IVR (interactive voice response) phone systems are often the first line of contact between a business and its customers. This means that any technical flaw or poorly designed menu item can leave a negative first impression on your brand. In other words, you want to make sure that your IVR system always works smoothly and efficiently.
To do so, however, you’ll need to run a lot of proactive tests—and manual in-house testing can be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to perform without a lot of expertise. This is why it’s a good idea to use automated IVR testing tools instead. These tools can run IVR tests, detect issues, and suggest fixes all on their own.
Below you’ll find some of our top picks for IVR testing tools and services.
Cyara
Cyara is an all-in-one CX Assurance platform that leverages AI to test anything related to customer experience, from IVR stress tests to omnichannel assessments.
With its own in-house team of experts, Cyara can give you all the guidance necessary to ensure your CX is in the best possible shape. Plus, as the cherry on top, Cyara also gives you the option to use its entire toolset or just a few specific solutions.
The Cyara platform’s flexibility and versatility are some of the reasons it landed atop our list, but it has several more features that are worth mentioning as well.
Document existing call flows and applications
It’s pretty easy to migrate all of your call flows and existing IVR applications to Cyara’s cloud-based contact center solution. All you really have to do is let the platform crawl through your existing IVR call flows to assess menu options and it will automatically set up baseline documentation models for you.
Automate functional and regression testing or schedule other IVR tests
Cyara has a specific solution for functional and regression testing called Cyara Velocity. It performs functional tests to confirm that newly developed IVR features are working as intended and regression tests to ensure that new IVR updates didn’t break any preexisting functions or integrations—all through a single, straightforward, no-code interface.
Keep in mind that you can also set up and store test cases to simulate specific inbound or outbound IVR interactions and streamline testing procedures. The platform creates and updates these cases automatically, but you can also set them up yourself via the visual interface.
Test speech recognition and get audio transcriptions to study
To see how well your IVR system understands and responds to user voice commands, Cyara offers statistical language modeling tests. It gives you easy access to all the recorded audio files (and their transcriptions) so you can compare them side-by-side and gauge your IVR’s speech recognition accuracy.
Perform load testing, stress testing, soak testing, graduated testing, disaster recovery testing, and avalanche testing
There are many ways you can check your IVR’s ability to handle pressure.
- Stress testing simulates sudden glitches, spikes in call volumes, and internet connectivity fluctuations to identify your IVR’s limits and assess its performance under critical circumstances.
- Soak testing is similar to stress testing but conducts the tests over long periods of time. This allows you to see how much load your IVR can take before crashing or slowing down so you can make all the necessary changes before your IVR goes live.
- Graduated testing involves a series of tests, each increasing in complexity. It helps measure specific IVR functions and determine exactly what types of events may cause hiccups.
- Disaster recovery testing simulates power outages, natural disasters, and catastrophic glitches to determine how quickly your IVR system can get back on its feet and identify opportunities to minimize downtime.
- Avalanche testing is an overload-oriented test you can run to see how many callers your IVR system can handle at once.
Visual, interactive dashboards to monitor IVR performance in real-time
The Cyara platform comes with a highly intuitive interface for monitoring IVR and omnichannel performance. You can set up customized alerts to get notified whenever your IVR experiences specific issues, and you can also tweak the dashboard for individual team members based on customizable user roles and permissions.
Pricing
You’ll need to contact the sales team to get personalized quotes for Cyara’s products.
If you want a 360-degree overview of your customer experience across multiple channels, like IVR, SMS email, web, and more, you can go with Cyara’s all-in-one AI-powered CX Assurance solution. Otherwise, you can opt for any of the following independent solutions:
- Cyara Velocity for functional and regression tests
- Cyara Pulse for real-time CX monitoring
- Cyara Cruncher for load and performance tests
Occam
The Razor platform by Occam offers an IVR/IVA discovery and mapping service that handles comprehensive documentation, migration, and monitoring capabilities—all designed with ease of use and efficiency in mind.
However, just like with Cyara, you can use Occam Razor to test other key contact center elements, such as your CRM and third-party integrations. The core Occam Razor platform is split into three default modules: Discover, Automate, and Monitor.
Automated IVR/IVA discovery and mapping
Occam automatically crawls through your IVR or IVA, recording all prompts and capturing all endpoints within each branch.
The platform then sets up detailed yet straightforward maps, complete with speech-to-text files, recorded audio files, and any potential issues it finds. You can easily turn the generated maps into PNG files to share them with stakeholders or commence testing right away.
Automated IVR/IVA testing
Occam’s testing scripts have a no-code interface, and its Test Call Generation (TCG) servers can generate hundreds of calls to simulate real-life scenarios.
