Manual Testing and Quality Monitoring of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications

Do you know which is never busy? Your answer would be Watch. Yes, you are absolutely correct. Time is one of the precious factors in our life and to persevere with time there is another dimension called IVR which is never busy and always set to assist their customers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In todayʹs world customer relationship hold the key to success or we would say survival also. Thanks to the global­ization where challenge is just 800 number away. Various organizations are currently using more than hundred call centre [1] related applications to support its external and internal communication interfaces. These IVR applications truly symbolize the brand of a company by seamlessly offer­ing complex self-service features like credit card processing, employee benefit surveys, order processing and status, in­ventory confirmation, bill inquiry and submission, account status and stock quotes and orders etc. to their customers. To constantly stay ahead of business, organizations need to adopt innovative technologies, migrate their IVR applica­tions from legacy platforms to enterprise platforms to im­prove operational efficiencies & enhance customer expe­rience.. Investment such as in Migrating IVR applications from one platform to another platform are huge and involve lots of risk. Organizations cannot go ahead and do proof of concept (PoC) [2] as migrating applications from one platform to another is a big initiatives with full of unknowns and include software development costs, license fee and infrastructure cost etc. Organizations really have to de-risk and plan their development and more importantly their testing strategies by careful planning and execution approach. Organizations need to decide success factors beforehand. This paper out­lines importance of manual testing and use of automation tools to facilitate organizations in making good testing strategies for an improved end-user satisfaction - to help customer retention and bring loyalty. This paper aims to give an insight on what to consider while choosing between Manual Testing or Automation Testing to test IVR applications, Why automation is difficult in testing IVR applications and use of automation tools in monitoring IVR applications.