What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?

Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry. If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own. You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements.

So here’s a partial list of the things we have addressed or are preparing to address with our services in the near future:

• Multichannel touchpoints
• SIP
• Cloud services
• Virtualization
• Unified (not merely converged) contact centers that extend into the enterprise
• Virtual contact centers, i.e., contact centers without walls
• Voice + Visual
• Video self-service
• Multi-modal transactions that demonstrate, not merely explain

As pipes get bigger, servers faster and applications more capable, the user experience gets richer and your responsibilities become more complex. Our challenge is to find ways to help you evaluate and monitor those complex and ever-evolving end-user interactions. In order to do that, we have to shut up and listen to where you are going with your plans to implement, support, service or sell contact center technologies.

So what’s around the corner for you? What challenges/opportunities are you prepared to take advantage of? Who are you listening to? You may only be self-service IVR with screen-pop to an agent today, or perhaps a website with a click-to-chat window, but you probably already know what’s coming if you don’t already have it.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 1

The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems. The customer asked an interesting question. Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services? Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have. But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company. Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company. But it doesn’t feel that way. It got me thinking about why.

Is it because so many of our customers are on the Fortune 500 list? Is it because we’ve served hundreds and hundreds of customers with communications technology that supports just a handful to hundreds of thousands of transactions per day? Or is it because we deliver services all over the world including North America, EMEA, CALA and Asia/Pacific? Is it because we are able to test with 20,000+ concurrent telephone calls or unlimited browsers? Or that we have distributed facilities for generating millions of monitoring transactions?

When I look at the ability of small (albeit talented and dedicated) group of people to so successfully leverage technology to do so much, I understand why we don’t feel small. I’m sure there are many other small businesses out there that feel the same way for similar reasons and more. When you couple this kind of success with the kind of unique responsiveness a small company can offer its customers, it makes you wonder why the prospects aren’t asking the bigger guys “Why should I do business with a big corporation like you?”
Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Groundhog Day

For me, one of the more interesting aspects of a typical performance and load testing engagement is how much bad news we deliver and how often we hear in response “OMG – that was horrible. Thank you! When can we do it again?”

As I think of it, the “can we do it again” sentiment describes the big picture when it comes to performance and load testing of a new contact center or communications solution. Proactive performance testing shouldn’t be thought of as a one-off activity. When most effectively applied it’s a process that allows you to try things out until you get them right. Kind of like Groundhog Day, but with you playing Phil Connor.

Something always turns up and most of the time it’s a big deal, which means you really do have to stop and think about what to do to get it right. Often, you need more than 5 or 10 minutes. Most often, you need a few days or even a week to get it right. Experience tells us that things aren’t usually right the 2nd time either, so you have to plan to do it more than twice too…sometimes more than three times.

The advice I give early in every project is to budget enough resources (your team, internal & vendors & suppliers) and plan enough time to test and re-test at least three to four times over a two to three week period.

Yes. Multiple sessions, two to three weeks, time in between.

If your team is prepared for the do-overs and you include the time and resources in your schedule and budget, the Groundhog Day type experience can have a positive effect on your project, your team and eventually your customers.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

So what do you learn?

In my last blog, I talked about test setup and the value of collaborating during the early stages of test planning – even when you’re just talking about who needs to do what and when.

Clearly the setup process has a lot to do with success. But the next question – the one I actually seem to get asked the most – is “So what am I going to learn? Why should we put ourselves through this when we’ve managed the living daylights out of the project, held everyone’s feet to the fire, and the budget’s already tight – running out of time & money (and patience) due to bumps in the road along the way? What’s in it for me? And don’t be vague & give me more of that value prop stuff, give me some real examples!”

Ok. We’ve got a long list of examples to help answer that question. (Check out this webinar to learn more).

But I’m going to suggest something you might not have considered. Not the obvious stuff like un-provisioned trunks, incomplete translations & routing, under-capacity servers, incompatible standards between components from different vendors, misconfigured or under capacity VLANs, etc.

Instead…think licenses. Yep. Licenses.

I hear that more and more, especially in the BC/DR context.

It’s a tight economy and nobody wants to buy more than they need, not that they ever did. But now more than ever it matters. And with IP plus virtualization & cloud computing in the mix, it’s not just about counting trunks or ports anymore. It’s not even CPU cycles or memory. Moore’s Law’s taken care of that one.

It’s about licenses.

“If everyone’s not logged in over here, can I use their licenses over there? If I lose power in Omaha, or the pipe to Chennai, will the licenses be re-distributed & usable in the back-up location?”

Well of course you thought so when you set it up. But what I’m hearing from the folks in our test facility, issues with license configurations almost always show up – often early on – and again in the BC/DR phase of our StressTest™ performance and load testing engagements for new systems.

