Don’t Be A Turkey!

If you’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner this year, you know this is one big “make or break” time to show your skills as a host and a chef. You’ll have a houseful of family and friends expecting a feast of epicurean delights, a welcoming home, and, if all goes as planned, an invitation to come back next year for more. As the host, you know the planning involved in making this holiday a truly special day. Seating arrangements, recipes, and the all-important turkey must be given consideration well before the guests arrive. With the right planning (and a little bit of luck!), you provide your guests a fabulous meal and gain a reputation as a talented cook and skilled entertainer. Without the planning, you can end up with dry turkey, scorched yams and Thanksgiving at someone else’s house next year.

The same can be said about the holiday season for many businesses. The fourth quarter is truly the “make or break” time of the year—a time to not only see a large proportion of annual business, but also a time to interact with customers to prove how well you meet their needs and how much you value them. And just like the Thanksgiving turkey, getting it right is all about planning ahead.

All year long, your Web site and contact center perform with moderate levels of traffic. Come the fourth quarter, everything changes. Customer interactions swell as people search for the perfect holiday gift, make their last minute financial changes before January 1, register for new insurance programs, and finish up end-of-the year business initiatives. The bad news is, if your systems aren’t ready for all that increased traffic, you could experience poor system performance and disappoint—or worse yet, lose—your customers. The good news is, you always know the fourth quarter is coming and you can be confident that your systems will handle the traffic before your customers start to multiply.

You can verify your systems are ready for increased traffic at this or any other time of the year with a proactive, end-to-end load test. Proactively load testing a communication system end-to-end before a peak period will give you a clear view of system performance under high load. This type of test lets you experience what your customers experience and can help you find and isolate issues within your system. That way, you can fix any issues before they affect your customers and be confident that you provide them with the best experience you can offer.

Once your high traffic periods begin, it is critical to maintain a close watch on system performance to ensure each customer has a positive interaction with the system. Many of today’s new system components monitor themselves and produce a weekly or daily performance log. These features may work well for each component, but internal monitors can’t observe the complete system environment. This integration makes up the most meaningful statistic of all: your customer’s experience.

Proactive, end-to-end availability and performance monitoring regularly interacts with your system just like your customers and alerts you of any issues based on these interactions. IQ Services’ HeartBeat™ and WebBeat™ monitoring provide you with immediate notification of the issues and unique data that can help you find the problem and fix it faster. That way, you can be confident your systems are working properly throughout your busiest time of the year and focus on all of your increased sales, transactions and satisfied customers.

The fourth quarter can be a time to shine for many businesses. A great fourth quarter can mean increased sales, achieved goals and loyal customers who return to do business with you throughout the year. All this success takes planning, though, so make sure you do yours. Make sure your systems are ready for the increased traffic you’ll see this quarter and you’ll be confident as you head into the busiest time of year. If you don’t, you might end up looking like a turkey.