Empirix to Deliver Real-time, End-to-End Genesys Contact Center Performance Testing

Today's contact center and UC solutions are extremely complex. Neglecting to validate any proposed change - whether it's a new solution or routine software update - prior to deployment can adversely impact customer experience and performance. Only complete, end-to-end testing under real world conditions can prevent costly problems. The benefits of doing so are:

• Easily identify the source of problems and eliminate finger pointing
  
  
• Keep projects on time and on budget to maximize ROI
  
  
• Proactively assure optimal performance and a great user experience
  
  
• Prevent costly correction of post-deployment issues
  
  
• Realize the full value of technology investments.

Bottom line - through pre-deployment solution testing to preempt customer-impacting issues, companies can cut project costs; they can speed deployment cycles and confidently leverage the latest IP technologies to gain business agility, competitive advantage and a loyal customer base.

With these thoughts in mind Genesys and Empirix have come together and announced that they will jointly offer Genesys Testing as a Service (GTaaS), powered by Empirix Hammer Test technology, to their mutual customers. Empirix Hammer technology is a flexible communications and contact center test solution capable of handling the latest technologies, including VoIP, SIP, TDM, and IMS protocols, customer behaviors (making calls, reading emails, accessing mobile services, opening web pages), and services (voice, video, data) in a single test plan. GTaaS is highly scalable for both enterprise and carrier-grade deployments. Its target market is multisite Genesys-based contact centers of over 500 seats that are in the process of introducing SIP and UCC solutions as well as session border controllers (SBCs) at the contact center front end that interact with the Genesys voice portal. Key verticals are finance, insurance, healthcare and retail.

GTaaS Service Description

GTaaS includes customizable services for auditing contact center operations, assessing customer experience and designing test plans. Load, regression and interoperability testing is used to fully validate Genesys self-service, routing, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and desktop solutions within a company's specific contact center environment. Industry- and technology-specific knowledge is leveraged along with shoulder-to-shoulder knowledge sharing of client customers' behaviors so that the test plan design with key use cases, call flows and traffic patterns accurately reflects expected real world usage. Traffic patterns and loads (volumes up to 20,000 simultaneous callers) are then simulated to pinpoint errors and performance bottlenecks with touch-tone or speech-enabled applications throughout the contact center environment including switches, Genesys SIP Servers, Genesys Voice Portals, Proactive Contact, Genesys Customer Interaction Management (CIM), agent desktop solutions and backend systems.

When evaluating performance from the customer viewpoint, Empirix GTaaS uses Empirix Hammer technology to interact with the contact center in the same way actual customers do. This can include calling a toll-free number and navigating through the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution by speaking, listening or entering touch-tone digits. It can request agent assistance to verify the routing and CTI experience as well as full agent desktop screen pop capabilities.

Agent behavior is emulated by the Empirix Genesys Virtual Agent Simulator (VAS), an application designed to interact with the Genesys CIM Platform just as a live agent desktop application does. It simulates multiple agents from a single workstation/server, logs in the agents, and makes them ready to accept calls. Empirix Genesys VAS is installed and configured in the client's environment by Genesys Professional Services.

Key features:

• A comprehensive mapping of existing services, call flows and routing schemes
  
  
• Automated, predictable and repeatable test scripts that will traverse and verify contact center functions
  
  
• Flexible test execution capabilities that emulate real-world customer behaviors - at scale - to fully validate customer experience across the contact center
  
  
• Availability of wide range of performance metrics including IVR response time variations, time-to-connect, prompt errors, speech recognition errors, CTI issues, screen pop timing, and response times
  
  
• Interoperability assurance for complex multi-vendor, multi-protocol environments
  
  
• Availability of realtime web-based reporting for more rapid diagnosis of detected issues
  
  
• At the end of each engagement, a scalability report summarizing the final system performance, highlights from the testing sessions, and potential recommendations for improvement is delivered.

Empirix Go-to-Market Strategy

Empirix has moved from a direct model to an indirect model working with large contact center vendors such as Genesys and Avaya. In addition, they do a bit of work with large systems integrators. They work with these companies around the globe, but mostly in the US, EMEA and a bit in Japan and in China. Empirix has realized a 40 percent increase in orders worldwide in the first half of 2012, when compared to the same period last year. This includes record orders in Q1 and a 144 percent increase in EMEA orders during the first half of 2012.

About 50 percent of their book is via contact center vendor resale. A good portion of the remainder is through contact center vendor referrals. These are cases where a Genesys or Avaya refers Empirix as a neutral third-party to do deployment validation testing.

Typically pricing for GTaaS services tends to be in the 5 to 8 percent range of contact center solution CapEx. For example, if an enterprise puts in $1 million of Genesys gear they're probably going to spend about $75,000 on the test.

What This Means to Customers

When asked to name Empirix's largest competitor, Tim Moynihan, Vice President, Marketing said, "To be honest with you, the biggest one that we evaluate regularly is the 'do nothing.' When I started talking to customers, I found out that they've done nothing in the past until they talked to us. Their belief that everything would work was based on a hope and a prayer. That is, believe it or not, out biggest competitor - do nothing."

In today's winner-take-all world, your business depends on customer loyalty, of which the customer communication experience is a critical component. Testing your communications infrastructure before taking it live is not an option - it's a requirement. Issues that are not handled in the pre-production stage will have a direct negative impact, destroying customer satisfaction levels and your company's reputation, while encouraging customers to take their business to your competitors. Furthermore, adding external neutral testing expertise provides that crucial independent third-party validation that all bases are covered, so you can move forward with confidence.

We believe that Empirix GTaaS is an interesting and a good solution. Companies in the target demographic, discussed above should definitely consider it. But, as always, this is a competitive market and potential customers should shop around. Two competitors of Empirix that you may want to look at are IQ Services and NACR. The key thing here is to get engaged. The "do nothing" strategy is simply unsustainable.