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!

 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.

With the machine learning revolution, however, voice recognition systems have moved on leaps and bounds. The fundamental nature of IVR technology has progressed from the expert systems of ode to something far more generalizable. And with the recent jump in the focus on AI, we’ll continue to see the growth and change of how customers interact with their favorite brands. 

Unfortunately, some companies’ IVR systems haven’t kept pace with developments in artificial intelligence software. They still rely on old-fashioned software, even when the rest of the software universe has moved on enormously. It’s a tragedy, and it’s ruining the customer experience. 

The solution is to this puzzle is better IVR testing and integration.

The Current Problems Facing Companies Wanting To Use IVR

Twenty years ago, the technology just wasn’t there for speech recognition. Many large corporations experimented with speech-based IVR, hoping to provide their customers with a superior experience, all while trying to avoid the need to hire legions of customer service reps. They discovered, however, that the old technology didn’t work well if there was noise in the background, or the caller had a cold. It just wasn’t flexible enough. 

The other IVR issue facing companies is integration. Landline phone services are hardly the only channels customers use to communicate with companies anymore – the internet and mobile are now both major players. What’s more, the universe of software that requires integration has exploded, with voice self-service environments now having to include VUI, text-to-speech, visual IVR, and voice-enabled artificial intelligence. 

Integration, of course, isn’t easy, and most organizations aren’t sure how to update their legacy IVR to make it compatible with their new systems. This has led to a variety of downstream issues, including increased difficulty testing, leading to stagnation. It’s a big problem, especially when there’s so much untapped value left on the table. 

Changes in the fundamental underlying technology, however, now means that IVR solutions are improving. Systems are getting much better at recognizing words and sentences, opening up a host of new use cases. The market was worth $3.7 billion in 2017 and will rise to more than $6.6 billion by 2025, according to Market Watch.

The Importance Of Comprehensive IVR Testing

IVR solutions don’t exist in isolation. They’re often part of a much larger nexus of digital capabilities and need to work seamlessly together to provide a pleasant customer experience. Finding out whether or not they do, though, can be a significant challenge. Companies hook up IVRs to call routing systems, database search, PSTN access, and Contact Centers all complicating matters enormously. 

 During a migration of any communications platforms from one vendor to another or from on-prem to cloud, it’s important to be testing before during and after to make sure the experience is what is expected. But ideally testing is done regularly to ensure that they continue to serve customers well and don’t become the weak link in the client experience.  Firms, therefore, need robust tools that allow them to automatically test their IVR solutions independently across a range of environments and domains, saving time over doing it manually. 

Types Of IVR Testing

Over the years, organizations have developed several IVR testing methods. Here are some of the most popular in use today. 

IVR Load Testing

IVR load testing is designed to test whether IVR systems have sufficient processing power to manage the typical loads that they might experience during regular use. Companies make calls through their regular public switched telephone network to see if they experience issues as they increase volume. 

A firm, for instance, might start with a dozen or so simultaneous calls to see how the system responds. It could then increase the number from there, perhaps to thousands of concurrent callers. While it does this, it tracks performance metrics of the underlying computer software that lets the whole system work, monitoring things like RAM usage and CPU utilization. These readouts tell engineers how close regular predicted use comes to overloading the network. If tolerances are tight, then the solution is to increase bandwidth, server capacity, or whatever else will eliminate the bottleneck. 

IVR Stress Testing

Stress testing works in much the same way as load testing, but with a slightly different emphasis. Just as before, the test involves routing calls through the PSTN, as regular customers might under normal operation. But the difference is that in this case, the test is to see whether the systems can handle periods of high demand well above normal levels. 

Testers arrange an experiment where they route lots calls through to company lines, getting close to maximum theoretical loads. They then increase the number of calls to the IVR to see when the systems can no longer serve customers. The aim is to find out how many requests the system can deal with at once and then put in place strategies to mitigate, avoid, or improve the situation. 

IVR Feature Testing

The previous two testing methods deal with the computing capacity of IVR systems. IVR feature testing, however, is more concerned with ensuring that the system does what it claims to do.

Suppose, for instance, a customer calls a company hotline to get assistance with a particular problem. When they call the company, they’re presented with an IVR system that tells them to say a specific number from a list of options. If there are four numbers in the list – 1, 2, 3, and 4 – then the IVR system should ensure that the user is forwarded to the service for the correct option. Furthermore, a feature test will also confirm that the IVR system does not forward users to services if they quote a number outside of the given range, like “seven.” The idea is to iron out any incongruencies in the system before allowing it to go live. 

