While the benefits of integrated CTI (News - Alert) and CRM systems have been made clear in recent for both customers and agents, ensuring smooth call handoffs from agents and self-service applications can be difficult to achieve.
However, successful applications can reduce call handling times, resulting in positive customer experiences.
VoIP testing and monitoring solutions provider Empirix (News - Alert) offers a Virtual Agent Simulator (VAS) for End-to-End testing and monitoring of contact center applications to achieve such positive experiences.
Because orchestrating each step of the testing process can be technically complex and difficult to deploy and maintain, the Empirix Virtual Agent Simulator is designed to simultaneously test and monitor to ensure the proper data gets to the right agent at the right time, according to the company.
Often, frustration of calling into a contact center and having to repeat the same information multiple times leaves callers scratching their heads.
In fact, companies invest millions of dollars to integrate self-service, CTI and CRM applications in an effort to streamline the call experience for customers and agents.
The VAS emulates the interactions between an agent’s desktop, specifically the CTI toolbar, and the CTI and CRM servers. According to officials at Empirix, it a perfect complement to Empirix Hammer, the gold standard for emulating customer calls over the PSTN (or VoIP networks). VAS utilizes the patented Hammer Synchronization Server to coordinate results from both sides of the call.
When Integrated with Hammer Test System and OneSight Voice Engine, is designed for complete end-to-end transaction testing and monitoring to ensure performance, consistency and accuracy of data.
As TMCnet recently reported, the addition of Hammer XMS allows companies to provide an even greater comprehensive service monitoring solution that addresses both signaling and media content, correlates across multiple protocols and identifies network problems.
How it works.
The VAS simulates the agent’s call handling and collects metrics from the agent’s Perspective and determines where the call went, if there was attached data, whether the data was correct, and how long it took to populate the agent desktop.
The collected data is then posted back to the Synchronization Server so it can be correlated with the caller data to provide an integrated view of the end-to-end call and unified reporting.
The VAS comprises two components: VAS Builder which is used to script the way in which the agent’s client application will react to incoming calls and the VAS Runner which executes the scripts during testing or monitoring. VAS Builder is a graphical development environment for visual scripting and debugging, consisting of pre-defined templates and real traffic recording to make script development easier and faster.
Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Tim’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Tim Gray