“On-demand” services are a sign of the times as financial pressures lead companies to avoid capital expenses without compromising the quality of services offered customers or the quality of life for employees. Risk reduction is a big part of the decision process as well. Customer care support infrastructure has become fragile (some would say “brittle”) when trying to accommodate changes in delivery channels (from phone to Web to social media to mobile devices and any mixture that customers can conceive). That’s why it is a relief to migrate all or part of the operations to third-party service providers with pay-as-you-go or on-demand options for customer self-service elements like interactive voice response (IVR), e-commerce Web sites, outbound notifications, live agent call-handling and “all-of-the-above.”

Enter Empirix, whose “Hammer” technology helped define the business of quality assurance testing in contact centers (since 1992) and more recently for IP-based network services and networking components. Today, Empirix is formally launching Emprix Testing as a Service(TM), in response to a growing need from companies who are making major investments in a wide range of self-service resources and require highly customized (and dynamic) quality assurance testing that won’t add to the capital budget.

The “Testing as a Service” approach enables Empirix to scale the service quickly and almost indefinitely and to do so at predictable levels of operating expense. While this is the formal “launch,” the efficacy of the approach has been borne out by live implementations at a large mail-order clothing merchandiser and a major North American utility. In the first case, the company was making a major investment in new IP-based infrastructure to support traffic needs through the next five years. They knew they had sufficient capacity for call handling and voice processing, but wanted to be sure that the customer experience would not suffer, especially during seasonal spikes in caller activity. A five-month project uncovered some issues that would arise under stress and were able to tune the voice processing system to the point where there were only 20 errors in the course of 40,000 calls per week. The utility used the service to provide regulators with evidence that it complied to requirements that contact centers be available to receive calls in the event of emergency. Empirix simulated and measured the ability to deliver calls to the correct sites and provided reports that certified compliance to the government requirements.

The value of testing is its ability to detect potential problems in advance. Major infrastructure providers, like Avaya, Cisco and Genesys, partner with Empirix to provide their prospects with the confidence they need to justify the acquisition and deployment of a new system. Empirix’s services model should be a welcome innovation to the equipment providers because they are no longer vying for the same discretionary capital spending budget items. That means that Empirix’s goal and role is to be a trusted provider of “end-to-end” quality assurance testing based on a combination of experience and vertical knowledge.

Categories: Articles

Tags: SaaS, Contact Center, Quality Assurance