Don’t overlook or make assumptions about something as simple as licenses – test it & see what really happens.

Mike Burke

The Unexpected Benefits of Contact Center Load Testing Setup

Launching a new contact center? Preparing to load test it to make sure it works? It isn’t just about throwing 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 calls at a solution to see what happens. That’s taking the “let’s see if this breaks it!” approach, and like I’ve mentioned before, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many of our customers have been surprised to find that preparing for “the dreaded load testing event” can actually help everyone – employees and vendors alike – work more effectively as a team. Everyone benefits (including end-user customers) when you approach testing as a team effort instead of a series of isolated exercises to generate reports, which can be used to beat up vendors & colleagues later.

(Warning … necessary plug approaching) IQ Services pioneered the team testing approach for contact center load testing over 13 years ago. So we know from experience that a successful contact center launch starts with common objectives and widespread, shared understanding. This doesn’t happen by fiat – it takes effort & guidance (and the earlier you start the better). It is still exciting for us to see how the techniques we use to prepare for a load test also encourage everyone on our customer’s team to invest some skin in the game. Talking through what’s supposed to happen – from the end-user customer’s perspective – really helps the team get their collective head screwed on straight. It’s all about the customer experience, not just the CPU consumption or the routing plan or the VLAN partitions. If it doesn’t all work together when hundreds or thousands of customers each try to do their own thing, it really doesn’t matter if the web services building block works in isolation or under twice the load as expected. You can’t imagine how many times we’ve been in the early stages of a test engagement and heard astonished customer team members say to each other “You expect it to do what?!?”

No, really.

But that’s great news! Because it happens during a test planning session, not at 10:30 AM on the morning the system goes live.

One of the key items we review (which seems so obvious to the team after the fact) is the list of who’s responsible for everything – internal and vendor – and making sure each person is plugged into their piece of the action when we start to light up the test. For example, routing and hunting are huge, whether you’re doing it yourself or counting on a toll-free network services provider. You want those resources online & participating during the test activity – not just available by pager or cell phone. Because if there’s an issue and Theo isn’t available to (1) dump the logs before they roll over, (2) interpret the results, and then (3) fix the translations right now, you might have to bring down the curtain. Then you’ll be making plans to do it all over again tomorrow night or next week or probably when you’ve promised to chaperone your kid’s traveling soccer tournament over in Fargo.

By preparing for contact center load testing early in the process, you start considering critical questions that can impact everyone on the team but that might not otherwise be discussed. Which applications are the riskiest, which data feeds the most tenuous? How are the various sites supposed to function, individually and collectively? Caching? Record locking? How do we find out if the SIP trunks really can handle the same burst rates that PRIs dealt with? Early contact center load test discussions seem to help everyone:

• Stay focused on the real business objectives
• Have a keen understanding of their role/their component’s role in meeting those objectives
• Clearly see where responsibility for any issues lie
• Pitch in where possible to get things resolved and working so testing can continue
• Have a shared understanding of what a successful launch will look like
  

Go through the load test planning and setup process in a methodical fashion. It gets your team onboard, you’re prepared to handle just about everything and you’ve probably addressed a myriad of issues before you’ve even launched the first test call.

Mike Burke
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

The Canoe Approach…Priceless

Over the past four decades, I’ve worked with customers who purchase products and services from communication companies. One of the most important things I’ve learned from working with these companies and customers is what I call the “canoe approach” to customer service. It isn’t just a cute saying. It is a solid approach that takes the customer relationship to a deeper level. It works well when followed by a single employee. But the real value of this approach hits home when any entire company lives by it. The canoe approach gives everyone in the vendor company – even sales and marketing – a way to put some muscle behind the hype. It presumes that to have a really good customer relationship, your customers need to know you’re there with them when they’re working on tough problems and trying to resolve their company issues. You are really in the canoe with them.

The work I do at IQ Services gives me an opportunity to apply the canoe approach quite often. As you know, we offer load testing services. Because the systems we test are often already in production, we must test late at night or early in the morning to reduce impact on real end-user callers. This means that a test might be running from midnight to 5AM. The canoe approach means that IQ Services is there with the customer throughout all those hours of testing and tuning and retesting. It means my colleagues (often times a Project Manager and Test Engineer) are there to look out for our customer’s best interests and to help them address whatever problems might arise. It also means that as a salesperson, I should be there sometimes for the test as well even though our project implementation experts can handle it without me. The value of my presence isn’t necessarily realized during the wee hours of the night, but rather the next morning when I have chance to talk to the customer. They know I was there and understand what happened and that I’m there again in the morning to continue helping them solve their issues.

As a salesperson, I’ve always found that customers respect you and depend on you much more when you are in the canoe with them during difficult times. But when a customer feels like an entire vendor company is in the canoe with them…well that’s priceless.

Gregg Williams

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423