CX Testing for Better Customer Journeys

by | Jun 18, 2025 | 0 comments

What makes a customer happy with a company’s service? Is it how easily they can find the answers to their questions in a few interactions? Or maybe it’s the friendliness and expediency of live-agent interactions? Or perhaps it’s the way that they feel like their feedback means something? 
 The answer is all of the above. 
But how do you test your customer’s experience in a contact center? And more importantly, how can your team ensure your customer’s overall satisfaction with your company?

What is CX?

In the context of contact centers, CX, or customer experience, is as it sounds: how your customers perceive your company based on their interactions with your Contact Center via their various channels be it ;phone, chat, social, or email interactions. A positive customer experience is likely to drive their loyalty and retention, which in turn, boosts your brand reputation, and ultimately, increases revenue. The flip side, of course, is a negative customer experience which leads to complaints, bad reviews, and high customer churn rate, higher Agent churn rate, more expensive onboarding and staff retention costs, etc etc etc. This begs the question…

What is CX Testing?

Customer experience testing should be thought of as a continuous process rather than a single test. It’s an ongoing act of evaluating and simulating typical customer interactions across all channels (voice, chat, email, social media, self-service, etc.) to ensure a great customer experience (CX). 
 By leveraging key metrics to assess customer journeys, omnichannel interactions, and your service performance, CX testing tools help your team identify areas for improvement to ensure a polished and optimized customer experience.

How do You Test CX?

The goal of CX testing is to find ways to reduce friction in customer interactions, improve customer satisfaction, and increase efficiency. CX testing in the context of contact centers looks at how well the contact center environment facilitates efficient and prompt customer engagement and interactions. It’s not a single test, but a way of continually evaluating, simulating, and monitoring customer interactions against measurable criteria to ensure optimal customer experience.

CX and UX

Customer eXperience (CX) and User eXperience (UX) are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t technically the same thing. Think of CX as a customer’s overall experience. It’s the broader or overarching experience. The question with CX is “What do you think about the company?” User experience, or UX, is the customer’s experience whilst engaging with a specific product or technology. The question with UX would be “Is that company’s website easy and straightforward to use?”

CX Testing and CX Monitoring

Both CX Monitoring and CX Testing has the same goal: to empower you to provide an exceptional customer experience. But while they have the same goal, how they help you achieve this is different. Think of CX Testing as a Snapshot approach that helps you identify issues based on simulations, performance testing, and feedback. CX Monitoring, gives you a continual stream of data and feedback that you can track and analyse to help refine various aspects of your contact center’s performance. In other words, CX Testing is a “photograph” and CX Monitoring is “movie”.

Discover the benfits of customer experience monitoring.

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Types of CX Testing

Believe it or not, it takes more than a short wait time for a customer to decide if they’re satisfied with your company. Providing an exceptional customer experience means that:

    • Every touchpoint—whether it’s IVR, calls with agents, AI chats, and emails—is swift and efficient.
    • Calls are clear without jitter or latency.
    • All Inbound Numbers connect cleanly to the IVR/IVAs.
    • All elements of the CX platforms can cope with the anticipated volume of interactions.
    • The IVR system is mapped out in the most efficient way possible and routes customers to the support they’re looking for.
    • Chatbots understand what the customer is asking for and can accurately solve their issues.
    • Agents can quickly access the customer’s data and call history to provide a more contextual and efficient service, and reach a fast resolution.

How do you test these individual aspects of CX?

IVA/IVR Testing

Your Interactive Voice Assistance (IVA) and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are often the first port of call for customers who want to engage with your company , so it’s crucial for your team to get ahead of any issues that may affect the efficiency of  self-serve.  Customers that can resolve their own issues using the IVA/IVR’s are serviced quickly and cost effectively, if customers are unable to resolve their own issues (Self Service) and are required to engage with Agents, this can negatively effect Customer eXperience (CX)  This is where automated IVA/IVR Testing and Monitoring comes in.

If your customers complain that your IVR/IVA system is ineffective or it sends them in a loop, or routes their enquiry to the wrong location or destination, not only does that waste your agent’s time, but it also leads to customer frustration, which significantly impacts  their experience.

IVR/IVA Testing makes sure your system handles IVR/IVA call flows correctly and delivers the right responses every time. With IVR Testing, you can expect to optimize CX by reducing call abandonment and call handling times. 

