Quality Assurance: The Executive View
Executives should not underinvest in QA and testing during this pivotal moment.
Quality assurance and testing generally is not a top of mind concern for the C-suite within an organization. Most of the time, it doesn’t warrant their attention until something goes wrong. With the dynamics of technology evolving at an ever-increasing speed, however, there’s more room for error, resulting in a direct negative impact on an organization’s bottom line.
Keeping up with the shifting paradigms can be overwhelming and products suffer as a result. How an organization’s QA and testing team reacts during these imperative times has an effect on the customer experience.
If the C-suite in your organization is not regularly asking, “How are our QA and testing teams reacting to these changes to keep customers happy?” Then you have a problem on your hands.
Today, according to an Avanade study, the value of customer relationship is defined “by the complete ‘experience’ a seller offers a buyer at the time of purchase and throughout their time with the product or service.”
The research revealed that customers increasingly make purchasing decisions for their organization based on their experience and are willing to pay up to 30 percent more for a superior experience. In fact, 56 percent of those surveyed said they paid more for a product or service in the last six months because it offered a better customer experience than a lower-cost competitor.
The digital experience has transformed rapidly in the past decade. Customers expect a seamless user experience from organizations across every device and channel. This means new challenges for QA and testing teams.
New approaches to testing within organizations must be addressed. No longer can QA and testing teams wait until a problem arises to repair an issue. Time is simply not on their side.
Even Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull took note recently of these drastic changes in the world, advising the Australian Business Council that businesses needed to be agile in this new time.
"We need to be prepared at every stage to say the way we did things yesterday, or last week, is not the way we'll do them in the future," he said. "As chief executives or senior executives you've got to encourage the people that work for you to challenge you, you've got to ensure that you're always testing existing practices."
To flourish in this digital era, it must be realized that this is a top down problem. Fortunately, organizations are in a better position now to deliver a consistent experience than ever before. Software testing services are available that enable not just the QA and testing team, but the organization as a whole – services that assure the quality of a complex product across every platform and moment in time.
At the end of the day, the pace of change will continue to exceed and how organizations deal with consumers must be given serious thought. Executives should not underinvest in QA and testing during this pivotal moment. To provide a richer customer experience, while ensuring quality products and services, it is essential executives enable QA and testing teams with the tools needed to achieve higher business value.
