Digital Assurance and need of Omni Channel Testing

Assurance refers to a positive declaration that instills confidence or a sense of surety.

In today’s world where everything is being digitized or automated, it is very much necessary that the end users of the products get a feeling of security and assurance that their data and other personal information that they might share on the web is safe. This is what Digital Assurance is all about. Digital Assurance refers to assuring the customers that none of their personal data is vulnerable to being exploited by hackers. This in turn ensures maximum customer satisfaction.

Now a days as digital technology is covering all spectrums of business solutions there is a rising demand for almost a completely flawless customer experience and safety. Digital Assurance aims at meeting this demand. Organizations providing a holistic assurance strategy not only ensure successful digital transformation but can also optimize their IT budgets.

Digital Assurance refers to Q&A practices that ensure the relationship between the various components of Digital Ecosystem remains smooth. The Digital Ecosystem includes various interconnected people, processes & things cutting across the Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud stack.

Here are the few reasons why organizations need to take up Digital Assurance.

1. Need for being Agile: Being agile through continuous quality assurance initiatives, and automating processes to ensure shorter delivery cycles become highly critical in a highly dynamic digital landscape.

2. Make or Break the Customer Experience: Delivering enhanced customer experience while leveraging a variety of components of Digital Ecosystem becomes challenging. Ensuring each component delivers optimum performance leading to customer delight becomes difficult as the organization becomes more digitally matured.

3. Organizations are vulnerable to Security Threats: Security is of paramount importance specifically in an interconnected world. The smart interconnected ecosystems on one side enable an unimaginable world of possibilities, but it makes the entire system highly vulnerable to security threats, if not properly configured and tested, on the flip side.

4. Performance of Organizations Legacy Infrastructure needs to be maximized:This is an important challenge specifically with those enterprises who are not born Digital. They need to change their organizational DNA both from a cultural perspective and from legacy IT infrastructure standpoint. Ensuring their core functionalities are not impacted as they chart their path towards Digital Infrastructure can be much challenging.

5. Complexity: The most difficult challenge comes from the complexities arising from the nexus of forces –Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud, to ensure that they work in synchronization with organizational goals.

We need to consider the following important points while implementing Digital Assurance: 

1. Omni-Channel Assurance: Omni-channel testing is based on preparing a test strategy with a view of all the channel and user interaction patterns.

2. Users spread across the globe: Internet users are spread across the globe with around 46% of the population having access to the internet. The region wise statistics are: Asia-48.2%, Europe-18%, Latin America-10.2%, Africa-9.8%, North America-9.3%, Middle East-3.7%, and Australia-0.8%. Irrespective of these statistics the users should find similar functionalities, semantics and experience. Therefore Digital Assurance strategies should include both localization and globalization tests.

3. Validating business scenarios:The Digital Assurance strategies must ensure that the business functionalities and expectations are met by the application.

4. Customer experience and social integration: The Digital Assurance strategies must ensure a good user and brand experience irrespective of the channel and the other factors.

5. Security Assurance: Application are being hosted on multiple platforms which has increased the risk rate thus having to necessarily perform security testing for these possible vulnerabilities by focusing on application profiling, authentication, data validation and encryption algorithms.

6. Lifecycle automation: Let me discuss more about Omni-channel testing in detail.
   Omni-channel is a multi-channel approach to sales that seeks to provide the customer with a seamless shopping experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a bricks and mortar store.What distinguishes the Omni-channel customer experience from the multi-channel customer experience is that there is true integration between channels on the back end. For example, when a store has implemented an Omni-channel approach, the customer service representative in the store will be able to immediately reference the customer’s previous purchases and preferences just as easily as the customer service representative on the phone or the web chat. Also, the customer can check inventory using laptop by store on the company’s website, purchase the item later on with a smartphone or tablet and pick up the product at the customer’s chosen location.The main difference between Omni-Channel and Multi-Channel lies in the process being tested.
   If you want to test a single process that spans across multiple devices, you want OMNI-CHANNEL testing.
   If you want to test the same process on a range of devices, you want MULTI-CHANNEL testing.Omni-channel testing is not just about consolidating testing across channels but designing a test strategy with a view of all the channels and real user behavior.

So what are the top advantages for businesses due to Digital Assurance:

1. Customer-centric business: This is done by ensuring flawless customer experience.
2. Agility in business: Automation and virtualization ensures quicker time to market.
3. Stability in business: Finding out errors in advance and modifying the tests accordingly to ensure the best testing cycle.
4. Future proofing the business: Anticipating the future and developing methods of minimizing the effects of shocks and stresses of future events.

Are you looking for Digital Assurance services and leverage the advantages listed above for your business? Then, reach out to our digital testing experts for a free assessment.

About the Author: Dheeraj Kumar M is a Software Consultant at Cigniti Technologies. He is part of the Innovation Vertical which primarily transforms an Idea into an actual product. Part of multiple Technical workshops right from his college days has helped him shape up his skill sets. His Core Skill is with Core Java, HTML5. He is also an avid shutterbug capturing the picturesque Mother Nature in his spare time.