Digital Assurance: The key to customer experience assurance

Amidst a sea change of strategies, processes, and business models in the digital era, three factors that remain on the business stakeholder agenda are cost, time-to-market, and customer experience. While the order of priorities may change over time, customer experience is the key in today’s digital world. 

To advance the digital business agenda, it is imperative for enterprises to up their game by embracing frictionless, full life cycle automation and a continuous delivery approach. By following this etiquette, the enterprises remain well assured that the quality is built-in from the scratch, easing the delivery of heightened customer experience that enhances the brand value and drives competitive differentiation. 

According to Gartner, “88% of service leaders say their current Quality Assurance processes are ineffective and rarely match up to the customer view of quality.” 

Gartner recommends enterprises to modernize quality assurance. It predicts that by 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 85% by all other resolution channels. 

To arrive at the next generation of quality customer experience assurance, there is a need to understand the implications of digital transformation on quality assurance. Among the broad mandates that enterprises could address, ensuring a seamless and consistent customer experience tops the list.  

How is a Good Customer Experience Assurance good for business? 

A key differentiator for enterprises to retain and grow their customer base is an enriched customer experience assurance. The customer experience assurance involves measuring and detecting customer experience flaws from a customer’s perspective throughout the quality assurance process, from design through functional and regression testing, to performance testing, and on to monitoring. 

According to Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon, “Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient. If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” 

Enterprises are working towards a comprehensive customer experience assurance that would dramatically reduce the costs and risks of exposing customers to customer experience flaws.  

By assuring the customer experience, enterprises can increase the path of innovation, monitor the enduring health of production customer experience, and maintain complete control over customer experience testing. 

Manage complexity and increase agility 

An increasing complexity of the application landscape is one of the important challenges that digital transformation brings in. Newer applications built on disparate technologies must be supported by the IT landscape. 

While the applications are interconnected, testing them on different device configuration pose additional challenges for quality assurance. 

To ensure early isolation of issues, there is a need for a testing strategy that will balance these requirements and provide optimal test coverage. A holistic digital assurance strategy optimized for the changing landscape encompassing all aspects of validations is the need of the hour. 

A well-planned approach involving optimized test scope, service virtualization, test data management, and a right mix of automation tools will certainly help manage complexity and increase agility. 

Assurance strategy in the digital world 

Newer technologies are being adopted at a faster pace. In a bid to enhance business, enterprises are trying to pilot newer and unproven technologies.  

With businesses vying to provide better features in quick span, the development cycles are getting gradually shorter and the development methodologies are eyeing towards DevOps and agile.  

Subsequently there is a mounting pressure on the quality assurance teams to deliver the code to production with reduced turnaround time. 

It is crucial to adopt methods to optimize testing requirements as there is limited time to test. Early automation strategies could be deployed to ensure the availability of all test scripts for system testing. 

Key considerations to strategize your digital assurance for a seamless customer experience assurance include –  

• Focus on continuous innovation and learning. 
• Accelerate testing and continuously optimize. 
• End-to-end assurance comprising all aspects of testing and validation. 

• Focus on superior customer experience rather than functional validation. 

The digital assurance imperative 

In the last half decade, we’ve seen a vast majority of enterprises embarking on the digital transformation initiatives.  While the digital transformation has taken the center stage, customer experience holds the key.  

As it is becoming more important than ever, the emphasis has moved to providing a seamless uniform customer experience. This digital shift is being touted to be the biggest market and business transformations of this century. 

Digital assurance strategy and approach that takes the essentials of the omni-channel and digital shift into cognizance holds the key to a fruitful transformation for the businesses to derive maximum value out of delivery. 

Benefits of automating customer experience assurance

Enable Agile/DevOps transformation: Agile/DevOps approach has been the norm for many customer experience leaders to deliver quality customer experience more swiftly. The key enabler to adopting Agile and DevOps methodologies has been automation. As testing encompasses a major chunk in the customer experience development life cycle, the major initiative in any Agile/DevOps transformation has been Test Automation. 

Innovate customer experience faster and more frequently: By automating their customer experience assurance efforts, many companies who do not focus on Agile/DevOps transformations have also been able to expedite their customer experience innovations. 

According to Forbes, “68% of the companies identify agility as one of their most important initiatives.” 

Reduce cost and improve productivity: Reduce delivery lead time, increase delivery throughput, reduce rework, and free resources for more value-added work by applying processes and automation. Customer experience leaders are evolving their customer experience delivery through a factory-like approach and focusing on the above-mentioned efficiencies. 

Assure brand reputation: Enterprises that prioritize customer experience are able to ensure brand quality & consistency and deliver high-quality customer experience as designed across all channels such as inbound/outbound, voice, mobile, and web, etc. 

Comply with government and industry regulations: Complying with government and industry regulations is a mandate in all the countries.  

According to Corporate Compliance Insights, “For financial services companies, the cost of missing or poor-quality audio recordings can run to as much as 4% of annual revenue. In Europe, for example, penalties can reach 20 million euros.” 

The customer experience leaders in these industries react quickly to missed requirements or regulatory change, understand the value of automating customer experience assurance, avoid risks or penalties associated with slow reaction time or non-compliance. 

Improve customer loyalty and revenue: Customer experience leaders were able to reduce end customer challenges, improve their loyalty, and eliminate problems before customers experience them by increasing the scope and quality of testing during development and monitoring in production environments. 

Conclusion 

Digital assurance is here to stay for long and probably this is the best time for enterprises to begin the journey and make their customer experience better. 

Cigniti’s Digital Assurance and Testing services help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journey and enable IT modernization by Cloud adoption. The Digital Assurance Centre of Excellence (CoE) is one of its key differentiators that focus on digital transformation trends and follows best practices and Service Level Agreement (SLA) driven approach. 

The features and benefits of Cigniti’s Digital Transformation Solutions include Core-Flex Resource Model, Domain Expertise Groups, Certified & experienced Test Professionals, Cloud-enabled Digital Test Lab with 400+ devices, Partnerships in Digital Media space, Discounted price for Partner tools and services, and Future Readiness on Digital Transformation. 

Looking out for Digital Assurance solutions to improve customer experience, connect with our Digital Assurance experts today.