As the contact center landscape continues to evolve, an ever growing number of organisations have started to focus on migrating from traditional, on-premise contact center operations to the cloud.
For many organizations, the contact center is the face of the brand and the primary point where a company will interact with their customer. Ultimately, the performance of the contact center will have a significant impact on the overall success of an organization.
With that in mind, contact centers will be looking to you as system integrators / partners / VARs to deliver a smooth and quick migration, cost-effectively.
One way to ensure that this is achieved is by adding automated validation testing into your migration proposal. This enhances the cloud migration process by:
- Providing sharable results and insights
- Ensuring providers are operating to specification
- Mitigating risk in production
- Allowing you to test earlier in the project lifecycle
We take a look at how this is achieved for each point below.
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Share results and insights
One of the biggest fears organizations have about moving to the cloud is relinquishing control of the infrastructure. From initial conversations through to deployment into the live environment, being able to share results and insights with your customers will provide clarity and assurance throughout the process.
Using an IVR Discovery tool at the initial stages of the migration project will allow you to map out the customer’s existing contact center operations from the perspective of the customer, as well as capture and document an accurate and up to date overview of the customer’s existing operations in a format that can be exported and shared. This provides the starting point on where and how migrating to a cloud solution will deliver significant results.
Completing a load test on the customer’s entire infrastructure, from carrier to backend systems during the UAT stage, validates that their cloud deployment will continue to operate as expected, even when experiencing peak traffic conditions.
Ensure providers are operating to specification
When you are delivering any cloud solution, it comes with a number of moving parts. You are looking at the carrier, the network, the traditional CRM that they may want to bring over with them, or any additional third party integrations such as NLP, platforms, etc. It’s your job to ensure that all of these different providers are delivering to specification.
In nearly all deployments, someone somewhere unintentionally drops the ball. It’s your job to try to identify where that ball has fallen, and with so many moving parts, it can be an almost impossible task that takes time and effort, money, and resources of yours to complete.
While this is all going on, your profits and reputation with the customer will start to be adversely affected. Adding a load and stress test will allow you to test your system at capacity and identify where that ball has been dropped. This insight will allow you to work with the provider in question, with documented proof of the problem, and ensure that your migration project remains on track.
Read how an ETS load test prior to launch identified various issues, none of which were as a result of the underlying cloud contact center solution itself here.
Mitigate risk in production
Your customers will look to you to deliver their migration in the most effective and efficient way possible. The ability to test throughout the development process is crucial to the chosen approach.
Validation testing enables you to test throughout the migration process. So whether that’s functionality testing at the touch of a button – has this new phase that we have delivered in the migration process changed anything? – to keep the project on track, or load testing – is everything operating to specification? – which is going to allow you to mitigate that risk once the solution is deployed.
Test earlier in the project lifecycle
Unless your testing process shifts left during the deployment process, small errors that could have been identified immediately are not picked up until much later in the process, where they have a far greater impact on the overall project.
Furthermore, often, a bug can be in the system, which doesn’t become apparent until you’ve hit peak traffic conditions – when your risk and impact to your customer is at its highest.
Validation testing continually throughout the deployment allows you to assure your customer from the onset of your project, showing that you have tested to specification with everything you are delivering to them in that cloud migration process.
Want to know more about how validation testing can accelerate your cloud migration projects?
Watch our on-demand webinar here.
In the webinar, we discuss how adopting automated validation and monitoring into your technology set ensures that you are perfectly positioned to bring your current on-premise customers and new customers over to the cloud and drastically increase your chances of retaining that customer in the long term.
