I was recently talking to a banking customer who started using Service Virtualization to do something that is more than a novel use: setting up Training environments for thousands of tellers and customer service reps (CSRs). When you think about the enormous level of investment and time involved in recruiting and training skilled CSRs to handle customer transactions, it becomes quite clear this is not a novelty.
There is a large amount of turnover in any CSR division - these employees have to be good at what they do, but they will also likely move on to other positions within the enterprise, or go elsewhere to do a similar job. Whether you are talking about banking and financial traders, travel agents, product support, cable television, or any system requiring a lot of personal attention, the company sinks millions of dollars into building education labs and getting all those reps up to speed on every key scenario they must support.
The training system for a customer-driven enterprise must be as sophisticated as the actual live systems, if you are going to train these people to do the job right. Or at least it should LOOK as sophisticated. Simply screen-scraping a system with rote answers is usually not enough realism to teach a complex interactive task. You need the underlying data to support the task you are training for. For instance, if a check deposited after 3:00PM needs to be shown as clearing the next morning, that's precisely how the system should respond to the trainee.
This is where Service Virtualization comes in. Using LISA to capture thousands of transactions between the CSR terminals and the underlying customer databases, transaction systems and mainframes (this could also be done from system logs), a Virtual Training Environment (VTE) is created, which behaves and responds almost exactly like the real thing. Part of the VTE is a Test Data Management component, where things like customer account numbers are "sanitized" to protect private customer data, while still being formatted in a realistic way for training purposes.
Best of all, once these VTEs are created, they can be reset again with the appropriate scenarios almost instantaneously for each student, with no waiting for manual configuration, no new infrastructure setup and costs, and no impact on the live back-end systems. If you are looking for a little more detail on this project, you can read LISA Case Study: Virtual Training Environments at an Interstate Banking Firm here.
While Virtual Services are becoming the go-to solution for eliminating constraints from software dev & test labs, this is not the only time we've seen them used in a completely non-software-development context, and we love seeing innovation in how customers apply the technology. Stay tuned for more Cool Stories from the Field over the next 3 weeks.
