As your business grows, so does your call center’s incoming calls. How can you be sure your infrastructure is going to be able to take the strain? By implementing a robust stress test schedule, you can have the peace of mind that your technology will be up to the job.
What is a Stress Test?
Stress testing, also known as Load Testing, in a contact center environment involves deliberately placing the center’s systems, infrastructure, and third-party integrations under increasing volumes of interactions to evaluate their performance. The goal is to identify and address any weaknesses before real-world peak periods, when undiagnosed failures could cause significant outages and major business impact.
Get Proactive
Stress testing is a vital exercise that all contact centers should practice in order to detect and prevent issues before they directly affect your customers. By running stress tests regularly, and with plenty of time before seasonal peaks, such as Black Friday for retailers, your tech team will be able to improve and optimize any areas of the call center infrastructure that could be at risk of crashing under pressure.
To have a true picture of your call center’s agility, you should be continuously testing the full customer journey in its entirety, known as End-to-End Testing. Every time a new feature or change is rolled out to your system – no matter how small – it should be Load tested to avoid any customer getting stuck in a loop or transferred to a dead end. If you decide to skip this, you not only run the risk of losing a customer but also damaging the reputation of the business through your level of customer service.
What to test
When creating your stress testing process, you will want to start with the most common customer journeys so that any issues you discover can be prioritized accordingly.
Areas to consider:
- Inbound and outbound interactions to and from the agents
- Agent’s interactions with the technology in place
- All the available methods of communications a customer could use to get in touch with an agent (phone, SMS, LiveChat, ChatBots etc.)
- How calls and channels are routed to appropriate agents
- Deployment of any new features within the call center
Metrics to measure:
- Total number of agents that would be logged in at the same time
- Number of outbound calls generated
- Number of inbound calls received
- Number of channels utilized
- The rate an agent will go online to attend a channel
- Average number of simultaneous channels to be handled by agents each hour
- The number of emails and interactions generated and received
- Average number of interactions (with 3rd party systems) handled by an agent each hour
Remember, the general assumption of a customer is that your company has a flawless contact center that will solve their problems with ease. When calling to resolve an issue, a customer’s tolerance for poor Customer Experience (CX) is likely to be exceptionally low; it is, therefore, essential to make their experience as smooth as possible to relieve any potential pressure that may be put on the human agent that has to eventually handle an escalation.
Automate
The reason that many contact centers shy away from load testing is due to the worry that these tests could interfere with real customers getting through to agents and so the workaround becomes a nightmare for the tech team resulting in late-night testing to avoid any hiccups during office hours.
But what if there was a better way?
A contact center testing platform can automate these tests for you by initiating multiple, simultaneous calls at defined times, replicating the projected volume of calls your center expects to process, allowing you to monitor and report on the performance of the live environment in a matter of minutes. With features such as Virtual Agents, a Load Testing platform can interact with your Contact Center and handle the inbound calls and interactions without the need to have human resources on hand to replicate or simulate the testing scenario.
With these automated tests, you can gather real data into the customer experience you offer. For example, if your contact center is running at 60% capacity, using a platform such as Occam’s Razor Load Testing, you will be able to push the capacity up to see how your system will perform and determine the risk to your customers may experience.
Traditional automated testing solutions used to rely heavily on a third party professional services to build and carry out any automated testing scenarios, which is not only costly and time-consuming but also inhibits your ability to deploy changes to your system or work to a DevOps methodology.
Occam’s Razor Load Testing system has been designed to automatically provide an interactive mapping of your IVR environment and highlight any potential errors to allow you to check the current performance. You can also easily build your test scenarios from the information within Razor rather than manually uploading or importing scripts and audio files, allowing you to manage any load testing internally, without the need to incur external third party professional services fees and the flexibility to run the tests as often as you need.
