Why Being Business Ready Matters

Being “business ready” is more than a buzzword; it’s a commitment to reliability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. For businesses handling thousands of customer interactions daily, even minor disruptions can snowball into significant operational and reputational challenges. Consider these critical aspects:

1. Customer Trust: When customers dial your 1-800 number or engage through a chatbot, they expect immediate and effective responses. System downtime, missed callbacks, or poor interaction quality erode trust and loyalty.
2. Operational Efficiency: Ensuring that agents, systems, and workflows are optimized not only improves response times but also reduces operational costs.
3. Competitive Advantage: A ready business is a reliable business. Meeting and exceeding customer expectations is a competitive differentiator in any industry.

 The Benefits of Being Ready for Each Day

When a business is “ready” every day, the effects are both immediate and long-lasting. First and foremost, continuous monitoring and automated testing act as a safety net, catching potential disruptions before they escalate into major problems. Imagine the confidence of knowing you will know of any issues prior to a customer interaction and that your systems are running smoothly, even during peak hours or unexpected traffic spikes.

This directly translates into happier customers. When someone dials your 1-800 number or interacts with your chatbot, they want quick, seamless solutions. Delivering that kind of consistent, frustration-free experience doesn’t just solve their issue—it builds trust and loyalty, keeping them coming back.

Internally, automation becomes a game changer. By eliminating the need for manual testing, your team can shift their focus from tedious tasks to more impactful strategic initiatives. It’s about working smarter, not harder, and letting your resources drive innovation instead of just keeping the lights on.

And then there’s the financial side of things. Resolving issues proactively means fewer costly outages and less downtime, which not only saves money but also protects your reputation. Being business ready is as much about efficiency and cost-effectiveness as it is about delivering exceptional experiences.

Best Practices for Being Business Ready Every Day

To keep your business running smoothly and maintain exceptional customer experiences, adopting these best practices is essential:

1. Automate Testing and Monitoring
   Automation is the backbone of a business-ready operation. Replace time-consuming manual processes with automated functional, regression, and load testing. This ensures your systems are always ready for peak performance, from daily operations to major events like product launches or holiday rushes. By simulating real-world interactions, automated testing catches potential issues early, giving you peace of mind and operational efficiency​.
2. Proactively Address Issues
   Prevention is better than cure. Using real-time alerts and diagnostics, your team can identify and address problems before customers even notice them by enabling quick identification of bottlenecks, ensuring your systems continue to deliver seamless service​. This proactive approach minimizes downtime, enhances reliability, and builds trust with your customers.
3. Optimize Omnichannel Performance
   Today’s customers interact with businesses across multiple channels, including voice, chat, email, and social media. Ensuring these channels are integrated and functioning smoothly is crucial. With comprehensive visibility and testing for omnichannel environments, every customer interaction can be seamless and consistent. Whether a customer reaches out via a chatbot or calls an agent, they should receive the same high-quality service​.
4. Engage in Continuous Improvement
   Business readiness isn’t a one-time achievement; it’s an ongoing commitment. Regularly analyzing data and the infrastructure allows you to uncover inefficiencies and identify opportunities for innovation.  This ensures your business not only meets but exceeds customer expectations and by​ implementing these best practices, your organization can stay ahead of the curve, consistently delivering the reliable, high-quality experiences your customers expect.

How Nectar’s CX Assurance Helps Ensure Business Readiness

Nectar’s CX Assurance solution is a cornerstone for ensuring businesses stay “business ready” every day. Here’s how it addresses the unique challenges of modern contact centers:

1. End-to-End Testing

   • What It Is: Simulates real-world customer interactions across all touchpoints, including voice calls, emails, chatbots, and social media platforms.
   • Why It Matters: Identifies potential issues before they impact operations, ensuring that contact center systems perform flawlessly from start to finish​

2. Proactive Monitoring

   • What It Is: Continuously monitors the health of your contact center infrastructure, from Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to agent endpoints.
   • Why It Matters: Detects and resolves issues before they affect the customer experience. Real-time alerts and dashboards keep teams informed and ready to act​.

3. Scalability and Load Testing

   • What It Is: Simulates thousands of interactions under various conditions, including traffic spikes and high call volumes.
   • Why It Matters: Ensures systems can handle peak loads during critical times, such as product launches or holiday rushes, without compromising performance​.

4. Workflow Validation

   • What It Is: Tests call flows, routing strategies, and agent workflows to ensure they function as intended.
   • Why It Matters: Prevents disruptions that can lead to lost revenue and diminished customer satisfaction.

How Nectar Can Help

Every day is not just about maintaining systems but about delivering exceptional customer experiences. With Nectar’s CX Assurance, businesses can confidently manage their contact center environments, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and satisfaction at every touchpoint. Whether it’s minimizing downtime, optimizing workflows, or scaling to meet demand, CX Assurance empowers businesses to rise to the challenge and set new standards for excellence. Interested in learning more about how we help businesses ensure that each day they are “business ready”? Contact us today and we can show you in action!

The human impact of these events is undeniable: employees may be directly affected by the storm, customers reach out in moments of distress, and businesses are stretched thin as they try to keep operations running. In these moments, the ability to maintain connection and offer support can make all the difference.

Overwhelmed Contact Centers

When a natural disaster occurs, certain industries—such as insurance, travel, logistics, and utilities—experience a dramatic surge in call volume. Customers are seeking assistance and timely responses and resolutions during one of the most stressful times in their lives, whether they are filing insurance claims, canceling travel plans, or making emergency arrangements. Contact centers become a critical lifeline, and the pressure on these businesses is intense. Phones ring off the hook, websites and chat are inundated with traffic and wait times can skyrocket.

