Fall 2005 Newsletter: Peak Retail Season Testing
Originally published October 21, 2005

Letter from the Publisher
by Jim Jenkins

Don't Be A Turkey!
Proper planning can help you shine during the busy fourth quarter.
by Sarah Laurin
The busiest time of the year is quickly approaching. Make sure your systems are ready to handle the increased business with a load test now and availability monitoring throughout your busy season.

Asked & Answered
Read our answers to some of our readers' most critical testing questions.

Fermentations
by Chuck Blethen
Ever feel intimidated by an expansive wine list at a fine restaurant? Chuck Blethen gives us tips to confidently and intelligently navigate a wine list.

Letter from the Publisher

Autumn 2005

I can't believe I'm writing a letter for the final issue of our first year in newsletter publication. I'm very proud of the publication we've put together and I hope that you enjoy reading it. We are looking forward to even better articles and information next year. We always welcome your feedback, so please let us know what kind of information and features you’d like to see.

We've learned so much this year about our industry and how we can better serve you, our customers. I'm really excited about the improvements we are making to our services and look forward to sharing them with you to see how they can help you in the delivery of excellence to your customers.

As we head into the busiest time of year for many of our customers, I’d like to remind you to make sure that your contact center and communication systems are ready to handle the increased traffic. Read this issue’s feature article to learn how you make sure.

On a similar note, I wish you a safe and happy holiday season, and a prosperous new year. Thank you for helping to make our inaugural publishing year such a success.

Sincerely,

Jim Jenkins
Publisher
President & CEO

Back to Top

Don't be a Turkey

Proper planning can help you shine during the busy fourth quarter

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.

Back to Top

Asked & Answered

If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in our quarterly newsletter, contact us!

Q: I know I need to test my new solution, but I have no idea how to do it. Can you help me?

A: Yes! We frequently work with people who need assistance to define the testing component of their new system implementation plan. IQ Services’ testing experts have years of experience calculating proper load levels for a solution, configuring test cases, determining test objectives, selecting appropriate report styles and much more. We will help you every step of the way. Our simple implementation documents make it easy for you to submit the information we need to set up your StressTest™. Before your test, we’ll help you understand what you’ll be able to see in real time via ORCA™, the Online Reporting and Charting Application, as well as how we’ll formally report the analyzed test results.

If you need help over and above what we provide standard with our test support services, we offer consulting services to help you with more in-depth needs. One of our consultants can work with you to create an RFP, respond to an RFP, develop a business solution life cycle test plan and define acceptance criteria to help you determine when a new or upgraded solution is ready for production. We also have the expertise to provide testing project management support that goes beyond the limits of the StressTest™ or HeartBeat™ implementation. This is only a sampling of the work our consultants can provide. Once you’ve realized you need to test your business solution, contact IQ Services for help throughout your project.

Back to Top

Fermintations

Before you head out to that famous restaurant with a fabulous wine cellar, you may want to consider the various ways wines are offered for sale in a restaurant and the markup you can expect to find. Most restaurants make their biggest profits on the wines they serve. The typical markup on a bottle of wine is 200-400%.

The least expensive wine offered by some restaurants is a house wine, sold by the glass or carafe. These wines are normally purchased by the restaurant and represent a good value for their customers. The wine is basically sound and goes with many dishes offered by the chef on the menu. You can expect to pay $3-6 a glass for this wine offering or perhaps $10 for a carafe. European restaurants are famous for their house wines. Only a few American restaurants offer house wines.

Many restaurants offer premium wines that are sold by the glass or bottle. These wines are slightly better than the house wines and offer the restaurant patrons a chance to try them by the glass before purchasing a whole bottle to go with a meal. These wines may go for $7-15 a glass.

Next are the wines that are offered from the “Standard Wine List”. These wines are normally higher in price and quality. A good wine list will contain names you recognize from vineyards with good reputations for producing good wines year after year. Wines from this list may range from $20 to $250 a bottle.

Finally, if your wallet can stand the prices, you can order older wines or rare wines from the “Reserve Wine List”. These wines are for serious oenophiles or patrons participating in very special occasions. Wines on this list can run upwards of $3,500 a bottle.

Let’s assume that you have asked about the house wine and have decided to go for a choice from one of their wine lists. The next thing to do is to assess their wine list. Some wine lists are bound in leather and some are printed on computer paper and slipped into the sleeve of a menu binder. The more permanent and immutable a wine list seems, the less accurate the listings are likely to be. A wine list that is printed from a computer and updated weekly is likely to yield better descriptions of their available wines. Some restaurants have a list of their wines available on-line via the Internet so you can preview them and be prepared to make your selection in advance. The best choice is always the best value wine – not the cheapest wine on the list.

A wine list should tell you several things about each listed wine:

• Usually there is an item number or bin number for each wine.
• The list will give the name of each wine. If you have difficulty in remembering the name (or knowing how to pronounce it properly) you can just order by bin or item number.
• The list will have a vintage indication (the year the wine was made) for each wine. Sometimes there is no vintage so you will see the wine listing with “NV”, which means no vintage. If you see “VV” that means the wine is vintage dated but you have to ask the wine steward to tell you what year it was made.
• Sometimes there is a brief description of the wine that expounds upon the virtues of its nose or taste characteristics.
• You may also see a suggestion for food pairings with each wine. You may or may not agree with their suggestion, depending upon your experience and individual taste preferences.
• And finally, there is the price of the wine.

Make it a habit of looking up the wine lists in every restaurant you visit and read them carefully keeping the above tips in mind. Before long you will feel comfortable with any wine list that you may encounter in a restaurant.

Next time: Corkage fees and ordering wines…

- Chuck Blethen, Vigneron in Residence, Black Mountain Oasis Vineyard, Scottsdale, AZ

Back to Top