Over the last couple of years, digital transformation has become the highest priority for most of the clients. What it used to be for the tech world or retail, it has now become the buzzword for every industry. Right from manufacturing, retailers, healthcare and life sciences, everyone is embarking on their true investment in digital transformation, and most importantly, on the customer experience side of it.<\/p>\n
Earlier, while it used to take a month or a quarter to garner feedback, it has now converted to an hourly basis. They are now reaching out directly to their consumers through multiple social media channels and customer sentiments across all those digital transformation initiatives. This has become the key for them to increasing their experience with it and thereby increasing their sales.<\/p>\n
Every consumer is also looking for the immediate implementation of their request to increase their consumer experience. The total IT budget for the digital transformation initiatives across the Fortune 500 companies has increased from 20% to 60% over the last couple of years, and the budget is coming from the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Experience Officer, and Chief Digital and Transformation Officer. These are some of the imperatives that we\u2019ve seen across the organization over the last 18 months.<\/p>\n
Many organizations have started to evolve from being reactive to being proactive with the concept of customer and user experience. Traditionally testing has been really focused on pure functionality and then we started to look at performance and response times, but it was always a secondary consideration. Now, we are starting to go beyond it. While there are real challenges with getting the right feedback at the right stage of the development lifecycle, organizations have started to pursue a number of different strategies in the pursuit of getting real customer and user experiences data as early as possible. But the environments are also much more complex as networks and applications become more sophisticated and integrated. As our capabilities are increasing, the user\u2019s expectation has increased manifold.<\/p>\n
Experience is the relevant metric of our time, specifically right now. When we live in a hyper personalization era where everything is personalized, we\u2019ve seen applications working on that personalization angle and now they are trying to take it to the next level. Now the applications were able to achieve some amount of personalization, however, our networks were being mainly used as a deliver mechanism like as an application agnostic pipeline.<\/p>\n
With the advent of 5G, our networks are becoming more application aware, virtualized, programmable, and very advanced. 5G is taking it many steps ahead and is becoming a network that can be personalized, not just the applications. The application and the network have to go hand in hand, and many applications are being optimized for 5G.<\/p>\n
The 3GPP standards and networks have defined a metric called \u201cQuality of Experience\u201d (QoE). The applications need to understand what its own needs are, how much bandwidth would it require, and such. Applications can now make an end-to-end experience where they can be tested on live 5G networks.<\/p>\n
QoE is the metrics the clients are asking us to create. If we want to have the QoE, our net promoter score will be increased for our application and brand. So, everything is a direct correlation of the QoE.<\/p>\n
Digital assurance is more important than ever. Organizations have to deliver innovation, they have to deliver it fast and it has to be great, “just good enough” will not suffice.<\/p>\n
Digital Assurance done right ensures the speed and quality that have become the imperative of any digital transformation. But doing digital assurance \u201cright\u201d is not simply a factor of proper test plans, use of automation and tools, viable test data, etc. While of course those are all vital elements, the nature of digital, and specifically, the significantly increased focus on digital engagement with the customer (i.e., the customer experience), creates the mandate that we must now seriously consider the voice of the customer (VOC) in the definition of digital assurance.<\/p>\n
VOC is a composite of the customer expectations (needs and wants) and the customer\u2019s performance experiences regarding products and\/or services they have been provided. They can be both specifically stated and unstated. They can also be things the customer has no idea about, but it affects their experience (i.e., a mobile app that drains their smartphone battery).<\/p>\n
Digital Assurance is not static. Shifting-right is now just as important as shifting-left. We have to be using tools and techniques such as digital experience monitoring to capture and report back on these real- time experience metrics. Digital assurance is not a linear path with a starting point and an end point – when done right, it is an “always on” loop.<\/p>\n