During testing, the platform collects and analyzes data to spot any loops, dead ends, or other potential errors before handing all of the details over to you in the form of interactive maps. These maps are immediately available via the platform’s discovery and mapping service.
Functional testing
You can leverage Occam’s functional testing module to measure your IVR’s or IVA’s responsiveness and accuracy in multiple languages via live IVA and language-agnostic tests.
If you want to ensure that each element of your contact center is working smoothly, Occam’s functional testing capabilities will even extend to your CRM and third-party integrations. This means you can be sure that your agents have quick access to accurate customer details and that any new software integrations aren’t interfering with pre-established workflows.
Some other notable features in this category include AI-powered testing tools that automate specific tasks as well as anticipate and fix issues before they blow out of proportion. You can also save existing testing scripts for later use.
Contact center monitoring
Once you set up metric thresholds and reporting frequencies, all you have to do is let Occam monitor contact center operations for you. The platform automatically sends over reports and notifies users whenever your contact center performance dips below your thresholds.
Optional add-ons
Aside from default features, Occam also offers add-ons. You can elect to add these features to the Core platform or use them independently:
- Outbound SMS testing and monitoring to test your contact center’s outbound SMS capabilities and ensure your messages always reach their intended destination on time. Test across 150 countries and 560 mobile network operators to identify underperforming destinations and fraudulent suppliers.
- Outbound voice testing and monitoring to measure metrics like call duration and lost packets in real time. Stop fraud tactics like call hijacking and OTT frauds before they do any damage to your business.
- Load testing to simulate high call volumes and see whether your contact center can handle busy, stressful times.
- In-Country Calling (ICC) to measure numerous factors that might impact CX quality across the countries you operate in—like jitters, latency, packet losses, and IVR response times.
- Simbox detection, which automatically identifies and blocks any suspicious traffic to avoid complications caused by Simbox or bypass fraud.
Pricing
You’ll need to contact the sales team to get a quote on any Occam Razor products.
Hammer IVR Testing
Hammer is an end-to-end contact center testing solution that has been around for over 30 years, making it one of the most popular in the market. Its IVR testing capabilities stand out because of their immense versatility.
For example, you can carry out load, quality assurance (QA), performance, and user acceptance tests (UAT) that simulate hundreds of simultaneous calls across multiple customer journeys—all of which can reduce your overall testing and development times by up to 90%.
Carry out on-demand performance and tests
The Hammer platform allows you to use predetermined test scripts and to build your own via a drag-and-drop interface. This allows you to run quick on-demand tests and see the results in real time. You can also grab a brief overview of the test’s failed and passed calls through graphs, or get into the details to see each individual call and recording.
Perform IVR tests based on specific user personas
It’s possible to conduct advanced QA testing for specific user profiles (such as premium customers or even troublemakers) to simulate real-life scenarios more accurately. The platform can test your IVR and identify potential issues based on these personas to see exactly how different user segments may interact with your system.
Handle variable load tests across multiple call flow paths
To test how well each call path can handle high traffic, simply set up in-depth call flow diagrams directly within Hammer and tweak the platform’s pre-set testing scripts.
For example, you can set 50% of call volumes to go to the customer support path, 30% to the sales department path, and 20% to the account balance path. You can then shuffle the numbers and see whether any sudden volume surges in a specific call path trigger a bug.
Monitor end-to-end customer interactions
Another standout Hammer solution is VoiceWatch, which emulates customer interactions to help detect any technical issues that might occur during the customer journey—from PSTN providers to agent interactions. If VoiceWatch detects an issue, it will record, pinpoint it, and notify your team via email and SMS.
Automated reports
While Hammer does its testing in the background, you receive in-depth, easy-to-digest reports in the foreground. These reports include both performance trends and failure summaries, ultimately letting you zoom in on how your response times and failure rates change based on different call volumes across each step of your call flow.
Pricing
You’ll need to contact the Hammer sales team to get a price quote.
Conclusion
IVR testing is complex, so using dedicated tools and services is usually the easiest route to take.
Overall, Cyara is an excellent option if you want to focus solely on your IVR system. Its broad variety of load and performance tests helps ensure your IVR works well under any circumstance.
Meanwhile, you should consider Occam Razor if you want to take proactive measures against potential fraud. Although they are extra add-ons, the Simbox detection and outbound SMS and voice tools mitigate the risk of dealing with any unwanted costs.
Lastly, Hammer is best suited for quick assessments. Its on-demand tests will let you see whether something is wrong with your system within minutes. That said, the platform can also conduct tests on its own using your call flow diagram, which is pretty sweet.
