Wellington, 12 Nov 2010: Cyara Solutions today announced that the New Zealand's Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has adopted its Pulse product to automatically test the operations of its call centers, removing the need for daily manual testing.
The Ministry delivers a wide range of income support and social services to more than one million citizens and operates 20 call centers as its first point of contact for inquires.
The call centers are therefore mission-critical and Brent Ludlam, the Ministry's Voice manager, says he used to conduct daily tests of all queues to make sure the call centers were ready for business.
'At 6:00AM every day, an hour before the contact centers go live, I tested all my big queues,' he says. 'That way I could say, hand on heart, that I knew the state they were in at the start of a business day.'
But Ludlam recognised that this practice was overly-time consuming, and meant the Ministry relied on his personal diligence. He was also less-than-thrilled by the endless early starts!
Enter Cyara Pulse, which now conducts automated tests of the Ministry's call centers to make sure they are ready for business each day, relieving Ludlam of the need for manual tests at dawn.
'I still do run my own tests - I think I am a bit of a control freak - but I only test 10 instead of 50. I trust the tool to do some of the testing for me,' he says. 'I only test the critical ones now. Cyara has done the rest and tells me when they are okay.'
Cyara Pulse also monitors the contact centers around the clock, and if performance ever falls below desired thresholds, Ludlam receives a SMS notification and can initiate action to restore service and ensure customers get the experience they deserve.
Overall, Ludlam says introducing Cyara to the Ministry's call centers has made their operations more robust.
'Our testing was completely manual and inefficient,' Ludlam says. 'The quality of people determined quality of testing, or we would conduct simple tests to make sure network components would fail over in high availability and disaster recovery scenarios.'
Now, he says, the Ministry understands its operations inside out and can more easily plan for future innovation. Ministry-wide voicemail upgrade has already been planned, with Cyara central to Ludlam's upgrade plans.
'I won't be testing that manually - it's another job for Cyara,' he says. 'It brings project costs and timeframes down.'
