Accelerating Customer Experience Innovation

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Accelerating Customer Experience Innovation

By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC  |  March 07, 2017

The idea of improving the customer experience has become a popular topic in recent years. But doing that is more difficult and time consuming than it sounds. And even if you have a great idea, it can be tough to execute it.

Companies like CYARA, Empirix (News - Alert), and Nu Echo exist to help organizations accelerate their customer experience innovation.

Bill Aston, general manager and vice president of the Americas at CYARA, explains that his company helps customers like Bank of America design; build; and do integration, load, regression, and user acceptance testing on customer service capabilities. As a result, Aston says, CYARA can help organizations accelerate the process of implementing new customer care solutions by 40 percent and avoid downtown on those solutions.

The load testing involves CYARA documenting customer experience use cases so it can simulate common customer behaviors and see what the organization can handle in terms of those communications. Latency, sound quality, and data accuracy are among the things CYARA is measuring.

CYARA can test IVRs to make sure they are responding, have the correct automated scripts, and are triggering screen pops of customer information to the appropriate agents and in a timely manner when calls are moved to personnel.

Recently CYARA rolled out a test call recording solution. It works to ensure the recording system is capturing all parts of a conversation – and clearly, even when a call is transferred. It also makes sure those recordings are accessible after the fact so organizations aren’t fumbling around to locate them in the event of an audit.

And CYARA is working on developing high-value personas so its customers can ensure those individuals receive top-drawer customer service.

When it comes to customer experience, it’s hard to know what you’re delivering because customers may not tell you, notes Aston, and those customers who have bad experiences may simply leave your business or be dissatisfied without letting you know. CYARA provides the tools so you can assess the customer experience yourself, in an automated way, and with an approach that can prevent dissatisfaction before it happens.

As for Nu Echo, it provides the NuBot self-serve, high capacity automated testing platform for identifying critical performance and customer experience issues in enterprise telecommunications and call center systems. The company released version 4.0 of NuBot in June. That included improvements in terms of an audio/prompt important wizard, which provides drag-and-drop functionality; interactive charts, which are interactive; project overviews for each test project; simple scenario creation, which allows users to match prompts, provide DTMF, or audio input to interact and test systems; and test configuration, including phone number entry, test campaign definition, and more.

“These new product improvements put our platform on par with those of Empirix and CYARA,” said Pascal Deschênes, chief product architect at Nu Echo. “Paired with our team’s flexibility and approach to testing, there is no better solution on the market for contact center performance testing.

“Testing is truly a mandatory step in any new contact center or telephony infrastructure deployment; every project has issues – it is just a matter of whether you have tried to find them or not. NuBot platform 4.0 takes the complicated development side of performance testing out of the equation. A deep level of performance testing knowledge is always required, but our new platform allows us to demonstrate true value to our clients who can easily view their tests, browse results and dashboards, and relaunch tests at a click of a button.”

As for Empirix, it recently released a new version of its Hammer Test System for end-to-end call center customer experience IVR and virtual agent test automation. The new version, released in October, features expanded voice biometric and sound processing capabilities, and automatic environment detection.

Empirix has “years of experience working with QA teams, and understanding all the potential obstacles that impede their ability to meet business objectives, from how requirements change between regression tests through performance tests and even in production monitoring,” said Erik Delorey, product manager for contact center assurance at Empirix. “This release enables organization to eliminate a majority of those issues and accelerate successful projects.”




Edited by Alicia Young
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