In every industry, there are a few critical periods each year when your Unified Communications (UC) or Contact Center system will be put to the test. For example:
- fluctuations in the economy
- weather events
- peaks in retail season (e.g. holidays, Black Friday, End of Financial Year sales)
- open enrolment for insurance
- marketing promotions
- data breaches
In North America, we know the devastation that hurricane season can bring, broadly impacting public safety, utilities, and insurance companies. And nobody is ever likely to forget the devastation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected millions of people, and tens of thousands of businesses. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic, it's the importance of equipping your business with the means to withstand a disaster.
Sudden outages, natural disasters, or spikes in customer traffic can leave an organization flailing. Disaster recovery plans after the fact (reactive measures) are important of course, and they may address the problem, but often it’s too late to curtail the damage.
Reactive vs proactive disaster recovery
While reactive disaster response and management is necessary, proactive risk management is all about taking preventative measures before the event to decrease its severity, or in some cases, stop a disaster from happening at all. A reactive approach learns from past or current events and with that knowledge and information, prepares your organization for the next.
How proactive risk management benefits an organization
The ability to anticipate ever-changing factors plays a critical role in any contact center’s success. This is where the difference between ‘proactive’ and ‘reactive’ comes into play. Proactive businesses continuously monitor changes in customer behavior and expectations as well as broader market dynamics.
This constant monitoring allows them to predict how those changes will affect their activities, and plan how they should respond. It also enables them to manage change in a timely and effective fashion, minimizing potential disruptions to their activities.
Proactive contact centers base their business management on analytics to leverage customer experience (CX) and operational data and incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and automation capabilities. This is necessary to analyze and act on vast volumes of data, both structured and unstructured, in a timely and accurate manner.
Why performance testing is vital
With the rapid evolution of technology, UC and contact center environments today are prone to regular change. Things like ongoing software and system upgrades, additions and improvements have added a new level of intricacy and complexity. Any organization’s UC and contact center system depends on peak performance at all times.
Performance testing accounts for all performance acceptance criteria and benchmarks when a system is under stress. It also provides developers and system managers with the diagnostic information they need to eliminate bottlenecks. The only way to be sure your systems will always deliver the intended level of service is to test them in their failover configurations ahead of time. Utilities and insurance companies, for example, need to be ready for a possible onslaught of calls should a storm cause wide-spread damage in one of their business regions.
What performance testing reveals:
- Where computing bottlenecks are occurring within an application
- Whether an application meets performance requirements (e.g., if the system can handle 1,000 concurrent users)
- Whether performance levels claimed by a software vendor are as they are intended to be
- Comparison of two or more systems to identify which performs best
- The measurement of stability under peak traffic events
For everything you need to know about performance testing, read our Definitive Guide to Performance Testing
The importance of repeat testing
During the months of normal operations, changes can happen within your network environment that are not immediately obvious. Those changes potentially impact your ability to get 100% of peak load for which the contact center applications are designed. For example, perhaps there have been network upgrades or configuration changes required to keep the systems working.
However, even if these changes are part of the network environment, and not directly tied to your communications complex, they have the potential to cause the system to gradually wander out of spec.
If someone looks at a configuration setting without really knowing what it's supposed to do, for example, it could be tweaked in a way that's not appropriate for a high-traffic environment.
Under normal operations this may cause no impact, as the system normally runs at 20% to 30% of capacity. However, the periodic high-volume events you've planned for, might push traffic levels in your system 5 to 10 times greater than where they're running during the rest of the year. Will your system actually function as intended when traffic levels increase to near maximum capacity?
Generating traffic
Because it’s critical to deliver excellent customer experience at all times (including to internal customers), load testing and stress testing before peak season is a must. This generates a large amount of traffic into your systems to verify their ability to handle the increased load. Conducting a stress test like this provides time to address any changes or issues identified so they can have confidence their system is ready for peak traffic and works as intended.
For companies that have hot standby systems in place, it's really important to make sure they are actually capable of handling the traffic load. Running a load test into a hot standby solution as part of peak season prep is a great way to make sure that the system hasn't been compromised over the last year. Any patches or application upgrades that have been applied to the production environment could have affected its ability to handle high levels of traffic.
Another key element of maintaining hot standby systems is knowing that they can be accessed from the outside-in. Hot standbys are meant to kick into place without any user intervention. Whether it's part of your web environment or voice environment, IR can offer HeartBeat™ availability and experience testing against those systems.
IR testing solutions
Many organizations admit that they only perform a minimal amount of testing due to shortage of time and resources. This could severely impact your ability to recover quickly from a disaster like those already mentioned. Today’s contact centers utilize a mix of technologies and different channels of communication, creating a complex environment.
With IR’s Collaborate suite of solutions, you can get vital end-to-end visibility into your entire UC and contact center system from a single pane of glass.
