In the early stages of your call center’s growth and expansion, manually testing your customer journey may have been the only option available at the time, either due to budgetary constraints or lack of available technology. However, in an age where customer experience (CX) is the biggest differentiator between your business and it’s competitors, it’s time to review your approach to testing and place a DevOps methodology at the forefront of your decision-making process when introducing new technologies into your organization’s operations.
Occam’s experience testing system (ETS) is designed with the sole purpose of enhancing your customer’s experience by enabling your technical teams to automate the testing process and continuously check for potential issues, all this with minimal effort or time required on your part.
Manual testing vs. automated testing
We may as well start with the bottom line, and that is: manual and automated testing are incomparable. Manual testing is inherently flawed as a means of establishing the functionality of your CX operations because it relies heavily on the subjective nature of humans, and therefore, unintentional errors, which may skew your results and cause more problems down the line.
Automated testing enables DevOps teams to generate accurate data consistently. As your customer journey grows in complexity to accommodate the introduction of new products or services, it becomes harder and harder to test for issues manually, this is because manual testing requires an individual to follow every possible pathway through your network to ensure that there are no issues – a task that will inevitably become unmanageable.
Load testing is virtually impossible to do manually, so it’s crucial to have an experience testing system that can really put the IVR through a ring of fire in order to prepare your call center for peak times and sudden changes in your customers’ demand for contact.
Furthermore, manual testing can mostly be applied in a live environment, meaning you’re conducting checks to diagnose and firefight, instead of discovering setbacks earlier on in the production process and tackling them before launching any new scripts.
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To summarise, let’s take a look at why you shouldn’t be manual testing:
- You are likely to generate inaccurate, subjective data.
- Manual testing is an inefficient use of your human resources; your technical staff will be able to ideate and innovate far more effectively if they are not burdened with the task of manual testing.
- There are certain factors that are impossible to test manually and at scale.
- Your customer service will suffer as your response to errors will be significantly impaired if you are spending long periods of time in the discovery process.
- Prognostic manual testing is often conducted too infrequently due to the time consumption element; this means that developing and evolving your customer experience initiatives is always on the back foot.
How best to implement DevOps
Making your software development and information-technology departments cohesive should be the primary concern of every modern call center. If you’re keen to shake off the stigma that many customers attach to the effort of contacting a business telephonically, adopting a DevOps methodology and a philosophy of continuous improvement will bring in noticeable, positive changes in the conversations that your call center agents have with customers.
Your DevOps team needs automation
Automation is the first step towards implementing DevOps within your organization as it presents the ability to develop and deploy faster, whilst maintaining and often improving quality.
Start with the right tech stack
A customer experience testing system that automatically maps your IVR configuration and tests audio scripts in the production environment empowers developers to come up with solutions long before you encounter problems. Occam’s ETS goes a step further by also generating the necessary scripts to validate changes, enabling rapid responses and seamless correction.
With the help of our user-friendly platform, your DevOps team can catalyze quick analysis reports that can be shared with other colleagues, encouraging collaboration, and a proactive approach to improving your overall customer experience. What’s more, our software integrates easily with your existing applications, and our comprehensive setup process makes sure the configuration works from day one.
Facilitate collaboration
Implementing DevOps successfully is hugely reliant upon the tools you give to your team in order for them to perform each task optimally. Using Occam’s comprehensive experience testing platform helps you to consolidate many of the manual tasks that may have been holding your teams back by siloing each department into its own corner of the organization.
So, the key to implementing DevOps into your business is to start by shifting the mindset of colleagues and stakeholders towards continuous improvement, then supplying the tools that enable everyone to work together towards the common goal of making your customer’s experience as seamless as possible.
If you’re keen to gain a more in-depth understanding of how each feature in our customer experience testing system can be applied to your CX initiatives, we’d love to offer you a free trial of our market-leading software. We understand the pressures and concerns that call center technicians face when trying to implement new tools that enhance user experience; for this reason, our service is uniquely tailored to accommodate your testing requirements.
Everything, from our pay-as-you-go price plan to the innovative nature of our platform, has been adapted to enable continuous improvement that can be conducted without disrupting your call center’s everyday operations. This means you can deliver changes, solutions, and enhancements quickly and cost-effectively.
If you recognize that your team’s talents could make a far greater contribution to your customer’s experience once the burden of manual testing has been lifted, give us a call today.
Further reading on this topic: IVR Testing
