AI has significantly affected most industries. Over the past 25 years, call centers have experienced a huge transformation in terms of how they process customer information and the efficiency with which they respond to requests. Automation has enabled flexibility, improved accuracy, and lowered operational costs. The technology which delivers these improvements in the customer journey requires continuous monitoring and development to ensure that businesses are providing a consistent, high-quality experience to the end-user. While manually testing your infrastructure may have served a purpose a few years ago, the results of such activity will not support a growing organization or allow it to remain competitive in the long run.
According to a report from The Institute of Customer Service, in an economy that is increasingly focussed on relationship building, customer service is "becoming the key differentiator." This means that the quality of the experience you're delivering when interacting with your customer has to significantly improve if you are to acquire and retain more clientele. As your customer base grows, the burden placed on your IVR system, chatbots, and Natural Language Applications to deliver that experience becomes increasingly unmanageable through manual testing.
With so many expenses competing for a slice of the budget, however, it's not always easy for everyone in your organization to recognize the necessity of introducing automated testing to your CX development process. The return on investment (ROI) of such an initiative, however, offers tangible results that make the incorporation of automated experience testing one of the best investments you can make. Here's why:
Automated testing enables greater efficiency in DevOps delivery
Finding a bug and then developing the code to fix it can be a long-winded process – particularly if you're manually testing for issues. To deliver improvements faster, your continuous testing identifies issues and rapidly tests fixes to enable your DevOps team to come up with real-time solutions. You can replicate the live environment and test out new configurations being added to the IVR or run regular preventative checks. Teams can generate reports and share information instantaneously, which improves collaboration and creates better working relationships between employees. The obvious ROI here is faster deployment, less room for error and happier workers.
Get ahead of the market
By automating your testing, you unburden your developers from troubleshooting tasks and free their time to innovate and come up with even better solutions to enhance your customer's experience. This puts your business one step ahead of the game at all times and ensures that you aren't missing out on opportunities.
A more motivated workforce
Developers are likely to be some of your most highly skilled human resource assets; their roles require stimulus and targets to reach for in order to keep them engaged and motivated. If the majority of their day is taken up by manual testing, you can rest assured that they will soon become discouraged and it won't be long before errors start cropping up. Save yourself the cost of losing your top talent or correcting avoidable mistakes by providing your team with the right tools.
Increasing your coverage lowers your risk
Manual testing requires lots of individual tests to be performed, often independent of each other. This can be highly time-consuming, and the results can quickly become irrelevant depending on how long it has taken your engineers to conduct the check and get the feedback.
Automation enables continuous testing, which can run through your entire system and come back with quick answers as well as pre-scripted solutions. This means your risk of a system failure is considerably lower, and by implication, the cost of having to solve any issue is going to decrease.
Identify more regressions
Once an update goes live after a software patch or a bug fix, regressions can typically crop up and disable the feature; it can take your team quite a while to locate the issue when testing manually. Once you have introduced continuous testing into your network, you can compare the number of regressions found against the number from your previous manual testing efforts. You'll immediately be able to see how the results vary and demonstrate to stakeholders how automated testing has sped up not only the regression finding activity but also the amount of time it takes you to resolve any issues.
All growing and established call centers face challenges. Customer service is one of your key deliverables as a business, and it makes sense to invest in the tools and infrastructure that will support your organizations' initiatives to offer value and genuine assistance to end-users. Taking advantage of automated testing allows your business to keep growing and shows your commitment to a DevOps methodology. Remaining agile and proactive in a very competitive economy is one of the best ways to ensure your business succeeds.
At Occam, we have spent a long time building the tools that support operation teams in delivering real-time solutions. Our audio-recognition software allows users to test their infrastructure in a much shorter period when compared to manual attempts. Our software is flexible and unrestrictive, allowing multiple users to gain access to the platform and take advantage of the insights that our experience testing system (ETS) generates. We offer a unique pricing model that allows our customers to deploy projects with the reassurance of reliable testing, without paying extortionate fees for the service.
If you'd like to learn more about Occam’s ETS and how we can help you to generate more ROI for your call center through automated testing, just click here.
