If you’re reading these words, it’s likely that your professional life exists within the realm of customer experience (CX), where client satisfaction rules all and technology plays a key role in maintaining those important relationships. With ever-increasing expectations from consumers and businesses for a positive experience, a wide-angle view of your contact center systems, both front- and back-end, is even more important now than ever.

By the numbers

It’s astounding the impact customer experience can have on consumers’ and businesses’ purchase decisions. According to recent Salesforce research, 67% of consumers and 74% of business buyers will happily pay more for a good customer experience, while Zendesk informs us that 67% of consumers will recommend that brand or business based on positive CX. Couple this with Zendesk’s findings that 98% of consumers will inform others after a single poor experience and that negative CX discourages 58% of customers from buying again—90% of whom will change brands altogether!—it’s clear that maintaining strong relationships through good customer experience has never been more important.

When it comes to achieving customer experience goals, well-trained staff and the most up-to-date technology or human-like IVR or chatbot systems will only go so far towards achieving them. If there are issues with your hardware, software and infrastructure, you need to know promptly so you can quickly address and correct these issues with minimal disruptions to your operations and bottom line.

Common technical issues encountered by your customers

When you consider the complexity of today’s contact center systems, there’s a whole lot of wiggle room for troubles to arise. Customers can experience issues like incorrect prompts, erroneous routing, language mismatches, garbled audio, lengthy prompt delays, and dropped calls. Issues with physical telco infrastructure, network routing, and multi-system integration can also compound, or even overshadow these issues—risks every organization would prefer to avoid.

Despite the speed at which organizations have been adopting digital transformation, CX monitoring and testing is often done internally, and manually. Building out test cases to thoroughly cover all menu options and routing scenarios can be time-consuming and problematic due to system complexity. Layer multilingual call flows into this, and the workload could double, or more. Because of this, internal testing is often limited to placing a few test calls to validate a small portion of functionality.  This of course leaves room for error as systems are not thoroughly tested, allowing most—if not all—issues to go undetected until customers encounter them, and sometimes, report them.

Automated CX testing can help you detect, correct and avoid technical problems

Fortunately, there is a convenient and cost-efficient way to avoid the pitfalls associated with manual testing, while also increasing your organization’s return on investment (ROI), while achieving a higher standard of CX delivery. Automated CX monitoring and testing provides a comprehensive look inside your technology, focusing on even the most indistinct corners of your technology to pinpoint problems that prevent you from delivering a positive experience to your customers.

CX Monitoring can identify issues your customers have an up to 10% chance of encountering while interacting with your interactive voice response (IVR), natural language understanding (NLU), unified communications (UC) and chatbot systems. Given the tenuous nature of most customer relationships, this provides actionable real-time insights so you can keep your focus on the customer side of your operation, with less worry about technical performance.

Load Testing enables you to reliably determine how well your systems perform during your busiest hours. This is especially beneficial because you can identify and fix performance-related issues such as dropped calls, busy signals, long response times and system failures prior to major upgrades and changes. Proactive identification of key load issues enables timely resolution, boosts self-serve while reducing call-handling time and costs, and enables more consistent delivery of outstanding customer experience.

Regression Testing is ideal for system changes and upgrades because it helps to identify and resolve potential customer experience issues before cutovers, while reducing the time-investment for manual pre-cutover testing by as much as 90%. This reclamation of resources means better change management, swifter implementation of changes, and an increase in on-schedule cutovers.

Health Checks provide a snapshot of the customer experience on your contact center, unified communications systems and related networks. They can be administered on-demand, or scheduled for specific times (24x7) to benchmark your CX performance vs that of your competitors, assuring you can stay ahead of the curve.

If your organization still relies on manual testing and monitoring of your on-premise or cloud-based customer experience technology, or if you’re interested in a switch in automated testing providers, TekVision’s Lens Automated Testing Platform offers operational peace of mind and unparalleled value.

Contact us today for more information and let’s start a conversation.