IVR Experience Testing

IVR experience testing is a little bit like mystery shopping, but for a company’s IVR system. The process goes something like this: the firm gets somebody to call up their hotlines at regular intervals, just like a regular customer might throughout the day. They then test various options to see whether the experience makes sense, not just from a technical perspective. These tests can also put supporting infrastructure to the test. 

IVR Spike Testing

Spike testing is a little bit like stress testing but more intense. Occasionally, company lines will have to deal with dramatically more traffic than usual and react to spikes in demand. Usually, these spikes occur due to problems elsewhere in the network or a server going down, leading to a sudden rerouting of calls. Spike analysis determines how systems deal with shifting loads, whether they stop working altogether, slow down, or manage changes without issue. 

IVR Soak Testing

Soak testing is a little different from the examples above, namely the ability of systems to manage traffic over extended periods. 

A typical soak test, for instance, would be to bombard an IVR with a thousand calls per hour over 48 hours to see if the system could cope with the numbers. 

Companies like to perform IVR soak testing, just in case issues with server capacity don’t emerge immediately, as they might in other testing methods. Soak testing, therefore, consumes more time inherently compared to different approaches. 

IVR Regression Testing

Regression testing is a type of analysis that checks that IVR systems continue to perform as expected following third-party integration. Sometimes updates and integrations can break IVR systems, causing them to work differently, undermining the customer experience. Regression testing provides businesses with critical information about the current status of their IVR. They show whether changes to system architectures result in meaningful service differences on the customer end.

The Need For Automatic IVR Testing

In all the testing methods described above, we’ve assumed that humans carry out the tests. In the real world, however, that isn’t practical. Companies can’t easily recruit thousands of volunteers to stress test their systems. And even if they could, coordinating them all in the right way would be a practical impossibility. 

Firms, therefore, prefer to use automatic IVR testing facilities. 

The way this work is simple. The software makes calls, as customers might, through the PSTN automatically. Then analysts monitor progress to explore system limits. The great thing about software is that it can make as many calls as the company sees fit. It scales infinitely, avoids human labor, and is customizable, letting you test systems in novel ways. You can automate all of the testing methods that we discussed in the previous section. 

Businesses use these automated software solutions for a variety of purposes. Automated experience testing is perhaps one of the most useful things that IVR testing offers. Machines can call up your services every five or ten minutes, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to test that everything is in good working order. You get continual feedback on your systems using testing methods that mimic real-world situations.

Automatic testing helps to give IVR systems managers peace of mind. Every five minutes, they can get feedback confirming that the customer IVR experience is still functioning as it should.

Statistical Speech Testing Modelling

Automatically testing speech-dependent systems is much more challenging than testing conventional button-based systems. It is, however, still possible, reducing the burden on manual testers. 

IVR testing software engages with the voice user interface for a variety of topics, languages, and so on and then uses statistical methods to assess system performance. While these systems can’t yet eliminate the work of manual testers, they are a tremendous labor-saving device for busy companies that want to cut down on time spent doing rote tasks. 

IVR Testing: Benefits And Conclusions

Customers need to be able to get in touch with companies for support, guidance, sales, and to make complaints. It’s critical, therefore, that the telephone system routing them works correctly. 

In today’s market, however, there’s a problem. Many executives expect IVR managers to deliver solutions by short deadlines, cutting into the time that they can spend testing. Less time, in turn, means that more problems could potentially creep into the system, undermining the customer experience. 

What’s more, new software doesn’t always integrate with legacy IVR systems, creating additional headaches for managers. 

Automated IVR testing is a Digital Channel tool that you can use to combat these problems. It lets you stress test your systems to ensure that they continue to work, even in your worst-case scenarios, all in quick succession. You don’t need to spend hours organizing test scenarios when a simple software instruction will do the trick. This way, you can take your testing window time down to the bare minimum while still delivering viable customer experience. 

How well your customers can interact with your IVR can have an enormous impact on customer experience. Ideally, you want to be in a situation in which you can detect a defect before a customer does so that you can iron it out before it leads to disgruntled clients. 

Contact us if you’re interested in testing your IVR.  Nectar CX Assurance can take care of automating any type of testing you may need to do.

This bundled solution is being demonstrated along with other innovations from Nectar and ecosystem partners at Enterprise Connect 2023, in Nectar’s booth #736 from March 27-30 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, Florida.  

ConnX has been managing large enterprise networks in the retail, manufacturing, healthcare, government, and financial services sectors for nearly three decades, and their extremely popular ConnX Virtual Edge (CVE) has been in place and serving Fortune 500 companies as real time communications and collaboration shifted dramatically to the cloud.  

