What’s on Your Roadmap this Week?

Just for fun, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the exciting trends we’re seeing in the industry.  If you work for a company that owns, supports, services or sells to contact centers, you no doubt have a similar list of your own.  You’ve probably got a roadmap that identifies the trends appropriate to your market and how you can best leverage and evolve your product or service to meet tomorrow’s customer requirements. Read More...

Being a Small Business:  Part 1

The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems.  The customer asked an interesting question.  Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services?  Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have.   But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company.   Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company.  But it doesn’t feel that way.  It got me thinking about why. Read More...

Groundhog Day

For me, one of the more interesting aspects of a typical performance and load testing engagement is how much bad news we deliver and how often we hear in response “OMG – that was horrible.  Thank you!  When can we do it again?”

As I think of it, the “can we do it again” sentiment describes the big picture when it comes to performance and load testing of a new contact center or communications solution.  Proactive performance testing shouldn’t be thought of as a one-off activity.  When most effectively applied it’s a process that allows you to try things out until you get them right.  Kind of like Groundhog Day, but with you playing Phil Connor. Read More...

So what do you learn?

In my last blog, I talked about test setup and the value of collaborating during the early stages of test planning – even when you’re just talking about who needs to do what and when.

Clearly the setup process has a lot to do with success.  But the next question – the one I actually seem to get asked the most – is “So what am I going to learn?  Why should we put ourselves through this when we’ve managed the living daylights out of the project, held everyone’s feet to the fire, and the budget’s already tight – running out of time & money (and patience) due to bumps in the road along the way?  What’s in it for me?  And don’t be vague & give me more of that value prop stuff, give me some real examples!” Read More...

The Unexpected Benefits of Contact Center Load Testing Setup

Launching a new contact center?  Preparing to load test it to make sure it works?  It isn’t just about throwing 100 or 1,000 or even 10,000 calls at a solution to see what happens.  That’s taking the “let’s see if this breaks it!” approach, and like I’ve mentioned before, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many of our customers have been surprised to find that preparing for “the dreaded load testing event” can actually help everyone – employees and vendors alike – work more effectively as a team.  Everyone benefits (including end-user customers) when you approach testing as a team effort instead of a series of isolated exercises to generate reports, which can be used to beat up vendors & colleagues later. Read More...

The Canoe Approach…Priceless

Over the past four decades, I’ve worked with customers who purchase products and services from communication companies.  One of the most important things I’ve learned from working with these companies and customers is what I call the “canoe approach” to customer service.  It isn’t just a cute saying.  It is a solid approach that takes the customer relationship to a deeper level.  It works well when followed by a single employee.  But the real value of this approach hits home when any entire company lives by it.  The canoe approach gives everyone in the vendor company – even sales and marketing – a way to put some muscle behind the hype.  It presumes that to have a really good customer relationship, your customers need to know you’re there with them when they’re working on tough problems and trying to resolve their company issues.  You are really in the canoe with them. Read More...

The hidden value of customer service – a project perspective.

We’d like to think that every week is Customer Service Week for our company.  But it is great to have that special annual reminder to take time to focus and recognize customers, employees and partners alike. 

In fact, it got me to thinking about the roots of our company’s customer-centric approach to the market (again).  After over 40 years of working with customers -- a large chunk as a manager of operations and project implementation -- one of the most important lessons learned was how critical our vendors were to helping manage technical, schedule, and financial risk.  Completing projects on time and within budget is challenging work.  The challenge is increased when projects involve the integration of multiple vendor products and activities.  Read More...

Would you deliberately redline a Porsche? 

It’s easy to break stuff.  Just ask the parent of any 3-year old and they’ll confirm it for you.  Fortunately, a child’s toys are relatively inexpensive compared to, say, a Porsche.  The hottest fastest cars in the world have a redline on the tachometer.  It’s there for a reason.  It says “Sure, you can act like a 3-year old & wind this baby up.  But if you overdo it, you’ll have junk on your hands.” Read More...

Positive customer experiences

One of the things that’s really cool about working for IQ Services is the customer experience we get.

Because we test systems remotely – from the outside in, just like your customers use them – we very rarely go on-site.  Not that we haven’t.  But the vast majority of the time we just don’t do it because we don’t have to.  The upside to this methodology is our customers don’t have to do anything to their systems for us to be able to test or monitor.  They don’t have to get us security credentials to be onsite.  And because travel & shipping aren’t required, it’s all very cost-effective. Read More...

Red River keeps on rolling...

There’s a lot going on around the world this week – wars, tourists in space, North Korean rockets, Bear Market bounces, greed grief, and, of course, weather.

But here in the Upper Midwest there’s really only one story – the Red River of the North.

The Red’s unconventional in that it flows north, ultimately to Hudson Bay, which means it’s melting & wants to flow out before there’s anywhere for it all to go. This flood’s unprecedented – more water earlier in the year than there’s ever been before. You can prepare but you can’t really practice for a flood of these proportions. Disaster recovery planning is essential, but for an incident like this it is really hard to dry run – pun intended. Read More...

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