Contact Center Business Solutions: Protecting ROI by Ensuring Customer Experience

The financial services industry is making a large investment in contact center business solutions to take advantage of the potential cost savings and business process improvements promised by ever-evolving technologies. Today’s customers, both technically savvy and technology-averse, demand immediate and efficient customer service when, where, and how they want it. The customer’s experience with a company and products depends largely on complex communications and service infrastructures that respond to customer requests for timely, accurate information and support. One bad experience with a voice or Web solution may send customers looking for different suppliers. In fact, a recent study by Opinion Research Group quoted in the June 14, 2006 “Figuratively Speaking” section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune shows 69% of Americans are less likely to do business with a company after one bad call center experience. If a company deploys and maintains solutions that do not perform as designed and do not provide customers with a quality experience, the ROI objectives related to improved customer service and increased employee productivity erode at lightning quick speed.

To ensure your company realizes the ROI you plan to receive from new or upgraded contact center business solutions, it is essential you employ customer experience-oriented, quality assurance test planning and implementation practices. Although anyone who currently relies on these solutions can benefit from customer-experience test planning and implementation, all companies can better manage the risk of delayed or unattained ROI by using these practices as early in the business solution life cycle as possible.

Contact Center Business Solution: What is it?

Today’s financial contact center business solution is a sophisticated integration of advanced technologies, multiple vendors, geographically dispersed customers and employees, and complex business requirements from varied and sometimes conflicting decision-makers. The business objectives that govern each contact center can be as diverse as the technologies that support it. However, the primary purpose of a contact center should be to provide quality customer experiences via the most appropriate and economical way possible. Common user-facing applications include account inquiry, funds transfer, agent transfer, live customer service chat, and online rate information just to name a few.

The integration of hardware, software, and business processes to deliver simple, customer-friendly service is complex and dynamic. Although the architecture of each solution is unique, there are common elements including but not limited to things like: VoIP and TDM; SS7, SIP, and H.323; ACD and PBX; auto-attendant; voicemail; IVR and application; speech recognition (NLSR); TTS; VXML; data access; middleware; management reporting; call routing; CTI; screen pop; agent routing (virtual or traditional); Web servers and applications; and media servers and gateways. Traditional and evolving technologies allow financial institutions to create solutions that satisfy customer requirements through solution applications like self-service, disaster recovery, CRM and customer care, presence, and unified queuing.

Quality Assurance Test Planning from the Customer Perspective: Identifying risk.

The first step toward protecting the ROI associated with a contact center business solution is having a well thought out quality assurance and risk management plan. A crucial component of the plan, which is often over-looked or abandoned when other parts of the plan start to slip, is quality assurance test planning and implementation. When testing is absent or eliminated from a solution’s quality assurance plan, there is no mechanism to ensure customers have the quality experience with the solution that you expected. When the focus on customer experience is sacrificed because of expediency, poor planning, or other project concerns, managing and ensuring the solution’s ROI becomes a matter of luck rather than good risk management.

The second step in protecting the ROI associated with a new or enhanced solution is deciding whether to partner with a testing expert or to utilize in-house risk management and test execution resources. Whatever choice a company makes, it is critical the test team’s primary objective be to make the jobs of the design, development, and project management teams easier and cost-effective. Carefully planned, customer experience-focused testing serves as a valuable calibration step for all stakeholders and never becomes just one more piece of red tape.

Regardless of the test team, the ultimate goal of test planning is to establish an appropriate test schedule and budget for the project. In addition to business objectives and post-production goals, the plan should include an outline of specific test-related tasks and preliminary acceptance criteria. An example of this sort of planning might occur when a company has a business objective to decrease the number of customers that opt out of an automated solution to speak with expensive customer service agents. To ensure the new or enhanced solution actually increases containment, the test plan for the objective would include pre-production acceptance criteria, project time, budget, and specific test strategies, which identify methods and resources (e.g., feature function, usability, and load testing). If the features and enhancements do not perform as designed and are not corrected in response to testing, the company will not receive the ROI that justified the purchase of the new solution.

A well-documented test plan includes the identification and ranking of project risks and the testing strategies for managing each risk. Risk identification and test planning phases start with the answers to some broad questions, like the following, to help determine the most cost-effective approach to test the solution:

• What are the major components and complexities of the business solution(s)?
• What regulatory or legal constraints impact the solution? What risks are associated with non-compliance?
• Are the applications and user-facing features of the solution directly or closely related to revenue generation or cost reduction?
• What aspects of the solution are most closely tied to ROI for the project? Where are the greatest risks for not realizing the ROI related to:
  o Infrastructure?
  o New technologies (new to the industry or company)?
  o Traffic levels and patterns?
  o Complex routing or distributed architecture?
  o Key performance indicators (e.g. response times)?