Nectar’s award-winning, market leading software solutions, delivered as a service in the cloud, or on prem or in a hybrid model, is embedded into the ConnX AI Active Assurance offering. Nectar brings to the collaboration dynamic geospatial dashboards which provide location-based views of usage and user experience metrics that enable IT support and managed services teams to drill down on individual users, locations, and sessions to quickly troubleshoot issues.  

These user-based dashboards give ConnX managed services support teams full context into an individual user’s devices, client versions and network connections with correlated insights and a real-time health assessment (powered by Nectar’s proprietary User Health Index) for fast troubleshooting. ConnX integrates Nectar’s solution into a broader partner ecosystem that simplifies the client experience and helps resolve issues with greater efficiency. 

“ConnX has been working with Nectar for over ten years, collaborating with them through the rapid evolution from traditional infrastructure to cloud networking solutions,” said Jeff Li, Senior Director, Risk, Governance, Partners, and Projects, ConnX. “By bringing together two talented engineering teams around a common vision – to bring the highest quality real time communications services to enterprise customers and contact center and CX providers at a level they’ve never seen before – we are dramatically improving how the ‘borderless enterprise’ can deliver consistently excellent interactions with their customers and partners. The pandemic caused us to work harder and faster than ever as the evolution to cloud became a revolution, and together our offering addresses the hardest challenges.” 

“Working with ConnX, we’ve been able to bring enterprises more visibility into private, public and hybrid cloud UCaaS services,” said Steph Shaw, Strategic Alliance Manager, Nectar. “Our combination of strengths, including our great teams and common vision, make it possible to bring enterprises and departments insights their teams need. We are proud to enhance ConnX’s AI Active Assurance premium offerings and support their next-level AI SD-WAN capabilities.” 

Nectar was founded on the idea that voice and video are a unique workload within IT and, over the years, it has proven its value in day-to-day telephony operations within many of the world’s largest organizations.  

By instrumenting devices being used for every day internal and external communications with additional software, the two companies have gone way beyond intelligent routing for quality and resiliency, advancing into software that validates and makes instantly visible controls associated with the management of every session. 

The future is applying analytics to generate BI insights that have a direct impact on business outcomes, whether companies wish to grow revenues by improving customer experience, or to improve profitability. 

“We are very proud of our collective solution and grateful for the partnerships we been blessed with as we have always been able to succeed when we can truly help leaders across the entire organization to drive increasingly positive business outcomes,” Li said. 

About ConnX  

ConnX is a Digital Communications Transformation as a Service platform provider that integrates SDWAN, UC collaboration, mobility, security, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation to help enterprise customers transform from fragmented and siloed communications services to an integrated, AI-driven, multi-service collaboration platform. ConnX Maestro Orchestrator enables customers to rapidly realize the benefits of AI and digital transformation to mitigate the challenges associated with communications integration, provisioning, support, maintenance, and migration resulting in lower cost, higher productivity, and a predictable and consistent user experience.  

For more information, please visit www.connxai.com.  

Media Contact 

Artin Arts for ConnX 

Cynthia Artin 

cynthia@artinarts.com 

About Nectar  

Nectar delivers market-leading software solutions that empower organizations to dramatically improve management, visibility, and service delivery across enterprise VoIP, SIP and MPLS networks and across integrated voice, video, collaboration and contact center solutions. Nectar collects and correlates your organization’s most important customer, agent and user experience data and presents you the actionable insights and information you need within a single pane of glass. The best-in-class, vendor agnostic solutions support the industry’s most strategic and popular platforms from Avaya, Amazon, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, Microsoft, Jabra, Zoom and more. Nectar currently supports millions of enterprise endpoints across thousands of organizations around the world.  

For more information please visit www.nectarcorp.com. 

Media Contact 

Tiffany Towb  

ttowb@nectarcorp.com 

The holiday season is coming up, making it even more critical than normal for retailers to make sure their call centres are ready to handle some pressure. Preparing properly is key to keep from being ambushed by sudden CX issues.

“Looking at statistics, about 38% of people start their holiday shopping before the end of October,” notes Steph Shaw, Strategic Alliance Manager at Nectar Corp. “And between October and the end of year holiday shopping and travel season, you’ve also got special sales and all kinds of other events that could cause an influx of calls into the call centre.”

The most effective way to make sure your call centre is ready to take that influx of calls is performing 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.

Here are four actions you can take now to ready your contact centre for great customer experiences ahead of peak volumes!

