Does Software Testing help you unlock Customer Experience innovation?

“The biggest challenge for a lot of brands is that they’re focused on quarterly results, rather than innovating for the future,” often because they need to meet the short-term expectations of stakeholders, says Augie Ray, Research Director at Gartner in a recent report. “Brands need to recognize that there can be a balance. There are experiences that are really designed to help the brand. CX by definition is things we do for the customer, and about lifting customer loyalty and advocacy. And when we help the customer, we help the brand.”

“Leading brands in CX start with a strong foundation in customer satisfaction,” says Ray. “Getting this right and understanding how to build upon it to drive positive financial and business outcomes is what sets the best brands apart from the rest.”

CIOs from a wide array of in industries vouch that software testing has helped them create new milestones in unlocking customer service innovation. However, let’s analyse what they mean when they talk about innovation in the customer experience (CX) arena. According to most CIOs, CX innovation is not about just creating something new, but it is more about applying better practices to meet business goals and engage in better ways to solve the problems currently faced by the users. In an advanced digital age where technology is constantly evolving, customers have become more demanding and inter-connected. They want seamless, secure, and robust solutions for the issues they face, and they want it fast.

Aspects of Customer Experience Innovation

CX innovation has become a business-critical requirement and usually covers the following focus areas:

• Human-centric approach
• Social media trends
• Continuous improvements
• Doing things right the first time

CXOs have recognized that testing is essential to achieve speed and agility that is essential for thriving in the digital future. Software testing helps businesses take care of all the above focus areas, thus helping them provide the following for an enriching customer experience:

• Human-centric approach: Businesses need to focus on customer behavior – and use testing to keep up with the growing demands. The apps need to be developed in a manner that keeps in mind their peculiar behavior, requirements, locale, the cultural background, the willingness to buy and use your product, and more. Organizations thus need to have end-to-end testing practices in place and must go beyond traditional formats to understand customer behavior and involve both intrinsic as well as latent customer behavior.
• Social media trends: Businesses need to be very transparent and approachable for the communication to flow smoothly from the customers. Collating direct feedback of users from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and chatbots helps organizations test and implement the required changes to the latest versions of the applications, thereby unlocking customer confidence as well as loyalty. Merely relying on beta testing responses as the only feedback will not help companies to be aware of, and to adapt, and adopt to the latest trends. Organizations therefore need to have a big data testing strategy in place for making optimum use of the collected data.
• Continuous improvements: Based on the communication received in the form of feedback, organizations need to respond proactively. CXOs must use the information from customer support and sales team and incorporate it into their testing strategy. This means that testing continuously utilizes real-time information for giving customers an enriching experience. Testing strategies are being constantly improved to focus on customer experiences. They are increasingly becoming analytics-driven with an effective mix of end user information, social sentiments and other interactions. This helps reach customers and solve their current issues continuously. CXOs are using continuous testing as a platform to remove the gap between IT and their customer. Crowd-testing is another strategy which is being employed at multiple points across the product development life cycle and post-production stages.
• Doing things right the first time: To achieve better RoI and improve cost efficiency, businesses need to provide solutions that are perfect the first time itself. Testing these products and solutions for quality assurance, agility, performance, functionality, scalability, and more leads to garnering of customer loyalty and satisfied customer base. Implementing the shift-left and DevOps testing practices exposes the issues in the products way early in the process which can be rectified at much lesser costs and efforts.

Conclusion

In the words of Yuval Yerit “the job of a smart tester is to represent the customer and the customer’s domain.”

This quote can be extended to include the CXOs who are now able to comprehend the impact of testing when it comes to delivering enriched customer experience. CXOs are using testing for their software to not just be agile, cost-effective and time saving, but also help sort the issues faced by customers on a real-time basis. Businesses, especially digital organizations, have to understand customers and appreciate them. Using customer experience to create innovative testing strategies is becoming the need of the times with the advent of new channels, devices and options.

CX Testing is critical as it brings the organizations closer to its clients. Practices of Agile and DevOps (- Continuous) testing creates the best environment for getting the full benefits. Agile helps making the process more collaborative and open to experimentation. Cigniti has been a trusted testing partner for many organizations in various stages of adopting Agile. We have helped organizations who are in the Agile adoption mode to plan their QA strategy, set estimations, define metrics into their sprints.

Using our high-end mobile-app testing lab, digital assurance solutions, and our framework for continuous test automation, you can add customer centricity and agility to your assurance approach for improved customer satisfaction and increased business. Connect with us to build applications that offer the much-needed high performance CX.