Customer Experience Testing in Digital World

Digitization has pervaded almost every aspect of our personal as well as professional lives. This has made it necessary for the businesses to embrace and execute well-defined and well-planned Customer Experience Testing strategies in order to keep the customers loyal, satisfied, and happy.

Difference between User and Customer Experience

The organizations need to differentiate between User experience and Customer experience – the two terms are used interchangeably many-a-times. They also need to focus on developing strategic plans by properly mapping an individual’s interactions with the various products/services that they use. To design an effective Customer Experience Testing strategy, complete understanding of customer behaviour (both intrinsic and latent characteristics), along with tangible and functional traits is of paramount importance. Also, non-functional requirements and aspects like capability, ease of access and use & navigation should be considered in devising the test strategy. There is also a need to address intrinsic human behavioural elements from end-customer experience perspective like cultural fit, psychology and emotions.

The relevance of end-user experience

While the digital products have already evolved in both the B2B and B2C segments, the “direct-to-customer” model is also gaining high momentum. This makes end-user experience even more relevant and it must be correlated with enhanced user adoption, increased customer loyalty, and social conversions achieved. Hence, there is a business-critical need for robust testing strategy that suits the needs of CIOs and CMOs, and also has a transformational impact on the business and revenue models.

In order to achieve this, an effective Customer Experience Testing strategy should consist of better design, and efficient digital channels with real-time analytics to achieve user goals and fulfil business objectives.

Important Factors in Customer Experience Testing

The factors that play an important role in Customer Experience Testing are:

1. Emotions: Social channels can be used to capture human emotions through social listening techniques and covering the findings using real-time analytics, sentiment analysis, etc. This will help the organizations in identifying the defects not found during UAT.
2. Crowd’s Wisdom: Crowdsourcing can be used as a means to pre-launch end-user feedback by choosing a demographically distributed crowd which is culturally and socio-economically similar to the end-user.
3. Analytics: Performing a varied set of activities like personalization, keeping a track on multi–channel and cross-channel browsing history, transactions, monitoring likes and dislikes across channels, etc. will play a crucial role in ensuring a seamless Customer experience in the digital world.

The Available Testing Options

Digital customers have the option to choose from a variety of products, applications, channels, etc. Addressing the needs of variety that customers have (- and demand) needs accelerated efforts by consumer-facing companies to achieve end-user delight. Resolving the issues in an effective manner impacts the top line directly as the transactions are linked closely to brand loyalty, word-of-mouth publicity, and repeated purchase by the customers. Hence, defining and executing an effective Customer Experience Testing gains prime importance across the product development lifecycle as well as during the post-production phase.

There is a need to enhance traditional test case-based approaches by adopting techniques that include automation, overall end-user journey, real-time user analytics, and persona-based strategies along with Omni-channel interactions across various digital touch points and connected devices. The products/services can also be tested by disparate crowd in demographically specific regions, most suitable for particular end-user situations. Customer Experience Testing also needs to be a continuous process as the expectations of end-users for products/services are continuously evolving with multiple changes happening simultaneously in the Digital world.

Cigniti’s state-of-the-art test labs use the latest and best in testing to bring you better quality and quicker time-to-market. Our fine-tuned testing services are supported by our proven testing approach, Proprietary Testing IP (ETAS), and capabilities through our Center of Excellence. Discover the Cigniti advantage today.
About the Author:

About the Author: Abhijeet Srivastava is an Associate Manager at Cigniti Technologies. He is a part of Enterprise Solutions Group which primarily helps convert Leads to Deals by devising the best solutions. He holds a B.Tech in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology and PGDM from TAPMI, Manipal. His Core Skills are Business Analysis, Sales pitch, Architecting Solutions, building Proposal, etc.