Stressed Employees

Behind every call answered in a contact center is a human being. Your employees are the unsung heroes during a crisis, often dealing with upset or panicked customers while simultaneously managing their own concerns about the storm. Long hours emotionally charged conversations, and system challenges can leave even the most seasoned agents feeling overwhelmed.

Displaced Workforce

In disaster-prone areas, it’s not uncommon for employees themselves to be displaced by the storm. Whether evacuated from their homes or cut off from their usual work locations, employees might find themselves working from unfamiliar environments. This often means using unvetted or unreliable Wi-Fi networks at hotels, relatives’ homes, or other temporary shelters. These situations can severely disrupt communication systems and introduce new vulnerabilities.

Variable Preparedness

While some businesses in the southern U.S. are well-prepared for hurricane season, and those in tornado alley know it’s inevitable at certain times of the year and test regularly, others might not have the same level of readiness. The degree of preparation can vary widely, from robust disaster recovery plans to businesses that are caught off guard when the storm makes landfall.

At Nectar, we’ve long understood the critical importance of maintaining business continuity during such crises. Our solutions are built to provide resilience and support in exactly these situations, ensuring that businesses not only survive but maintain exceptional service levels.

Testing and Monitoring:

• Load, Stress, and Performance Testing with CX Assurance: Ensuring that contact centers are prepared for the increased load, before a storm hits, is critical. By simulating high call volumes and stress scenarios, our testing solutions help businesses assess whether their systems can handle the surge. We monitor for potential points of failure, flagging issues that could lead to dropped calls or slow response times.
• Web Interaction Manager: It’s not just phones that are ringing. Customers are also flocking to websites to check claim statuses, flight cancellations, and hotel availabilities. Our Web Interaction Manager tests your web-based customer touchpoints, helping you verify that websites and mobile applications perform efficiently under stress. This can be critical when trying to balance call and digital interactions effectively during an emergency.

These proactive steps mean that businesses don’t have to scramble to address technical failures mid-crisis. Testing ahead of the storm ensures systems are resilient when they are most needed.

Enhanced Ear-to-Ear Monitoring (via our Jabra partnership):

Our partnership with Jabra provides businesses with powerful tools to monitor and support agents during intense situations. With enhanced ear-to-ear monitoring, Jabra headsets offer a way to monitor the interactions more closely and provide insights that can help identify stress points:

• Sentiment Analysis: By analyzing the tone and emotion of both the agent and the customer, managers can identify when agents are struggling or when customers are upset, allowing for immediate intervention.
• Cross-talking and Noise Level Analysis: High levels of noise or interruptions can indicate both a stressful call environment and the need for improved support.
• Support and Coaching: With real-time insights, managers can provide targeted coaching, help with workload distribution, or even suggest a brief reprieve for overstressed agents.

With these insights, businesses can support their employees as they navigate the challenges of high-pressure, high-emotion interactions, maintaining not just business continuity, but a high-quality customer experience throughout.

Outside-In Testing:

When employees are displaced, ensuring they can remain productive is critical to the overall success of the business during the storm. Nectar’s Endpoint Client offers a way to assess endpoint availability across various locations. By monitoring whether remote employees have reliable access to the network and communication tools, businesses can quickly adapt to new working conditions and provide support as needed.

• Real-Time Testing: Monitor and verify the availability and performance of endpoints, especially those connecting through non-traditional or temporary networks.
• Routing Validation: Ensure that calls and communications are being routed correctly even as employees move from one location to another, possibly working from unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.

With these tools, businesses can ensure their remote and displaced teams remain functional, regardless of their physical location.

Diagnostics:

For those contact centers that may need to be taken offline—whether preemptively or due to unforeseen circumstances—UCD (Unified Communications Diagnostics) Monitoring ensures that traffic is rerouted seamlessly. Nectar’s UCD Monitoring allows businesses to:

• Validate Traffic Routing: Ensure that, if a contact center must be taken offline temporarily, communications are routed to other sites, locations, or backup teams without disruption.
• Ensure Continuity: Real-time monitoring confirms that all communication channels remain functional, even if a particular site or office is temporarily unavailable.

This capability is critical for businesses that may need to proactively shut down parts of their operations to ensure the safety of their employees or their infrastructure. By testing and monitoring these systems in advance, businesses can act swiftly when the need arises.

Providing Value in Times of Crisis

Businesses don’t have to face these challenges unprepared. We can help ensure that systems remain robust, employees supported, and customers well-served, even during the most disruptive events.

From load testing that simulates call surges to real-time endpoint monitoring that ensures displaced workers remain connected, our focus is on ensuring business continuity, high-quality customer interactions, and effective team support.

In times of crisis, preparedness isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity, and it’s never too late plan. We’re here to help at whatever point you need, so you can get ahead of the next disaster. Let us know how we can help.

Chatbots have become an integral part of customer service in contact centers. With advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), they offer quick responses, handle multiple queries simultaneously, and operate 24/7. In fact, according to 2024 statistics from Tidio, many customers prefer interacting with chatbots over live agents during initial interactions. However, to ensure chatbots meet and exceed customer expectations, thorough testing and continuous monitoring using AI-based automation are crucial.

What is Chatbot Testing?

Chatbot testing is the process of evaluating a chatbot’s functionality, performance, and user experience to ensure it meets desired standards and objectives. It involves various tests designed to validate the chatbot’s ability to:

• Understand and Respond Accurately: Assessing its NLP capabilities to interpret user queries correctly.
• Integrate Seamlessly: Ensuring smooth interaction with other systems like CRM and billing platforms.
• Provide Secure Interactions: Identifying vulnerabilities to protect sensitive customer data.
• Deliver Satisfying User Experiences: Evaluating the overall interaction from the user’s perspective.

