Customer expectations have surged to unprecedented levels, demanding that companies almost intuitively understand their wants and needs. Failing to meet these heightened expectations incurs higher costs due to increased service expenses and greater customer turnover. Research by Forrester reveals a staggering statistic – 63% of customers in the United States have ceased doing business with a brand due to inadequate customer service experiences. As such, rigorous contact center testing is a necessity to ensure customers have a positive and seamless experience across all stages of their customer journey.
In this article, we’ll begin by delving into exactly what load testing is and its importance. Subsequently, we’ll explore why your load testing targets need to be realistic to ensure positive customer experiences, reduced operational costs, shorter troubleshooting times and ultimately higher revenues.
What is Load Testing?
Load testing, often known as performance testing, ensures the continuous functionality of your customer journeys, even when encountering high volumes of interactions. For example, the functionality of your organization’s mobile application is dependent on the carrier network; and the speed that your agents can handle incoming calls and email is reliant on the capabilities of back-end systems. Robust load testing scenarios, mirroring real-life situations with multiple interconnected systems—from telecommunication exchanges to back-end and third-party systems—must undergo rigorous testing to prevent any issues occuring or worse still going undetected for long periods of time.
Load testing of your customer experience (CX) is the key to achieving scale. And this scalability is directly related to your revenue growth capabilities. It evaluates system performance under peak load conditions, pinpointing any capacity issues or bottlenecks.
For instance, it can test the capability of your systems to manage hundreds or even thousands of simultaneous calls to your customer service line or interactions through web chat support. In today’s omnichannel landscape, individual spikes in one channel such as your web chat, email, call back, and video might occur. Or spikes could occur in all channels simultaneously. This means you need to conduct regular testing to ensure you are prepared if such scenarios arise.
Almost all organizations should be performing load testing and ideally on an ongoing and automated basis. Here are some projects that your organization might be participating in which require load testing to ensure they are functioning as envisioned. For example:
- Establishing system performance baselines
- Implementing technology updates or changes
- Outsourcing initiatives
- Introducing new CX offerings, such as expanding to a new channel
- Validation ahead of seasonal peaks, for example, Black Friday
- Continuous monitoring of CX
Importance of Load Testing
The advantages of load testing predominantly relate to ensuring your organization’s readiness to swiftly scale as and when necessary. It’s crucial to guarantee that surges in customer interactions or increased loads won’t compromise your customer experiences. Some other crucial benefits of this type of testing include:
- Swiftly identifying scalability issues before they have the potential to impact customers
- Evaluating customer experience as early as possible i.e. during the design phase
- Preparing for unexpected traffic volumes or spikes, particularly during emergency situations
- Assessing uni- or bi-directional voice quality at scale
- Identifying project weaknesses earlier and mitigating potential delays
- Minimizing flaws in CX and the customer journey
Setting Realistic Targets
“If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”
Zig Ziglar, author and motivational speaker
Passing or failing a load test depends on the targets you have set. This is why it’s crucial to have a clear and realistic target set for each of your load tests. However, unfortunately, this aspect is often overlooked, yet it’s vital for your project success. Whenever possible, validate this target against contracts or defined standards for your contact center.
In most cases, aiming for a 100% pass rate when pushing systems to their limits isn’t realistic. It’s also important to note that the cost of over-engineering a platform to guarantee high-levels of performance may be prohibitive rather than proactive.
Setting a realistic target aligned with your business needs before conducting a load test can help to prevent headaches and stress for your team. Once your load tests are consistently achieving the set targets for each of your communication channels, you can be confident in your readiness to handle peak traffic and high loads when they arise.
Conclusion
In today’s business landscape, meeting heightened customer expectations is critical to avoid revenue loss, increased operational costs, and customer churn. Contact center load testing plays a crucial role in optimizing and assuring your customer journeys. This is because it ensures your systems are functioning seamlessly even under unexpectedly high volumes of traffic. It enables your team to more swiftly identify issues or bottlenecks. This allows you to proactively prepare for potential spikes in demand across any of your customer communication channels.
Load testing serves multiple purposes including verifying system functionality, proactively addressing scalability issues, and validating customer experiences. However, it’s crucial that you establish realistic targets from the beginning. Meeting these targets ensures that your systems can handle peak traffic loads without compromising on your quality of service.
Ultimately, load testing remains crucial for businesses to proactively maintain service excellence, adapt to evolving customer expectations, and manage fluctuating demands effectively. Maintaining your contact center performance involves testing and monitoring numerous internal and external factors, making it a challenging task. Yet, it’s vital not to solely focus on technological risks and changes, to the detriment of ensuring the scalability of your systems. After all, if a customer can’t make contact with you when they try to, there is a high chance they won’t try again. This not only leads to customer churn but also to lost revenues and a damaged brand reputation.
Cyara revolutionizes the way businesses transform and optimize their customer experiences. Cyara’s AI-based CX Assurance Platform empowers enterprises to deliver flawless interactions across voice, video, digital, and chatbot experiences. With Cyara, businesses improve customer journeys through continuous innovation while reducing cost and minimizing risk. With a 96% customer retention rate and world-class Net Promoter Score (NPS), today’s leading global brands trust Cyara every day to deliver customer smiles at scale.To learn more, visit cyara.com or call 1-888-GO-CYARA.