1.  Is your call centre designed to perform under load?

“Call centre design is made up of two things: (1) How many concurrent calls is the call centre designed to take, (and do we know it will be able to handle it?) And (2) Are the IVR call flows routing properly?” Shaw explains.

“One of our federal clients’ call centre was designed to handle 1000 concurrent calls, and they had multiple data centres. But when we ran a load test using Nectar’s CX Assurance solution, we found that one of the data centres was not delivering the calls to an agent,” Shaw shares.

“This means that they could never have handled the maximum capacity of calls they were anticipating, and without that testing, they never would have known and fixed that prior to peak season.”

2. Is your IVR prepared?

Throughout the year, customers 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?”

3. Are you proactively monitoring the call centre?

Other than load testing, another key element in preparing the call centre 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 and reporting back if there are any issues with that IVR call flow from a CX perspective,” Shaw says. “Customers normally choose to monitor high traffic call flows, high-value call flows, or call flows that they know have been problematic.”

Potential issues are dead air, jitter, packet loss or calls that fail to connect.

“Those things create bad customer experience, but also repeat calls, which have an impact on the bottom line for the call centre.”

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

Timing is everything! Getting ahead of peak times means knowing your traffic patterns.

“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 prepare accordingly,” Shaw says.

But having a good test strategy is not only essential for industries impacted by the holiday peak. It’s also key for other industries all year round: travel, financial services and insurance organizations face peaks at different points of the year. A good example is fluctuations in call volumes in the travel industry following recent changes in Covid travel restrictions.

“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.“

In reality, the situation is a bit more complex. While no customer would refuse platinum service, in reality, many customers would actually prefer a solution that does not require service at all.

What we mean by this, is that customers want a solution that delivers what they paid for. They do not want to follow up and chase a company to ensure the product performs in the way they envisioned. If they do have to contact the company, they want to get a response that makes sense in a timely manner without having to navigate endless IVR queues.

When it comes to contact centers and customer service, how you communicate with your clients is critical. Clients today want integrated solutions that include telephony, chat, email, and more in a single solution that ensures they get the right information from properly trained staff.

Companies today know that customer experience is the real differentiator of service and success. Businesses that focus on this area understand that customer experience pays dividends in the long run. As this recent PWC survey points out – failure to focus on customer experience can have some significant negative long-term consequences.

How To Ensure You Are Delivering On Your Customer Experience Promise

Smart companies understand that an investment in customer experience is one with a massive ROI which simply cannot be ignored. These organizations invest in a variety of different tools and technologies to ensure that they are providing clients with an experience that stands out from the competition.

Some of these technologies are ones we’re very familiar with like IVR systems, while others are much newer and include Chatbots and Omnichannel. However, simply investing in new technology is not enough – companies need to ensure that these tools are working efficiently and well. They need to evaluate and appraise their current services and understand whether they are meeting customer and business requirements or not.

The Importance of Assessment

An investment in IVR systems, Omnichannel, Chat, or other communication tools is part of the process with regards to improving customer experience. Another element that is just as important is ensuring that these systems work together in an efficient and seamless manner.

In many cases, implementing or changing one system can have unforeseen consequences on other systems. Sadly, these impacts are often not immediately obvious leading to extended resolution times due to unplanned work and a negative customer experience.

• IVR Scrutiny – IVR systems today are significantly more capable than you might believe. New systems incorporate AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithms to ensure that customers can quickly reach the person best suited for their issue. However, while IVR systems are getting better, implementing a new solution can be problematic. Legacy and new IVR systems are complex and keeping them maintained can be difficult without a visual IVR map. Building this is extremely labor-intensive which is where Nectar can help. Nectar has automated IVR assurance tools and solutions that can simplify the process dramatically. By automating the discovery and design process, carryout functional, regression with performance validation, Nectar can work with your team to map IVR call paths and ensure your customers get to the right resources even under high loads.
• Omnichannel Appraisal –  While the phone is still important it is by no means the only way customers communicate with businesses. Chat, email, SMS, and web are all important channels, however, if these channels are not integrated, the experience a customer receives can be frustrating. Omnichannel is a way of solving this issue by providing a seamless experience across multiple channels. With omnichannel, the information provided through a chat conversation needs to be available to the agent that receives a follow-up email or vice-versa. When omnichannel works well, it can pay major dividends on the overall customer experience.  Sadly, when it fails, it can have the opposite effect. Fortunately, Nectar is able to provide advanced Omnichannel testing and monitoring. Experimentation needs to be from a customer’s perspective to truly understand how well the service is or is not functioning. In addition to Nectar’s suite of tools, investigative cases can be created and run whenever changes are made to ensure customers are not adversely impacted.
• Voice Quality – Systems need to run and be functional at all times. This includes the tools your agents use when working with your customers. Internal network issues and slowdowns can have impacts far-reaching and directly drive down customer experience if your agents are unable to provide information in a timely manner.  Robust evaluation at the agent level ensures the right calls are being transferred to the right agents based on skills and abilities. The Nectar Customer Experience Assurance solution has a suite of tools designed for the contact center to ensure that all operations are running at 100% efficiency.