Thorough chatbot testing helps in delivering a reliable, efficient, and engaging chatbot that enhances customer satisfaction and supports business goals.

Why AI-Based Chatbot Testing Matters

Chatbots are often the first point of contact for customers seeking support, and their performance can significantly impact the customer experience. Poorly functioning chatbots can lead to customer frustration, increased call volume, and ultimately, a tarnished brand reputation. Here are some key reasons why it is essential:

• Enhanced Accuracy and Reliability: AI algorithms can simulate countless interaction scenarios, including unexpected inputs, to ensure the chatbot responds accurately.
• Improved User Experience: AI enables the testing of conversational flows and user interfaces to create seamless and intuitive interactions.
• Efficient Integration Testing: Automated testing tools can quickly verify the chatbot’s integration with backend systems.
• Advanced Security Testing: AI can identify and address security vulnerabilities more effectively.
• Continuous Improvement: AI-driven analytics provide insights into user interactions, helping to refine and enhance the chatbot over time.

Key Steps in AI-Based Chatbot Testing

1. Define Objectives and Use Cases: Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with your chatbot and the specific scenarios it will handle. This helps in creating targeted AI-driven test scenarios reflecting real-world interactions.
2. NLP Testing with AI: Use AI algorithms to test the chatbot’s ability to understand and process natural language inputs, including variations in phrasing, slang, and typos.
3. Conversation Flow Testing: Evaluate the logical flow of conversations using AI to simulate different user paths, including edge cases with unexpected inputs or topic changes.
4. Integration Testing: Employ AI tools to verify that the chatbot interacts correctly with other systems, checking API calls and data processes efficiently.
5. User Interface (UI) Testing: For chatbots with graphical interfaces, AI can automate testing of UI elements across different devices and platforms to ensure consistency and functionality.
6. Performance Testing: Use AI-based testing to assess the chatbot’s responsiveness and stability under various conditions, including high user loads and simultaneous interactions.
7. Security Testing: AI can conduct thorough security assessments to identify vulnerabilities, ensuring data encryption and proper authentication mechanisms are in place.
8. Usability Testing: Gather feedback through AI-driven user simulations to evaluate the chatbot’s usability, providing insights for refinement.
9. Continuous Monitoring and Improvement: Implement AI analytics to monitor the chatbot’s performance post-deployment, collecting data on user interactions to identify common issues and update the chatbot regularly.

Leveraging Advanced Tools for Chatbot Testing

To effectively implement AI-based automation testing and monitoring, leveraging advanced tools is essential. Solutions Nectar’s AI-Driven CX Assurance offer comprehensive platforms for chatbot testing.

CX Assurance enables:

• Automated Functional Testing: Ensuring the chatbot performs intended tasks correctly through AI-driven test cases.
• NLP and Conversation Testing: Validating the chatbot’s understanding of natural language and maintaining conversational integrity.
• Performance and Load Testing: Assessing how the chatbot handles multiple users and heavy loads using AI simulations.
• Security and Compliance Testing: Identifying potential security risks and ensuring compliance with regulations.

Additionally, focusing on User Experience Testing for Chatbots is crucial. AI-based testing tools can simulate real user interactions to evaluate and enhance the overall user experience, ensuring the chatbot is user-friendly and meets customer expectations.

The Benefits of AI-Based Testing and Monitoring

Implementing AI in chatbot testing and monitoring offers significant benefits:

• Efficiency: AI automates repetitive testing tasks, saving time and resources.
• Scalability: Easily test complex scenarios and large volumes of interactions.
• Insightful Analytics: AI provides deep insights into user behavior and chatbot performance.
• Proactive Issue Resolution: Continuous monitoring helps identify and address issues before they impact users.

How Nectar Can Help?

Effective chatbot testing is not a one-time task but an ongoing process requiring attention to detail and a focus on continuous improvement. By implementing AI-based automation testing and monitoring, you can ensure your chatbot provides accurate, reliable, and satisfying interactions, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience. Our team specializes in deploying advanced AI-driven testing tools and strategies. We can assist you in:

• Developing Comprehensive Test Plans: Tailored to your chatbot’s objectives and use cases.
• Implementing AI Testing Tools: Setting up platforms like CX Assurance for efficient testing processes.
• Analyzing Performance Metrics: Providing actionable insights for continuous improvement.
• Optimizing User Experience: Enhancing the conversational flow and usability of your chatbot.

Ready to Enhance Your Chatbot? Reach out to us when you’re ready to test your chatbot or optimize your contact center solutions. We’re here to help you deliver the best customer experience possible!

Jericho, New York – July 25th, 2024 – Nectar Services Corp. (“Nectar”) grabs top honors in the 2024 UC Awards celebration, winning for Best Service Management Platform for the second year in a row.

UC Today, the leading international news publication honoring excellence in UC & Collaboration technology, proudly hosted the UC Awards. It’s where groundbreaking innovations and remarkable achievements in the tech industry come together for a digital fiesta!

Judging is based on an organization’s ability to demonstrate innovation, improved experience and execution. The panel of 16 judges included industry experts such as Zeus Kerravala, Analyst and Founder of ZK Research, Melissa Swartz, Founder at Swartz Consulting and Blair Pleasant, President & Principal at COMMfusion.

More about Nectar Services Corp.:

Nectar’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP) enables business and operational leaders to measure, monitor and maximize the performance of their digital communications and collaboration applications. Whether it’s on-premise voice platforms, cloud UCaaS and CCaas, digital customer experience (CX) channels, SIP sessions or remote workers, Nectar DXP presents a single-pane-of-glass for your user, agent and customer experience.

