In today’s world, modern call centers are well connected, organized systems, and being operated 24×7 to provide support and capable of processing tens of millions of phone calls per month.

The loyalty and growth of the customer base generally depends on a call center’s effectiveness. So, the performance requirements for call centers are constantly growing. Organizations are focusing to raise the level of customer service by reducing the time spent in a queue waiting to be connected to an agent (Average Speed of Answer, ASA), reducing the percentage of calls ended by customers while waiting (Abandon Rate), and striving to improve the quality of communications channel.

Load testing of IVR technology and Call Center platform is challenging, but can be achieved by emulating real phone calls by using tool LoadRunner or other similar tools. We propose to emulate inbound & outbound calls and customer / operator operations, interact with an interactive voice menu, and measure line quality.

Key benefits of IVR load testing

Below are some benefits can be achieved by load testing of IVR technology and call center platforms:

  • Detect performance issues that customers experience when the call center is under load/busy hours
  • Analyze application and infrastructural parameters under various load conditions
  • Identify performance bottlenecks at architectural level
  • Measure the call center’s stability and scalability
  • Evaluate load both from inside & outside the contact center’s local network

Load Testing Strategy

Load testing solutions will start from developing load scripts to emulate the behavior of the call center’s customers (calls, web activity, email, instant messaging, screen sharing) using load testing tools LoadRunner, Neoload or other similar tools in collaboration with data synergy Voice technology partner.  Once, load scripts are created and the parameters are set, they are used to general a workload that corresponds to the required number of customers.

  • Places generated calls to IVR
  • Acts as operators, answers calls
  • Collects performance metrics

The picture below depicts the solution’s architecture with LoadRunner tool

The approach will follow the steps as below:

  • General inbound and outbound voice traffic over SIP channels
  • Emulate the complex algorithms of voice services
  • Emulate audio and video streams
  • Measure the quality of the voice connection (delay, distortion, packet loss, PESQ)

The load testing solution will include the following features when emulating phone calls

  • calls dialing
  • call pick-up
  • call hold
  • call transfer (including voice mail)
  • call park
  • call forwarding
  • conference call
  • tone dialing

A high level five steps process of IVR load testing using LoadRunner as below:

  1. Define load test strategy
  2. Develop load test scripts by emulating real phone calls
  3. Execute tests i.e. Load, Scalability
  4. Prepare test result
  5. Perform analysis & recommendations