Each solution involves unique elements that should be considered in the plan and validated during testing. Taking the time to document a test plan is the first and most important step in identifying and managing the risk associated with a contact center business solution. Preparations during the early stages of a project help identify problems that, if discovered too late, add time and cost to completing the implementation.

Confidence during Design and Development: Staying on schedule and in budget. Integrating appropriate testing throughout the business solution life cycle helps ensure ROI by managing customer experience. Integrating testing into the design and development stages of the life cycle increases the likelihood of staying on schedule and within budget. The basis of effective design and development testing is a comprehensive design specification, which clearly defines how customer contacts will be processed from initiation to completion via all mediums. The design specification lays the groundwork for numerous pre-production test methods, including but not limited to comprehensive feature function testing, limited functional “smoke” checks, usability testing, and limited load testing. Using functional testing as an example, IQ Services uses the design specification to configure limited functionality “smoke” checks to make sure early and mid-development efforts stay on track. To help stay on schedule and within budget, the change tracking and reporting mechanisms and test cases setup for smoke checks are leveraged as components of more comprehensive feature function testing to validate the solution’s complete end-to-end performance.

It is important to recognize that “End-to-end” performance goes beyond the performance of individual components, which were tested before shipping. True “end-to-end” performance involves the functionality and integration of the entire solution in the actual production environment.

Regardless of the test method, it is critical that all testing conducted during development be flexible and responsive to minimize the time required to find and fix problems and to capitalize on every opportunity to help the implementation team progress and stay on schedule.

Confidence to “Go Live”: Protecting customer experience from “Day One.”

The final step in protecting customer experience before “Go Live” is end-to-end/integrated load testing of the solution to allow the implementation team to observe, tune and validate solution performance under real traffic conditions. Load testing prior to cutover provides implementation teams with an opportunity to tweak and fix until the solution works as expected in the production or pseudo-production environment. Load testing can also force out early life failures that sometimes plague solutions during the first months after cutover. Because this test is the ultimate test of the solution’s ability to provide a quality customer experience to ensure ROI, successful completion of load testing, based on previously defined acceptance criteria, is the definitive acceptance event for the solution owner, solution provider, and systems integrator alike.

Typically, load testing is conducted in an environment that is as close to production as possible, which may mean that significant amounts of test data are required for testing. It is critical that load testing during this stage of the project be performed entirely from the customer perspective—dialing or browsing to a solution from the outside world into the company. Any other approach would not provide a true verification of the solution’s ability to provide the expected customer experience. Test cases for a load test are ideally limited with each case focused on a particular user-facing function, component or integration (e.g., funds transfer). Load testing that focuses specifically on high-risk elements of the solution helps uncover the issues that could most significantly interfere with customer experience.

To maximize the scope and value of load testing, it is sometimes appropriate to coordinate load testing with testing via different channels (e.g., voice, Web, e-mail, fax, etc.) to make sure a realistic load is placed on shared components or with testing via different methods (e.g., feature function testing) to ensure that medium or low risk elements are also performing as expected.

Success at this stage of the project is dependent on the test team’s ability to appropriately configure the test; to remain highly flexible and responsive to frequent changes in the implementation team’s requirements and test schedule; and to use test expertise to accelerate root cause analysis, which is critical to resolving issues and validating corrective actions as quickly as possible.

Confidence after Cutover: Protecting customer experience Day 2 and beyond

Post-production risk should also be managed as part of a comprehensive test plan. The strategies associated with this phase of the plan include testing and monitoring methods such as proactive, customer experience monitoring, periodic assessment load testing and feature function regression testing.

To be in confident in the solution’s ability to deliver a quality customer experience, solution owners should conduct proactive, 24 x 7 customer experience monitoring. Unlike internal, component monitoring, proactive, end-to-end customer experience monitoring provides information about solution availability and performance from the customer perspective (contacting your company from the real world, outside-in). Availability monitoring minimizes the possibility that customers will have a bad experience by notifying the appropriate departments when something unexpected occurs and by collecting and displaying historical performance data (e.g., response times) that may suggest impending or intermittent issues. The information provided with notifications, including audio recordings, facilitates timely identification of persistent and intermittent issues to accelerate issue resolution. The frequency at which this monitoring is implemented should be consistent with a company’s business solution service level requirements.

Periodic assessment load tests and feature function tests should also be proactively scheduled to make sure the risks associated with day-to-day maintenance, patches and other unknown integration variables are managed to ensure a continuing positive customer experience.

Conclusion

Positive customer experience is critical to the ROI expected from technologies and solutions focused on customer communication and interaction. Comprehensive test planning, flexible and responsive pre-production testing, and proactive post-production testing and monitoring are essential to managing and ensuring positive customer experience. Knowing the solution works before putting it into production optimizes ROI by ensuring the productivity gains and customer satisfaction improvements used to justify the investment are actually delivered in the most timely and cost-effective way. Properly planned and implemented, quality assurance testing is the key to meeting business objectives associated with customer contact-driven business solutions.