Nectar partners with Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Genesys, Five9, Amazon, Zoom, Jabra and others to deliver integrated, correlated tools that assure exceptional user experiences, improve management visibility, and deliver operational gains through improved service delivery across cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments. Their tools provide ear-to-ear (down to the headset) experience monitoring on today’s collaboration and contact center platforms by offering best-in-class analytics, monitoring, troubleshooting and testing tools, purpose built for voice, video & real-time communications.  Nectar will:

• Maximize the quality of your users’ voice/video experiences, no matter where they are located, by monitoring their network, Internet Service Provider (ISP), SIP sessions, voice/video and web application response.
• Correlate voice and video performance from complex hybrid, multi-vendor scenarios in one easy to use dashboard to support your users across all the UC and CC platforms that you depend on.
• Assure quality interactions under any circumstances with comprehensive functional, regression and load testing across all CX channels, as frequently as needed, enabling your teams to proactively address issues and validate call performance and spare your customers from any negative experiences.

“Nectar’s exceptional work in Service Management has helped push the category forward, and we are thrilled to see their accomplishments acknowledged at UC Awards 2024,” said Rob Scott, Publisher at UC Today.

“From all of us at Nectar – Thank you UC Today for the recognition and this terrific honor! Congratulations to all the finalists and winners. Nectar is honored to win “Best Service Management Platform” for the 2nd year in a row. It’s a testament to our incredible team of professionals that strive every day to deliver the best UCaaS and CCaaS monitoring, diagnostic and testing solutions to our customers and partners worldwide.” said David Giangano, CEO at Nectar Services Corp.

Nectar was honored on Thursday, 25^th July. You can view all winners here www.uctoday.com/ucawards

About UC Awards:

UC Today celebrate the best in UC seeking pioneers, visionaries and game-changers, from groundbreaking solutions to transformative technologies. UC awards has become the beacon of recognition for companies and professionals pushing the envelope in the UC and Collaboration technology sphere.

The UC Awards 2024 is here for its seventh year and is bigger and better than ever before! Winners of the 2023 awards included Avaya, Webex, DTEN, 8×8, Zoom and more.

Since 2020, video communication has seen a monumental shift from an on-premises luxury to an essential cloud-based service. Since then, companies have embraced the future of hybrid work. However, as more employees are asked to return to the office, the demand for reliable video conferencing systems has surged, highlighting the need for enhanced monitoring strategies. This requires integrating cloud services and internet-based user devices with a renewed emphasis on on-premises hardware. At Nectar, we recognize the crucial need for comprehensive visibility across these hybrid environments, ensuring that businesses maximize their investments and maintain seamless communication.

The Evolution of Video Conferencing and the Return to the Office

Video communication has been a staple in corporate environments for years, initially dominated by on-premises solutions from various vendors. With the advent of cloud technologies, platforms like Cisco WebEx transitioned to the cloud, offering greater flexibility and scalability. 2020 further accelerated this shift as organizations moved to remote work, relying heavily on additional desktop video solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Now, there is a noticeable trend of employees returning to the office. This transition has sparked a renewed interest in sophisticated video conference systems. Companies are now investing in comprehensive video room setups, including Microsoft Teams Rooms, Cisco WebEx Rooms, and Zoom Rooms. Additionally, third-party vendors like Poly, Mersive Solstice, and Crestron are providing a range of video room components, including monitors, microphones, and control systems.

The Hybrid Monitoring Challenge

The integration of advanced video conference equipment and solutions presents new challenges for IT departments. The modern video conferencing environment is more complex, requiring monitoring of both cloud-based services and on-premises hardware; possibly all from different vendors and different eras.  This hybrid approach demands a robust monitoring solution that provides end-to-end visibility across all components of the video conferencing ecosystem as well as all employees no matter where they are working.

Comprehensive Visibility

At Nectar, we understand the importance of having a single pane of glass to monitor both cloud and on-premises video conference systems. Our solution offers comprehensive visibility, ensuring that IT teams can monitor the performance and health of every component, from cloud services to room hardware. This unified approach helps in identifying issues quickly, optimizing performance, and ensuring that investments in on-premises video systems deliver their intended ROI.

Ensuring ROI and Utilization

With significant investments being made in on-premises video systems, organizations need to ensure these resources are utilized effectively. Monitoring tools must provide insights into usage patterns, identifying underutilized assets and optimizing resource allocation. This data-driven approach helps businesses maximize their investments, ensuring that video conference systems contribute to productivity and collaboration.

Proactive Issue Resolution

Hybrid environments can be prone to a range of issues, from network disruptions affecting cloud services to hardware failures in on-premises setups. Proactive monitoring is essential to detect and resolve issues before they impact users. Nectar’s monitoring solutions offer real-time alerts and diagnostics, empowering IT teams to address problems swiftly and maintain a seamless video conferencing experience.

Supporting a Diverse Ecosystem

The video conferencing landscape is populated with a variety of vendors and technologies. From Microsoft Teams Rooms and Cisco WebEx devices to third-party components like Poly and Crestron, IT departments must manage a diverse ecosystem. Nectar’s flexible monitoring platform supports a wide range of devices and systems, providing consistent and reliable monitoring across the entire video conferencing infrastructure.

Looking Ahead: Trends in Video Conference Monitoring

As the hybrid work model becomes the norm, several trends are emerging in the monitoring space:

Integration of AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are playing an increasingly important role in monitoring solutions. These technologies can predict potential issues, automate routine tasks, and provide actionable insights to optimize performance. AI-driven analytics can help IT teams understand usage patterns and make data-driven decisions to improve the video conferencing experience.