With IVR/IVA Monitoring you can be sure you will be notified in real time if something goes awry, enabling you to swiftly address the issues.  The more straightforward, logical, and efficient your IVR/IVA system is, the happier your clients will be.

IVA/IVR Discovery and Mapping

Closely related to IVR/IVA testing is IVR Discovery, which refers to the process of visually mapping the customer’s journey through the IVA/IVR system to determine whether menus are correctly routed, and that the system meets the customer’s needs as efficiently as possible.

Capacity & Performance Testing

Customers can get frustrated over poor audio quality and dropped calls, which can lead to low overall satisfaction rates that damage your brand’s reputation. Capacity and performance testing will help your team stay on top of call quality no matter what time of day, no matter what the call volume is.

Contact center capacity and performance testing (also known as Load Testing) ensures your system is capable of handling your anticipated interaction volumes without facing system overload or inconsistent channel performance. A capacity test assesses how your system performs under pressure, i.e., when the maximum number of user interactions are introduced to your system. A Load Test will assess your system’s speed, responsiveness, stability, and resource usage under varying conditions to verify how well it performs under these specific conditions.

By identifying potential bottlenecks, your team can resolve these performance and capacity issues so they never  impact your customers.

Understand how VoIP latency impacts call quality and how you can fix it

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Remote Agent Testing

Testing the agent’s working environment is especially crucial if that agent is working from home or from a remote location. Remote agent testing evaluates and monitors agent performance to verify the quality of the call and the stability of the agent’s network. This testing is suitable for inbound and outbound, as well as on-premise and cloud-based contact centers.

Agent Testing can be carried out in real-time using live-agent monitoring, which measures latency, screen pop, jitter, packet loss, and call quality (MOS) while the agents are on live calls.

Agent calls can be tested through simulations to help reduce the number of human resources needed. In this case, servers mimic real agent behaviours, and test calls can be made to or from the call center to test call flows, agent workflows, and system integrations (all without needing a live agent).

Why Automation Is the Future of Customer Experience Testing

Time is an important factor. Without offering up the whole “time is money” platitude, it’s not something you or your customer want to waste. Any delay in resolving an issue can lead to setbacks on your end and customer dissatisfaction on the other.

When you manually test your technology, processes, or workflows, you add an unnecessary barrier between you and your solution. Additionally, manual testing is just not a feasible option for large enterprises that are dealing with large volumes of calls, customers, and agents – WHY ??? The sheer volume of end points, paths and scenarios to test are too many to perform manually and prone to errors and repetition causing complacency and inaccuracy – Automated Testing fixes this..

By automating your testing processes, your team can rapidly simulate a huge variety of scenarios to assess how your various contact center systems perform under various scenarios and interaction volumes.

From Suffering In Silence to Solving Real Problems

What’s easier for a frustrated customer to do? Wait to reach someone on the phone to complain about how poor the Customer experience is? Or not bother with the hassle and switch to a competitor whose CX is superior?

IVR Mapping provides you with a visual representation of the IVR/IVA which in turn enables you to connect customers to their desired destination with the least amount of interactions possible.  Without IVR testing, your customers might be having to deal  with inaccurate or overly complicated routing, dead end paths, call looping, congested paths and poor audio quality—all of which lead to poor Customer eXperience (CX) and a diminished brand reputation.

And the worst part is without IVR Monitoring, unless your customers tell you, you will have no idea that there’s even a problem that you need to address.

If the whole point of your IVR/IVA system is to make the customer’s journey as smooth as possible, then testing your IVA/IVR systems ensures that your company is effectively catering to your customer’s needs.

From an organizational perspective, CX testing simulates real-world scenarios across all touchpoints to provide your team with the data you need to measure Customer experience (CX)

From Resource Waste to Better ROI

Every time a Self Service opportunity fails to deliver for a customer, a live agent has to be engaged, which increases call wait times, customer frustration, dissatisfaction, and ultimately churn rate, negatively impacting Customer eXperience – CX.

Testing the processes and technologies that affect your customer’s satisfaction provides valuable insights into channel performance and smooths out any friction the customer may experience from the moment they interact with one of your channels to the moment they end their interaction..

Using automated testing tools prevents small issues from turning into expensive problems by continually monitoring ALL of the different areas of your Contact Center. It also improves channel performance, speed of service, accuracy, and lowers your operational costs by preventing service downtime, all of which lead to higher returns and better Customer eXperience (CX)..

Test your CX with Occam

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