This blog post was co-authored by Empirix partner, Genesys. Read the rest here.
Cloud technologies continue to dominate IT conversations about deployment options. Professional pundits opine while boardrooms question whether Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions can deliver the same level of functionality as their on-premises brethren. The question they should ask is how they can preserve customer experience — it’s the heart of any successful deployment.
Preserving CX
This isn’t an easy task, however. Contact center teams describe their environments as mired in complexity and uncertainty. To make matters worse, the need to deliver strong results is contrasted with the stark reality of dwindling resources. This is where cloud technologies can help — rapid scalability, third-party hosting and reduced operational expenses allow burdened teams to reallocate resources to more critical priorities.
But giving up control of on-premises solutions presents a new challenge — blind spots form, blocking contact center teams from having the visibility they need across the entire customer journey. Lacking visibility into network, application or infrastructure performance exposes customers to dropped or misrouted calls, latency, poor voice quality and more. One operations manager stated, “We are blind. We have no idea where these calls are going or if it is going to work.”
Empowered customers
This is a scary proposition. Competitive markets have put consumers in control. With customer retention at stake, things have to work as designed. You need a solid testing strategy.
For more than 25 years, Empirix has been validating change and mitigating risk in customer service environments. Our approach and technologies have evolved to support agile development, RESTful APIs, and cloud and hybrid deployments. But the basic premise remains the same — safeguard customer experience by making sure things work as designed.
Automated testing
Our testing solutions support the entire lifecycle of voice application deployment with purpose-built testing for QA/regression, performance and ongoing testing in production. You can use each application alone or as part of a suite to facilitate cross-functional collaboration between teams and reduce re-work. Empirix has more than 100 years of combined knowledge and expertise in testing on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.
To fully illustrate, I recently observed one of my account teams working with a customer who faced a challenging task: migrating millions of customers onto their multi-vendor, third-party, hybrid solution. In their world, a service provider managed the infrastructure; the IVR vendor sat in the cloud; and they managed the CTI and agent desktop applications.
Over the next six months, we engaged in a multi-vendor partnership. It commenced with a detailed discovery session where whiteboards provided a colorful blend of various call flows, elaborate infrastructure and associated business goals. The collaborative environment provided further clarity on the associated risks and necessary testing objectives — this intimacy laid the groundwork for a clear agreement with the approach that validated new capacity and functionality at critical inoperability points in the end-to-end customer experience. During the multiple rounds of testing, critical errors were discovered, which the customer fixed before going live.
If you’re considering a cloud solution, be sure to deploy the last, critical measure before going live. A proper testing strategy puts you in the driver’s seat and enables you to deploy with confidence.