Trial and Experimentation Matters When Servicing Customers

In the world of customer service, a customer’s experience is measured by the most recent interaction. Companies that fail to make each interaction seamless and problem-free are setting themselves up for failure.

Customer’s today have more choice in the product than ever before and they are no longer confined to their own city or state when making a decision. Now, competition is global, and in many cases, products themselves are commodities.

The real and only differentiator for a business is the overall customer experience that they provide. An investment in technology is only half the battle – the true test for a business is ensuring that the experience they aim to provide is what they actually deliver.

Regardless of the size of the organization, there are some strategies that need to be considered when building a plan for a great customer experience.

Training Matters

Agent training is essential for companies looking to improve and enhance customer experience. Many businesses provide a variety of different products and services and without dedicated training, agents will simply not have the right information needed to assist customers.

Added to the products themselves, are the tools being used by companies. As contact centers become more complex with different systems, processes and technologies, agents need to be trained on what to use and when. Technical systems and CRM tools are useful, but only if an agent knows how they work.

Dealing with Attrition

Agent attrition can be a pain regardless of the size of the contact center. Sourcing and hiring new employees can be a task in and of itself and added to that is the training curve to bring them up to speed.

Companies need to look at techniques and strategies to minimize agent attrition where possible. In many cases, the factors causing attrition are related to the work environment itself, things like safety, scheduling issues and even the work itself.

However, technology can help with many of these factors. Whether it is by updating systems and technologies to better forecast demand and improve scheduling or using omnichannel solutions and AI to remove repetition. Companies need to remember that happier employees lead to happier customers.

Finding the Right Technology

Companies grow over time and their processes and tools change. However, siloed technologies can have a negative impact on the overall customer experience. This is where tools like an omnichannel can help as they allow customers to reach your agents regardless of the platform being used. Whether it is online, chat, telephone or cases. An omnichannel solution can improve the overall customer experience as it ensures all the customers information is available across a multitude of different tools.

KPIs and Metrics

Contact centers need to ensure that they are measuring the right data if they want to focus on customer experience. Historically, these businesses focused on call volumes and wait times, but didn’t account for customer journeys or satisfaction. By focusing only on the numbers, merely a portion of the picture is provided.

Fortunately, companies have come to realize that it’s not just how fast you pick up a call, but rather, what happens next that matters. These companies use detailed analytics and dashboards to build out unique customer journeys and look for solutions to help reduce incoming calls.

Leadership from the Top

The world today has changed from what it once was. COVID-19 has impacted many businesses and services globally. With companies around the world furloughing employees and laying off staff, the fight for efficiencies is even more prevalent in business than it was ever before.

Within a support and service team, resources are always at a premium and making a request for new resources or technology can be difficult in the best of times. However, by emphasizing the ROI that these teams can bring to a business in terms of driving customer experience, the landscape and picture can be adjusted. While it is not always possible to fully transition a contact center from a cost center to a profit center, there are ways to demonstrate how these costs can lead to future profit.

Focus on Customer Experience

Creating a unique, one-of-a-kind experience is difficult and costs a significant amount of money. However, consumers are not looking for the Ritz every time they contact you. Rather a key point to realize is that they do not want to call you at all, so what is actually more important is the provision of a service and product that works the way they expect it to out the gate.

Building an organization that has customer experience at the heart takes some time and effort though. It requires planning and organization and an ability to ask hard questions. It also requires buy-in from all departments as they each have a place to play in providing exceptional customer experience.

Taking the Next Step

If these challenges sound somewhat familiar, contact us for help. For companies looking to take that next step in improving customer experience, contact Nectar Services Corp. Companies today cannot continue to work the way they always have. Global competition and customer expectations have changed, and businesses need to adjust to this new landscape.

We understand the contact center space and know how to help organizations work through these and other customer experience challenges. Using our suite of innovative tools, we can help your organization reduce costs while improving efficiencies.

Our tools assist in digital transformations and cloud migrations faster by automated testing of applications coupled with in-life monitoring of the customer experience. Let us help you take your organization to the next level.

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