Achieving a high level of customer success is a requirement for all serious businesses, and optimizing QA automation is an important step in getting there.
When it comes to managing customer success, companies can’t be too attentive. While a phrase like ‘customer success’ might seem simple enough, it has a very particular meaning in the business world.
Defined as “the business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service,” the concept amounts to concrete strategies companies can develop when they need to set quantifiable ways to measure customer satisfaction. With these in place, a given company is able to track when it meets and exceeds these goals. While there are a number of approaches to customer success, one method we suggest is boosting it through QA automation.
QA, or quality assurance, refers to the policies put in place by a company in order to maintain a high standard of production. As a term, it’s often used interchangeably (though not
without controversy) with ‘quality control.’ Since improving customer success is achieved by standardizing the ways customers use or react to one’s set of products or services, QA is an important tool in the toolbox.
It’s a simple concept: if you want to make sure customers are happy (and know how to use your products or services) you should have a stable, high-quality set of standards that ensure consistency of production. This, in turn, opens the door to agile testing, which helps teams respond faster and more effectively to changes.
The issue is, of course, the fact that the most thorough QA procedures are incredibly complex. Especially when it comes to IT and tech companies: the kinds of testing involved are as many as they are tedious. Vast amounts of personal and staff resources are often lost to manual QA testing, which is why companies everywhere have started to automate the process. Developing ways of optimizing QA automation has become a key way to gain a competitive edge in an already aggressive market.
Here are a few reasons why your company should be considering QA automation:
QA automation eliminates human error and increases effectivity
One of the most visible downsides to manual QA testing is the enormous amount of time it takes. But, even though it may be less obvious, an equally if not more pernicious element is the possibility of human error. While we have an
increasing number of programmers and developers in the field (with boot camps providing even
greater expertise), even the best team available can still miss important elements if they’re doing everything by hand. Which is why designing a solid QA automation regime is so important.
Plus, it frees important human resources from being spent on mindless and repetitive tasks. While there are certain critical stages of the QA process that
shouldn’t be automated (in favor of being overseen by human staff), there are a huge number of processes that can be delegated to a program without losing too much sleep over it. Combined with an agile-testing mindset, tests are run early and often, enabling programmers to save time whether they’re tinkering with new software or doing regression testing.
One area that’s a no-brainer for automation is data. Gathering and aggregating it from different update reports, platforms and other sources is something that can easily be accomplished through automation. The same goes with synchronization, updating and sending data where it needs to go. Additionally, creating early warning systems along with flagging potential opportunities or risks can be done with ease and help augment the work of human developers. These examples of using QA automation for customer success aren’t exhaustive, but they make for a compelling case.
Automation allows for more time to be spent on innovation and creating best practices
Not only will your QA procedures be more free of error once your company develops a reliable automation regime, but additional resources will be freed up that can be allocated to other tasks. Like developing innovative departments or practices, for example, or formulating best practices that can further increase your company’s customer success.
When you start streamlining processes with QA automation, your company will be able to focus not only on the testing but on making the testing process more efficient. Research and testing can be conducted on the automation system itself, and companies can set personalized benchmarks and milestones that can be used to quantify automation success.
This kind of research can result in a number of recommendations for improving the whole process, and developers can then spend the time they would have wasted on testing on making
better, smarter algorithms. This can lead to exponential growth and entrenches an agile-mindset.
Additionally, automation processes can be streamlined for further integration with your company’s other activities. That, and your developers will also have time to explore what the competition is doing with regards to creating better QA automation.
Extra resources can then be redirected into developing and improving other services
Once a stable QA automation regime is put into place and optimized, companies will find themselves with resources to start investing in
other forms of automation related to customer success.
For example, workflows can be improved using the same techniques as quality assurance automation. Developers can set up alerts and flag opportunities for customer success engagement so that no opportunity is lost. Or customer communication can be automated so that high-value clients can be given the time they deserve while low-value interactions are delegated to automated response units.
Once one set of processes are automated, it becomes much simpler to apply the same tools to optimize all parts of your business. So not only will QA automation increase customer success, it can pave the way for further innovation and development.
Automation for simpler, more effective business practices
When it comes to QA automation, the benefits are clear. Not only are you standardizing processes that in turn improve customer success, but you’ll also be setting a clear standard and providing actionable goals for your developers to work towards, all the while incorporating agile testing into your company’s daily rhythm. That, and the resources saved by not having your team do the testing manually can be invested in making an even further optimized QA automation regime. The exponential power of increasingly effective testing can then, in turn, free up resources to further develop your customer success strategy even more.
When companies take steps to invest in optimizing QA automation, all related business processes are streamlined and improved. Knowing all that, the question isn’t so much if automation is worth it, but how best to carry it out.