Enhanced Security and Compliance

With the growing reliance on video conferencing, security and compliance are critical. Monitoring solutions must ensure that video communications are secure and comply with industry regulations. This includes monitoring for unauthorized access, ensuring data encryption, and maintaining audit trails for compliance purposes.

User Experience Focus

Ultimately, the success of video conferencing systems hinges on the user experience. Monitoring solutions must prioritize metrics that impact user satisfaction, such as video and audio quality, latency, and connection stability. By focusing on the user experience, organizations can ensure that their video conferencing systems support effective collaboration and communication.

Conclusion

The return to the office and the integration of advanced video conference systems marks a new era in corporate communication. The hybrid environment, combining cloud-based services with on-premises hardware, presents unique challenges and opportunities for IT departments. We are committed to providing comprehensive monitoring solutions that offer the visibility, insights, and proactive capabilities needed to navigate this complex landscape. As businesses continue to invest in video conferencing technology, our goal is to ensure these systems deliver exceptional performance, enabling seamless and productive communication. Reach out if you’d like to see more!

Cloud migration is a strategic move that many companies undertake to enhance their technological agility and improve customer communications. However, the transition from traditional Contact Center platforms to a cloud-based environment can be fraught with challenges. To prevent issues, use these 5 steps to ensure a successful cloud migration, focusing on maintaining, optimizing and ultimately improving customer and agent experiences.

 Baseline of the Customer Journeys Before Migration

When initiating any migration project, it’s crucial to establish a comprehensive baseline of customer journeys and communication channels. Over time, customer journeys often evolve and rely on outdated legacy systems, especially complex IVRs that have undergone numerous consolidations and updates. Without a baseline, distinguishing existing issues from new ones introduced during migration becomes challenging. 

Creating a baseline manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming. For IVRs, this involves making manual calls, navigating through each path, and documenting every customer journey, which can be daunting given the complexity of most IVR systems. Manual documentation efforts may require extensive resources over weeks or months and are prone to errors. 

 A more efficient and accurate approach involves leveraging discovery mapping capabilities within an automated testing solution. This method significantly accelerates the baseline creation process, allowing IVRs to be documented within days instead of weeks or months. The resulting documentation can also be used to automatically generate test scripts, enabling companies to establish baseline documentation and conduct functional and regression testing simultaneously. 

Update and Optimize Customer Journeys  

According to a survey from Salesforce in 2023, 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products, so an essential advantage of transitioning to the cloud is the ability to enhance and refine customer journeys and thus customer experience. Form cross-functional teams dedicated to redesigning journeys with a customer-centric approach. These journeys often begin with self-service interactions and may transition to agent-assisted service. Develop these omnichannel journeys based on valuable customer feedback and insights gained from customer experiences. 

Create Functional Tests to QA Customer Journeys 

Simultaneously develop new or updated functional tests while designing customer journeys. Establish an automated regression test suite to conduct continuous testing during the migration process. Utilize a design-driven testing solution that dynamically generates and maintains tests alongside the design phase. 

Assure New Functionality Performs under stress  

Another crucial aspect of ensuring a successful migration is conducting load testing to verify the performance of your new contact center platform, the associated applications, and your network under various load conditions. Performing a single load test is insufficient; it’s essential to incorporate ongoing load testing into your quality assurance practices. Regular load tests assess continuous system and network performance and evaluate any changes made since the last test.  

Production Proactive and Realtime Monitoring of CX and AX Agents 

 It’s essential to proactively identify any issues with the customer experience before customers encounter them. Implement production monitoring during and after migration to continuously monitor system performance. Given the complexity of modern systems, which involve multiple interconnected components, it’s crucial to ensure monitoring covers all customer journeys, channels, backend system connections, business rules, agent routing, and other critical components. Evaluate attributes such as availability, transaction completion, performance, and other metrics vital to enhancing the overall customer experience. 

Pre-Assessment & Continuous Monitoring – Identifying Connectivity Challenges 

• • Home Users: Identify remote workers with poor internet bandwidth or connectivity. 
  • Testing Cloud Services: Rigorously test bandwidth and performance to cloud services (e.g., AWS, Azure) and corporate data centers. 
  • Eliminate Blind Spots: Ensure complete coverage across all remote workers. 

Post-Deployment Monitoring – Continuous Evaluation 

• • Agent Health: Summarize overall performance using live calls and test results. 
  • Global View: Localize issues to specific users, data centers, regions, or ISPs. 
  • Geolocation Mapping: Understand remote worker locations and ISPs. 

Supported Platforms 

Ensure the solution integrates seamlessly with various platforms, including Genesys, Five9s, Amazon Connect, and more. Make sure the company you work with ensure the product set is futureproof. 

Health Index-Intelligent Routing – Optimizing Agent Availability 

• • User Health Index: Intelligently manage agent availability based on network performance. 
  • Automatic Queue Placement: Place agents in chat queues during performance degradation, switching back to voice queues when network conditions improve. 
  • Manual Adjustments: Allow agents to adapt during voice quality issues. 

How Nectar can Help 

According to Forrester research, customers are 2.7 times more likely to spend more when companies communicate clearly. Therefore, it’s important to assure a successful cloud migration with a well-planned strategy that prioritizes customer needs and ensures that their experience is not negatively impacted. By leveraging advanced technologies and methodologies, businesses can enhance operational efficiency and improve customer satisfaction through a seamless migration. Each of these steps are aligned with Nectar’s solutions.  Contact Us!  We’d love the opportunity to discuss your project and concerns with you.

