How businesses can achieve ultimate success with a QA culture

Competition forces businesses or technicians to come up with things (read innovations) that they would not do otherwise. In the rat race where businesses are delivering products or services at the drop of a hat, not everything is lapped up by the end customers. At the end of the day, it is quality that plays an all-important role in making an enterprise successful. This is due to the fact that customers of the day are choosy, smart, knowledgeable, and won’t settle for anything less.

In fact, they choose products that meet the highest standards of security, usability, functionality, and performance, among other parameters. However, there can be issues galore when it comes to ensuring the quality of a product or service. To begin with, each product should work seamlessly across devices, operating systems, browsers, frameworks, and networks. This is easier said than done as ensuring that would mean subjecting the product to a rigorous quality assurance exercise.

Why software quality assurance?

Today, good customer experience has become a differentiator for the success of a product or service in the market. This can only come about when end-customers evaluate and accept that product or service based on various quality parameters. However, meeting such quality parameters in the SDLC consistently would require the product to be tested across devices, operating environments, and networks.

In the event of such parameters not meeting the desired standards, the consequences can be immense, both for the customers and businesses. The presence of bugs in a finished product can mar the quality of service. For example, it can allow vulnerabilities to creep in and let hackers steal sensitive personal or business information. Today, when software applications carry sensitive financial and personal information, the presence of glitches can render them vulnerable.

Since the traditional waterfall model has proved to be ineffective in measuring up to the quality standards of today’s products, methodologies like Agile and DevOps have come into play. If earlier, QA testing services used to follow development and integration, today these have become concurrent with them. The focus is on executing QA software testing alongside development to save cost and time. To make DevOps successful, businesses need to develop a QA culture where everyone is an equal stakeholder.

How to enable a robust QA culture?

Building a robust culture of quality assurance in the organization is not easy as it requires establishing a seamless coordination between silo-based departments and processes. The best way to go about the same is discussed below.

Engaging everyone in the process: For start-ups and small businesses, meeting the quality standards with their products need greater involvement of all the stakeholders. In fact, everyone involved with software development (and testing) viz., developers, managers, business analysts, and testers should be a part of the QA process. Except for developers, people can evaluate the functionality of a product and give feedback. The same can then be worked upon by developers to fix glitches, thereby offering a positive experience to the users. This shall make the QA process more efficient and help deliver quality products & services.

Follow Agile methodology: The process shall lead to better communication and collaboration between departments. Also, test management can implement better test automation tools to identify and fix bugs quickly and effectively. The use of QA automation tools can eliminate running of repetitive test cases. Thus, the QA team can focus its time in executing exploratory testing.

How a QA culture can help?

An all-encompassing QA culture can help enterprises to achieve success. They can do so in the following ways.

Better customer experience: A glitch-free application is a result of executing quality assurance and testing thoroughly. The final validation of features and functionalities against expected outcomes allows the application to work seamlessly across environments and customers to enjoy the best experience.

Faster time to market: When quality assurance and testing takes place alongside development following the Agile and DevOps methodologies, glitches are identified and remedied fast in the SDLC. As the workflow gets streamlined, the delivery of the product becomes faster.

Better security: The rising incidences of cybercrime have brought into sharp focus the importance of strengthening the security features of software applications. This can only happen when total quality culture pervades across the organization with every stakeholder being aware of upholding the security protocols, regulations, and standards. This can help to reduce security vulnerabilities and prevent applications from being hacked.

Conclusion

The changing market dynamics and the advent of new technologies have brought the aspect of ‘quality’ into sharp focus. It has not remained the preserve of a single department but a shared responsibility of all concerned. If only a total quality culture prevails in an organization, achieving success can only be a matter of time.

How a customer sentiment analyzer can help deliver better experiences

People take purchase decisions based on their perception about a product, service, individual, or entity irrespective of its source, validity, and authenticity. Perception is often born out of a sentiment and can have consequences on a product’s or brand’s credibility and reputation. Thanks to this predominant attribute that drives customer behavior, even a superior quality product can bite the dust in the sweepstakes of business. Moreover, in today’s omnichannel business landscape, sentiment-driven brand perception plays a significant role in achieving business objectives.

Since customer sentiment can either make a product or service acceptable or disowned by its end-users, analyzing the same can accrue key insights for the marketers and help them deliver positive outcomes. Customer sentiment analysis can be made a part of quality assurance process wherein automated tools are used to mine emotions from the text and other channels.

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a process in which opinions of the end-users of a brand, business, product, or service are mined to obtain business-critical feedback. Here, the emotions and attitudes of the end-users are analyzed through their conversations, voice inflections, and language. It is a highly useful tool that can be used in numerous areas, such as on social media platforms to understand customer sentiments on a product campaign.

How does customer sentiment analysis work?

Driven by an algorithm, customer sentiment analysis or customer experience testing strategy measures factors like the level of stress in the voice of a customer and his or her rate of speech to determine his or her sentiment, attitude, and opinion about a product, brand, service, topic, organization, event or individual. It can be used to refine processes and deliver better personalized experiences across channels leading to loyalty, retention, and new customer acquisition.

How customer sentiment analysis can address the customer needs

Testing customer experience is important to enhance the quality of a product or service according to the actual needs of the customer. In today’s competitive business environment where customer experience has become the ultimate determining factor to make a product or service successful, customer sentiment analysis as part of quality assurance cannot be overlooked. The benefits derived from this exercise are as follows:

# Provides customer insight: Businesses need to study the customer experiences to know how their products or services fare in the market. They can do so by employing tools for CX testing and gain insights into what customers think about their products or services. If the sentiments are negative, businesses can identify the reasons or factors behind them and work towards mitigating them. The knowledge of customer sentiments can help businesses to add new features and/or functionalities to their products or services and curate better plans to conduct future campaigns.

# Offers proactive business solutions: Customer sentiment analysis as a part of quality assurance and testing can help businesses to make informed decisions, draw better strategies, and set up realistic targets. Specific tools can offer proactive business solutions in the form of automatic reports, event analysis, etc. These can help businesses to understand the emotions behind positive, negative, or neutral opinions about specific products or services. Furthermore, it can help marketers to evaluate the impact of launch campaigns on customers and identify the specific demographic segment(s) where the interest or awareness about the product or service is the highest.

# Measures the success of any marketing campaign: The measure of any marketing campaign is not limited to the number of likes, followers, or comments alone. It also encompasses the number of discussions (positive or otherwise) elicited by customers about the brand, product, or service. By combining the numerical and non-numerical data generated through customer sentiment analysis, businesses can measure the ROI of their marketing campaign.

# Eliminates gaps in customer experience: Customer sentiments need to be measured holistically and not pigeonholed into multichannel like phone, email, chatbot, social media, etc. In other words, data for customer experience need to be collected holistically for the entire customer journey - initial awareness to repeat purchases. This will help to analyze the data more accurately and aid businesses to remove the gaps in customer experience.

Conclusion

Software quality assurance is not only about enhancing the quality of a product or service during the SDLC. It is also about obtaining data on customer experience by using specific tools for customer sentiment analysis. By determining the customer sentiment about a brand, product or service, businesses can improve their processes, delivery mechanism, not to speak of the quality of products or services. Although it is still an emerging area, businesses should utilize it to know more about their customers and to derive better success with their deliverables.

Author Bio

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry. Cigniti is a Global Leader in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services with CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5.

This article is originally published on medium.com.