the most.

“The worst possible time to discover that your Contact Center environment (or any individual component within it) is not able to cope with the demands placed upon it during peak conditions, is during a real world peak condition!”

But what is it and how can it benefit your operations?

What Is Capacity Testing in Contact Centers?

Capacity testing (also known as Load Testing) is a structured evaluation that determines how well a contact center’s infrastructure performs under certain load conditions. This includes verifying voice, chat, email, agent concurrency, API calls, and other communication channels to ensure the system maintains acceptable performance standards during peak demand. By simulating high interaction volumes, capacity testing identifies performance limitations, potential failures, and inefficiencies before they impact a contact center in real-world operations, particularly under high user load.

Benefits of Capacity Testing

Improved System Reliability and Confidence

By simulating high interaction volumes, your teams can easily identify  weaknesses or bottlenecks, ensuring that the correct specification and quantities of resources are in place ready for Peak loads.

Enhanced Customer Experience

When contact centers have experienced maximum capacity scenarios , they are able to verify how the customer, caller, or agent are impacted and address any issues. Capacity testing helps to identify any issues that may impact a smooth, efficient user experience, regardless of the volume of interactions occurring at any given time.

Cost Efficiency

Verifying the capacity limits of a system will help you get ahead of issues before they lead to downtime, lost sales opportunities, and, or a loss of customers.

Capacity Planning

Capacity planning in contact centers is the process of ensuring that the infrastructure, workforce, and technology can handle the expected call volumes and peak demand scenarios without experiencing service disruptions. It involves analyzing historical data volume, forecasting future demand, and optimizing resource allocation to maintain performance and customer experience.

Load Testing allows organizations to prepare for peak periods by checking how the system behaves under increased loads, which allows them to scale as efficiently as possible.

Types of Capacity Testing in Contact Centers

• • Baseline Capacity Testing looks at what your system is like under “normal” conditions.
  • Peak Capacity Testing takes a look at a system’s performance when it encounters its maximum expected load.
  • Scalability Testing sees how well the system scales at specific points between Baseline and Peak to ascertain where different elements are under different levels of strain
  • Multi-Channel Capacity Testing looks at the performance across numerous communication channels, i.e., calls, chat, etc.
  • Infrastructure Capacity Verification is a type of test checks all elements of your  environment and the individual components within it under a certain load, Processor capacities, API Calls, Screen pop times, IVR queues, Voice Channels, Bandwidth, Network Capacities, etc, etc, etc.

Improved System Reliability and Confidence

Ways to Test Your System

There are multiple ways to test your contact center’s system:

Performance Testing

Performance and capacity testing often go hand in hand. A performance test will look at your system’s speed, responsiveness, stability, and resource usage under varying conditions to see how well it generally performs, especially with different numbers of users. Its aim is to measure response times and to make sure that applications work properly in particular situations. It also helps identify bottlenecks or other issues impeding performance.

Stress Testing

Similar to capacity testing, a stress test pushes a system beyond its operational limits to determine when it fails and how it responds. It helps identify the system’s breaking point and to be able to identify how the system fails under extreme conditions, especially during volume tests with a high number of concurrent users. This is also known as “Testing to Destruction”.

For example, a Stress Test might deliberately overload your company’s IVR system with excessive inbound calls with the intention of understanding what your system does in this scenario – does the system reject the excessive calls, do all active calls degrade, do excess callers receive an engaged/busy tone? .

Testing for Destruction (See example above)

Ascertain Your Contact Center Capacities with Load Testing from Occam

With its capacity testing solutions, Occam is helping contact center teams reach their performance goals and therefore improve the overall experience of their customers.

Whether you’re striving to optimize your system’s performance, verify a new deployment, testing a change within your environment, planning for capacity, or simply to ensure a smooth customer experience during your contact center’s peak times, Occam and Razor Load are here to make it happen.

Elevate your contact center’s performance with Occam.

Try Razor Load Today