Jericho, New York – May 9, 2024 – Nectar Services Corp. (“Nectar”) today announced its Digital Experience Platform and CX Assurance tools are now available on the Genesys AppFoundry, a marketplace of solutions offering a curated selection of applications and integrations that elevate customer and employee experiences, as a Premier Partner.

“Entering the AppFoundry marketplace with Genesys presents an unparalleled opportunity. We’re not just solving problems proactively and in real-time – we’re enhancing customer and agent satisfaction, reducing churn, and offering a platform for partners to monetize their expertise.” – Hes Yavari, VP Contact Center & CX Practice

Nectar’s solutions make it easy for Genesys® customers to:

• Tackle issues right at the agent’s endpoint, to provide end-to-end customer journey visibility of the Genesys Cloud platform.
• Provide end-to-end customer/agent experience and platform visibility at scale across multi-vendor communications technologies.
• Test performance to ensure your system can deliver great customer experiences, even under stress.
• Speed up migration and quality assure your move to the cloud.
• Monitor your contact center from the outside in, providing alerts and alarms when something isn’t performing as it should.
• Pinpoint problems faster than traditional methods, all encapsulated within a single-pane-of-glass.

“While Nectar is new to the AppFoundry family, we’ve been supporting Genesys customers for several years. We have significantly aligned our R&D commitment to make it seamless for users to reduce the risk and expense of migrating to the cloud and deliver better customer and agent experiences. We look forward to working with Genesys on a more strategic level as we go along on this journey.” – Joe Fuccillo, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder

Nectar’s solutions are available for use with Genesys Cloud, an all-in-one composable solution that helps organizations offer frictionless and connected customer and employee experiences. As a modern, API first experience orchestration platform, Genesys Cloud enables organizations to coordinate every interaction and touchpoint through a full suite of omnichannel options, built-in employee experience, turnkey AI and end-to-end journey optimization.

To learn more about the specific features and benefits of our solutions please visit our AppFoundry listings:

Nectar Digital Experience Platform

Nectar CX Assurance – Performance

Nectar CX Assurance – Automated Functional/Regression Testing

Nectar CX Assurance – Monitoring

About Nectar Services Corp.

Nectar is a global market leader in delivering actionable digital experience insights for the cloud collaboration and contact center markets. Nectar’s software enables enterprises to collect, correlate and surface their most important customer, agent, and user experience data. This helps businesses to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, optimize the customer and employee experience, and improve brand strength.

Nectar’s best-in-class solutions support many voice and video technology vendors, and currently supports millions of enterprise endpoints across thousands of organizations around the world — including many Fortune 500 customers across global banking, insurance, healthcare and professional services industries.

You can see the original press release here: Nectar Solutions Now Available on Genesys AppFoundry (prnewswire.com)

 Callbacks are a crucial component of effective customer service, and their significance cannot be overstated. When considering the question, “Why Callbacks?” one must think of a “callback” as part of the promise of customer service that a company makes to their callers to ensure a great customer experience.

Customers call a company’s contact center to receive service and a callback is a critical element that allows a company to “promise” service even if an agent isn’t available because of excess callers or the contact center is closed.  Therefore, returning a callback is just as critical as the initial inbound call. After all, a customer that is expecting a callback has already made the effort to contact the company for support. Failing to follow through on a callback promise can be severely damaging to a company’s reputation, eroding customer trust and loyalty.

Callback tools are a great investment to help reduce call abandonment rates by ensuring that customers don’t have to wait in a queue, listening to music, effectively “trapped” in line hoping to have an agent answer.  They give customers options to carry on with their day until an agent is available. Every customer who hangs up frustrated or angry before reaching an agent is potentially a lost customer. So, callbacks play a pivotal role in improving the customer experience, resulting in higher customer retention rates.

In addition, callbacks increase agent productivity by allowing them to manage their time more efficiently and focus on resolving customer issues (rather than playing telephone tag!), contributing to higher first-call resolution rates and reducing the need for customers to make multiple calls to address the same problem.

Finally, callback tools aid in managing call traffic efficiently, evening-out peaks and valleys, and ensuring that no customer is left waiting for an extended period. This becomes extra important during those high traffic (and high revenue) times – like the holidays!

What can go wrong and whose fault is it?

Ensuring reliable service through a call center’s callback application is vital, especially when agents might not be immediately available. To fulfill its purpose, the application must be fully operational at all times. However, several issues could compromise its effectiveness:

• The callback system and the inbound call-routing services must be consistently operational to prevent any disruption to incoming and outgoing calls, maintaining dependable execution.
• Inbound services that channel calls to the agents and the callback system, as well as the outbound callbacks that can potentially be impeded, need uninterrupted availability to uphold service promises.
• DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) issues pose a significant hurdle. If customers can’t effectively use the phone’s keypad to interact with automated prompts or if their input isn’t properly detected, this can prevent them from reaching an agent, resulting in frustration and a loss of confidence in the service.
• The callback application’s availability could be hindered by internal complications within the Telecom Server’s environment, such as networking glitches or access problems.
• The timing of callbacks is essential. Promises made about callback times set customer expectations. If calls arrive unexpectedly or at inconvenient times, they may be missed or diverted to voicemail, leading to a prolonged and inefficient cycle of missed communications, otherwise known as “telephone tag.”

These issues have a direct impact on the customer experience and often, the first sign there is a problem isn’t until a customer complains (or worse, doesn’t, because they never got the call back!).  Figuring out exactly where the problem is occurring isn’t always easy and too much time is spent finger pointing at the possible culprits.

