Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world forever.

Customer behavior has evolved across areas, including how people work, shop, or entertain themselves. This is especially true of the banking and financial services industry, where customers are reaching out to contact centers for their banking needs. Consequently, interactive voice response (IVR) systems have come under pressure, often resulting in dissatisfaction and poor customer experience. Banks have gone into digital overdrive to manage the impact of the pandemic. In addition, the industry is at the cusp of shifting to contactless, smart banking with enhanced digital experience. However, banks’ IVR systems are not yet equipped to handle this change. We highlight how a robust IVR test strategy can help banks overcome these challenges and meet evolving customer expectations. We also discuss the various types of tests and components that must be incorporated into a comprehensive IVR test strategy.

Change in IVR testing

The sudden outbreak of the pandemic caused massive changes in the financial services industry.

Banks and insurers are accelerating the adoption of digital technologies and unified communication platforms. The industry is set to evolve further, and contactless and smart banking with enhanced digital customer experience will soon become the norm. IVR systems in bank contact centers need to be equipped with the requisite digital capabilities to handle these transformations. Coupled with a 360-degree view of the customer, efficient IVR systems will enable the transition to contactless and boundaryless banking.

An efficient, personalized, and smart IVR system is key to ensuring a professional image for financial institutions. However, banks face challenges in achieving this due to their complicated technology architecture. To add to this, the existing IT architecture has not been tested for functional competence and end-to-end IVR experience. The pandemic triggered branch closures and a huge spike in call volumes. As a result, the scope of IVR systems in ensuring query resolution and improving customer experience has expanded substantially. Yet, IVR systems lack personalization, have long wait times given large call volumes, and often deliver incomplete service due to problems in data retrieval. This leads to poor experience and churn, with customers switching to the competition. Strengthening IVR testing systems has thus become crucial to meeting customer expectations. An effective and robust IVR test strategy with 360-degree coverage has emerged as a critical need in the financial services industry.

IVR test process flaws

IVR systems are complex, with a wide range of functionalities and interfaces to other applications.

They also need to integrate with other communication platforms (omnichannel switch) and IVR systems. The existing test process lacks the capability to handle complexities in the next-generation self-service IVR systems. The insufficiencies (see Figure 1) in the existing system include:

• Lack of efficacy in testing computer telephony integrations due to the system’s complexity. This leads to incorrect server switches that translate into long waiting periods for customers.
• Lack of testing to check if the IVR server can accommodate unexpected call spikes. The challenge causes IVR server crashes during unexpected increase in call volumes, resulting in poor customer experience.
• Instances of poor customer experiences are tracked but not fed into the test coverage during functional or integration testing. This results in customers repeatedly facing the same issues, further adversely impacting experience.
• Inadequate testing to check if the IVR system recognizes, understands, and efficiently processes customers’ speech in natural language. This may result in the IVR system being unable to process customer requests. Consequently, customers may have to repeat their queries, in turn, leading to a poor experience.
• Complex integrations and switches within as well as to and from multiple channels give rise to complexities and incomplete testing. As a result, erroneous messages are played to customers, creating confusion and poor experience.

Figure 1: Drawbacks in IVR testing and a 360-degree test strategy

Closing gaps in the IVR test process will require banks to examine the IVR landscape, which is evolving from a single channel to an omni-channel one. Catering to this switch will necessitate a thorough assessment of the existing landscape with a focus on identifying change programs that must be implemented to build a future-ready IVR system.

360-degree test strategy

Self-service IVR systems need to undergo numerous tests to ensure accuracy, completeness, and resilience.

They must also meet business needs and customer expectations before they can be implemented. In our view, banks must implement a strategy that includes major types of IVR tests and ensures 360-degree coverage for all possible scenarios.

Load test

Calling the IVR system such that it simulates a real-time call spike will enable tracking of performance metrics to confirm that the system works as expected. In addition, CPU and memory consumption must remain within expected limits, ensuring customer response times are within acceptable levels.

Stress test

Stress or peak traffic tests help determine if the IVR system can endure extreme traffic levels across two parameters—number of concurrent calls and call arrival rate. This test will help ascertain the IVR system’s capability to handle high call volumes. This is applicable when the number of calls goes beyond the set threshold during peak periods without compromising the quality of service.

Spike test

Spike tests are more intense than load or stress tests and check whether the contact center can manage a burst of traffic beyond what it is designed to handle. This identifies how the IVR system deals with a big spike in traffic, as might occur when a high-availability architecture has to deal with network or server issues. This is especially important to handle seasonal surges in traffic due to increased business or when there is a major incident that triggers an unprecedented volume of calls.

Functionality test

Functionality tests confirm whether the IVR system has the capability to work as per basic requirements and is consistent with the design. Functionality and features testing is required for any new IVR system, or when a change is made to the IVR system. Given the evolving and integrated nature of the IVR ecosystem and the imminent switch to an omni-channel landscape, functionality tests are important to ensure a seamless customer experience.

Database access test

The database access test helps determine if the IVR system and other interfacing systems accurately and consistently retrieve valid and correct customer information from the database while addressing customer queries or processing transactions.

Database update test

This test checks if the information submitted by the customer during an IVR interaction is updated and stored in the database and is easily retrievable. Also, this test enables intelligent checks on the captured data, for example, age versus number of years of employment.

Interrupted communication test

This test determines if an appropriate warning is communicated to the customer during an interruption or communication break in any phase of the IVR transaction. It also ensures that the IVR system recovers from the interruption or communication break.

Soak test

An unexpected crash of the IVR server can cause service outages and customer dissatisfaction. Soak tests verify the IVR system’s stability and performance over an extended period and prevent such sudden crashes.

Overall customer experience test

This refers to the 24/7, real-time testing of the customers’ experience with IVR systems. It is achieved through the continuous recording of incoming calls, performing thorough quality checks, and leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze call records. The test determines customer sentiment as well as their response to the IVR experience.

Integration test

Banks offer various digital channels for customers to perform several banking activities. This, coupled with the use of unified communication platforms, results in a complex architecture. Hence, performing robust tests to ensure IVR systems integrate with multiple IVR interfaces of other banking channels and communication platforms is crucial to enable seamless switches between diverse interfaces and IVR systems. This, in turn, reduces call handling time and delivers a better customer experience.

Regression test

Contact centers deploy third-party applications and launch upgrades, which can result in IVR issues leading to poor customer experience. Regression tests determine if IVR systems are performing as expected after integration of third-party apps and feature upgrades.