A premium insurance financing company based in the United States decided to upgrade their interactive voice response (IVR) platforms in call centers located in Philadelphia, PA, and Irvine, CA. Their project team leader was given responsibility for ensuring all new and existing contact center components worked together at go-live. The team leader knew the only way to accomplish this was to test each system’s ability to handle real telephone calls that “behaved” just like real callers.

The company’s project leader contacted IQ Services located in Minneapolis, MN to discuss their project objectives and to learn more about how IQ Services helps businesses ensure integrated technologies work before letting real customers use new, upgraded or repaired contact center and communications solutions.

IQ Services worked with the team leader to set up IVR testing — including IVR performance and IVR load testing methods — to send real, automated telephone calls into the contact centers to exercise the capabilities of the IVR systems under load. It was necessary for the systems – with applications written by premier systems integrator based in Boulder, CO – to successfully integrate with Avaya switches and an IBM backend host. The systems had to provide customers with convenient access to their account information on the very first day of production. While some test calls exercised the integrated switch, IVR and backend systems, other test calls were configured to transfer to customer service representatives (CSR) where information collected by the IVR systems was whispered to the CSR. The IVR load testing services verified the accuracy of this exchange in addition to the performance of the rest of the integration.

IQ Services conducted the IVR testing and provided the project team leader with detailed reports to highlight potential problem areas. Recordings of calls that experienced unexpected results were a critical element of the reports. Armed with this information, the project team was able to make necessary changes and conduct a second round of IVR testing to verify the problems identified in the first round were subsequently fixed. The majority of issues identified through IVR testing involved components other than the IVR systems and applications. The information and insight provided by IQ Services helped pinpoint the source of problems. The team leader was able to supply her management team with proof that the systems were ready to start handling real customer calls. When the systems were put into production, the entire team enjoyed the peace of mind that comes from knowing everything is going to work as expected.

Ultimately, this company was able to avoid many of the common pitfalls associated with complex contact center implementations by planning ahead and implementing StressTest™ services — in particular IVR testing — from IQ Services. The vendors involved in the project enjoyed the benefit of not being caught up in finger pointing because the project team was able to isolate problems with the detailed information provided by IQ Services. This empowered the vendors to see how their pieces of the application would work before the system went live, allowing them to be proactive in fixing any potential problems. The collaborative and cooperative environment associated with StressTest™ performance and load testing made it easy for everyone to focus on making the systems work and delivering the best possible customer experience with the new technologies.

Thanks to IQ Services for the article.