Many organizations try to manually replicate the issue to determine if it’s a one-off sporadic problem or a wide-spread issue, but that takes a lot of resources. Ideally, a testing tool like Nectar’s CX Assurance is used to automate the testing of all the customer touchpoints, which will:

• Reduce costs by moving people from manual testing and putting them to work serving your customers.
• Ensure this is done daily (or even hourly) to make sure you contact center including inbound voice, callback options, and actual callbacks are functioning properly.
• Have a scientific measurement (by taking out a person’s perceptions during manual testing).
• Apply best practices around how to inbound and callbacks should work together and make sure they are ready for service.
• Provide recorded two-way audio test calls give you a true “voice of the customer” experience.

Tools give your staff peace of mind through automated testing for the IVR, Callback, and other customer facing applications to fully ensure a great customer experience, but adding experienced professional services ensures these tools are used correctly.

What Swampfox and Nectar provided together

A leading fortune 50 Telecom Company has long partnered with Swampfox Professional Services and Managed Services in serving and assisting and improving their overall customer experience. In this capacity, Swampfox has employed Nectar CX Assurance to closely monitor the customer’s initial engagement with their Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and the subsequent delivery to their agent queues.

About three years ago, the telecom company faced challenges with their existing callback solution. Previous solutions had proven to be lacking in functionality, suffered from performance issues, and struggled to integrate seamlessly into their contact center and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operations. In response to these issues, the company decided to migrate to Swampfox’s First-in-Line (FIL) callback tool, implementing it across multiple areas within their enterprise.

During a daily keep-alive call the team at Swampfox was alerted of an issue with the callback process. While the FIL Callback application-initiated callbacks as intended, there appeared to be a problem along the path between the initiation and the customer receiving the callback. To investigate and pinpoint the root cause of the issue, Swampfox turned to Nectar’s CX Assurance platform and User-Centric Diagnostics (UCD).

Using CX Assurance and UCD, Swampfox and the telecom company’s team conducted rigorous testing of the callback process. They scheduled FIL callback requests and monitored the responsiveness to ensure that every callback request resulted in successful customer interaction. Through detailed reports and email alerts, they observed a discrepancy between the number of callbacks requested and the number successfully delivered. This recurring issue indicated a systematic problem rather than an isolated incident.

Thanks to Nectar’s tools and Swampfox expertise, the issue was identified and resolved. It was determined that the problem did not originate from the client’s FIL application, but instead stemmed from a carrier-related issue. This discovery was pivotal, as it allowed the client to engage with the carrier to address and rectify the underlying problem.

Nectar’s tools were instrumental in identifying and resolving the issue. The addition of UCD was a significant differentiator in this partnership. UCD seamlessly integrates with CXA and offers a unique perspective… while CXA tests from the outside-in, replicating the customer experience, UCD looks inside the organization, allowing for better issue isolation. This combination is unmatched in the market, providing a comprehensive view of call-back systems.

Conclusion

The partnership between Nectar and Swampfox showcases the power of collaboration and the solutions that can be developed to address complex contact center issues in the enterprise. By using a combination of tools and expertise, they not only resolved the client’s problem but also provided a way for the client to monitor and manage their customer experience, including their First In Line call-back systems, more effectively. This case study highlights the importance of proactive automated testing and the invaluable role that technology plays in maintaining the seamless operation of telecommunications networks. For large telecom companies, addressing call-back issues is not just about preventing customer frustration; it’s about ensuring the continued success and growth of their business. Interested in seeing any of this in action?  Please contact us.

Even with the inflation that everyone is feeling, Deloitte is forecasting that holiday retail sales are expected to increase 2.3% to 3.3% this year, and the official shopping season kicks off in just a few weeks according to Target, Amazon, Best Buy and others. This means it’s time to determine if your Contact Center is ready. But honestly, it’s not just those shoppers… there’s always an uptick in travel as well as crazy weather that can cause an influx of calls and chats to a Contact Center. Let’s find out if yours is ready!

Is your Contact Center designed to perform under load?

Can your infrastructure physically handle an extra-large number of calls. A few things to think about:

• How many concurrent calls are we designed to take?
• Do we have enough agents to handle a large number of calls?
• Are the IVR call flows routing properly?
• Do we have a callback solution, like Swampfox’s First-in-Line, ready to help with wait times?

If your infrastructure is there, the most effective way to make sure you’re Contact Center is ready is to put it through the test with automated load testing. A load test effectively emulates real-world traffic and call volumes, while monitoring parameters like IVR response times, time to connect, speech recognition, busy signals and dropped calls.

Is your IVR prepared?

Throughout the year, companies make changes to their IVRs. It’s important to make sure that any functionality changes made to the IVR will perform under load, too.

As IVR develops, some go from DTMF to speech, and there are different functionalities that customers add. You want to know, come peak season, is the customer getting the best experience when they traverse the IVR?

It’s important to be testing after any changes, but ideally testing is done regularly to ensure that the IVRs continue to serve customers well and don’t become the weak link in the client experience.  Tools that allow companies to automatically test their IVR solutions independently across a range of environments and domains, save time over doing it manually.

What about your Chatbots?

Chatbots are often the first point of contact for customers seeking support (but often overlooked), and their performance can significantly impact the customer experience. Poorly functioning chatbots can lead to customer frustration, increased call volume, and ultimately, a tarnished brand reputation. Here are some key reasons why chatbot testing is essential (and you can get more detail here about chatbot testing).

• Accuracy and Reliability
• User Experience
• Integration with Systems
• Security and Compliance

Are you proactively monitoring your Contact Center?

