Thank you to everyone at AWS and in the community that have supported us in getting this far, we're now an AWS Partner and have Qualified Software.
When we started building the software many months ago, we agreed that there was a clear opportunity to bring a more dynamic, scalable and on-demand offering. A product where purchasing it didn't mean a huge upfront contract and a potential to not use it efficiently.
We knew however, that we couldn't release a concept, we couldn't use a concierge methodology to get it to market sooner. We had to build a minimally viable solution (that is, it performs the bare minimum of features needed to be a contender) - a working platform.
Having bootstrapped this ourselves, we knew it wasn't going to be done as quickly as we'd like, however we have been able to achieve what we set out to do, to differentiate our offering so that;
Customers can sign up via the AWS Marketplace,
Monthly subscription costs are a fraction of what our competitors are offering,
If you don't use the services, you don't pay exorbitant rates for the 'option' to do so,
Concurrency doesn't come at an unaffordable premium
Why were these such important underlying goals for our system you may ask. We know that we wouldn't be able to compete on feature richness out of the gates, so we needed to underpin the minimum with a more suitable way to consume and pay for it. In fact this was essential and thus, we have been able to show over 70% savings on customers existing usage patterns. Great, so what does this solve for a customer?
Regression Testing: During and at the end of a change cycle, customers need to test the outcomes and assure that services are still working as expected. We often hear that with existing products, customers cannot justify the cost of being able to execute large numbers of tests concurrently. This is because you can only place a single telephone call on a telephone line. Our product doesn't have the concept of telephone lines and therefore, if you needed to conduct 100 voice journey tests in under 15 minutes to validate a change, you wouldn't need to 'buy 100 lines', which consequently would be very expensive and probably wouldn't be used for the rest of the month. In this scenario, you pay for the 100 calls + the low cost subscription, nothing more.
Service Availability: For each number a customer wants to test a journey on, a recurring 5 minute schedule could be used, providing the customer with the best chance of detecting failure, thus reducing Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR), limiting brand damage and providing consistent and available services. Our service treats these as independent calls, which means you could be doing this across 100 journeys. You pay for what you use. Compared to competitors, if you wanted to do this, and then perform a regression test mid month, you would have to buy another 100 lines (for the entire month), or stop availability testing. To achieve this on TotalPath, a customer just needs a subscription with capacity, which in this example would cost less than a single line offered by competitors.
Migration: Our automated mapping tool allows customers to point it at a telephone number and we do the rest. This works within our subscription model and is again charged on-demand for what you use. When large organisations acquire smaller ones, the contact center teams are often told to migrate the customer journeys and that leads to the repetitive issue - no documentation, no maps, no real understanding of what already exists. This results in time and money being diverted to manually calling the numbers, trying to 'map out the service' and then recreate it on the destination platform. Our mapping product aids teams in doing this automatically and provides the ability to supply additional data like ID&V attributes, or card numbers, so that the tool can progress deep into the platform.
Flexibility: Our product isn't restricted to 'telephone line capacity', if you have a subscription with the required capacity (up to 5000 concurrent calls), you don't need to keep buying more. A number of times we have seen teams need to complete adhoc actions, in a reasonable timeframe get stuck behind commercial blockers. Our subscription prices are not prohibitive, so when the unplanned event happens, the teams can access capacity safely, without having to face additional challenges.
This is just the beginning though.
We are now working on some operational improvements that allow customers even more flexibility in how they trigger tests. Once completed we will continue to innovate the capability of the testing application by introducing multiple voices (yes, you can test with voice, not just DTMF). Our plan is to offer 'customer personas' that can reproduce real world, contextual and humanistic interactions, allowing teams to push the quality of their own customer servicing.
On mapping, we're adding newer features that will make it easier to deal with contextual services, where the engineering team may know the sector and topic - like Financial Services and Card Payment - in order to further automate discovery.
All that remains to be said is thank you for all the continuing support. Watch this space...
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