Besides having testing in place – it’s also important to make sure your lines are working before they open up to customers. You might be working with customers ready to reschedule a flight or order a Christmas gift, but you might also be dealing with phone lines and internet being down in the middle of it all. So, another key element in preparing for peak season is proactively monitoring it. This allows you to identify issues before the customer does.

Proactive monitoring means sending a test call every 15 or 30 minutes (or whatever interval you prefer) and reporting back if there are any issues with connectivity or IVR call flow. Customers often choose to monitor high traffic call flows, high-value call flows, or call flows that they know have been problematic.  Each of these can create bad customer experience if not working, but also repeat calls, which have an impact on the bottom line for the call center.

Do you know when your calls will start to ramp up?

Timing is everything! Getting ahead of peak times means knowing your traffic patterns. It’s always important to ask yourself: Is there an event that could trigger an influx of calls? By knowing when that is, you can create a good test strategy to make sure everything’s working as it should.

Planning ahead is key to a good test strategy and essential to providing a great experience during peak season. If you’re in retail or travel, you would anticipate calls starting to ramp up during the October-January period and you can prepare accordingly.

Having a good test strategy is not only essential for industries impacted by the holiday peak, but also key for other industries all year round: travel, financial services, insurance organizations and utilities face peaks at different points of the year.

While you can’t plan for that you can have an emergency response and be able to quickly test your contact center and infrastructure to check and get ready to accept a spike in calls.

Do you have the staff available?

Obviously, the goal is to automate any testing, monitoring efforts to prepare for peak (or unplanned) calls. The ability to test 1,000s or 10,000s of calls to see that your contact center is ready to start a shift is a huge time-saver.

But we have found that not all organizations have the resources to manage the process or the results of what the testing finds. This keeps them in a more reactive state. Having a partner (that has years of experience in the contact center) that can create the load test, then monitor the system while being tested and then find the root cause of the issue (should one pop up), pushes them into being proactive.

How can we help?

Nectar’s CX Assurance performance testing empowers you to be proactive and effortlessly test and optimize your CX, delivering quality performance under any circumstances and at any scale. Our solution along with Swampfox’s load testing services can help you conduct comprehensive load testing across all your CX channels, as frequently as needed. We’d love to help you determine if your Contact Center is ready for your peak season… just contact us!

The original version of this appeared on CX Today – 4 Ways to Prepare the Contact Centre for the Holiday Rush.

Network Monitoring

A robust and reliable network infrastructure is the backbone of any contact center (no matter if it’s hosted in the cloud or accessed on-prem). Network monitoring involves continuously analyzing and evaluating the performance, availability, and security of the network infrastructure. By constantly keeping an eye on the network, contact center managers can identify potential bottlenecks, latency issues, or other network-related problems that may affect customer or agent interactions.

Effective network monitoring provides valuable insights into network bandwidth usage, data packet loss, latency, time to issue resolution, and overall network health. It enables contact center administrators to proactively address any network-related issues and optimize performance, ensuring smooth communication between agents and customers. Additionally, it helps identify security threats, such as DDoS attacks or unauthorized access attempts, enabling prompt action to mitigate risks and protect sensitive customer data.

Application Platform Monitoring

The contact center platform serves as the central hub for managing and orchestrating customer interactions. Whether it’s a cloud-based solution or an on-premises system, monitoring the contact center platform is crucial for ensuring uninterrupted operations and optimal performance.

Platform monitoring can involve tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as call volume, average wait time, agent availability, and customer satisfaction metrics. By closely monitoring these metrics, contact center managers can identify trends, detect anomalies, and make data-driven decisions to improve operational efficiency.

Real-time platform monitoring also enables the identification of system outages, software glitches, or integration failures promptly. By proactively monitoring the platform, contact center administrators can minimize downtime, reduce service disruptions, and enhance the overall customer experience.

Similarly, this allows contact centers to ensure that customers can access services seamlessly. By tracking factors such as load times, user interface responsiveness, and compatibility issues, contact centers can address any usability concerns and optimize customer interactions.

Endpoint Monitoring

Endpoints, including agent home networks, workstations and even headsets as well as customer devices, are vital components of a contact center ecosystem. Endpoint monitoring allows you to see the digital experience of your remote agents and quickly troubleshoot voice impacting network issues to ensure a seamless experience for agents and customers alike.

So many contact center agents are working remotely now that being able to have visibility into local ISPs, home networks and personal devices has become even more crucial. Knowing and evaluating internet availability, system performance, software responsiveness, and resource utilization helps identify issues like slow connectivity, software crashes, or compatibility problems, enabling prompt resolution and minimizing productivity losses. It can also help you make key business decisions like rerouting calls when an agent is having any of these issues.

How Nectar can Help

Effective monitoring of network, platform, and endpoint performance is essential for contact centers aiming to deliver exceptional customer experiences. By proactively and continuously monitoring & testing these areas, contact center managers can identify and resolve issues promptly, optimize operations, and enhance overall performance.

Investing in robust monitoring systems and tools, leveraging real-time analytics, and adopting a proactive approach to addressing issues can empower contact centers to thrive in an increasingly competitive market. Being able to have just one tool that can take care of this for network, platform or endpoint monitoring is ideal and Nectar does just this.  Most specifically we:

• Monitor remote worker network, voice / video and web application response.
• Save time troubleshooting remote user call quality issues.
• Gain end-to-end visibility across multi-vendor, hybrid platform environments.
• Proactively support specific groups of remote users with administrator alerts.
• Baseline user experiences to demonstrate quantifiable improvement efforts.
• Create a seamless, successful remote contact center operation.
• Continuously test and monitor customer experience (CX) on voice channels to remote contact center agents.

Want to see it in action? We’d be happy to give you a personalized tour of Nectar DXP.