Why digital assurance is the new quality assurance
The way we see quality assurance and testing will change forever. The pandemic has brought about a reactive yet deliberate transformation of enterprises’ digital presence and support to customers.
The economic scenario has increased the pressure on customer experience (CX) practitioners to ensure a consistent and seamless user experience (UX) to satisfy customers. While some are doing all they can to deliver a more memorable online experience, others do not seem to have a clear roadmap.
We are seeing unprecedented examples in our daily lives. The streaming wars waged by Amazon Prime and Netflix to pull clients, with machine learning led recommendations, such as ‘because you watched Breaking Bad, you may like Narcos’ algorithms keep their clients glued on. In other examples, cross-selling and up-selling have become pervasive across e-commerce, learning management, and content management.
E-learning providers, for example, have enhanced their online schooling experience after realising that not all teachers, students, and parents are digitally savvy. Cosmetic companies are using augmented reality (AR) for replicating in-store experiences; multi-level marketers are using virtual connect sessions. The consumption patterns of online collaboration and e-learning have gone upwards by more than 20 times when compared to pre-Covid-19 days. Hence, the criticality of deploying an agile and integrated digital assurance framework to elevate user experience has gained even more importance in these disruptive times.
The New Quality Assurance
With seismic shifts in the way, the CEO has to think about ensuring consistency, effectiveness, and relevance of UX in the organisation. Digital assurance is the approach to ensure all components of digital assets across social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) to drive a desirable, effective, and result-oriented outcome. A good digital assurance solution ensures that digital assets such as social, mobile app, microsite, artificial intelligence-led chatbots, and AR tools have the following capabilities:
- Reachable: Ensure that you are reachable across search engines, social channels, and the like. Providing analytics with a timeline is critical for your marketing team. If they cannot find you, they cannot be your customer
- Responsive: How is your digital asset responding on different mobile networks, geographies, and devices? Over 40% of customer dropouts happen due to poor performance
- Appeal: The face of your brand has stopped being your sales executive and has become your digital asset. Ensure that the appeal of your digital assets in terms of visual integrity, consistency, and alignment is not underrated
- Right Content: What the user consumes must be readable and concise. Objectively review the user content based on industry benchmarks
- UX: Ensuring a low-click UX across various user journeys is critical. Scoring your user experience with a defined benchmark will help in your continuous development cycles
- Continuous Automation: You must have the ability to test constantly across your digital assets (up to 10 million assets for some companies) with every change
- Functionality: This is an area that most CXOs already focus on, but it is important to take care of the desired functionality
Four Critical Steps
A multinational professional services network stated in its webinar titled “the role of digital in the new normal”, that, firms need to digitally optimize business, operations, and customer models. The pandemic has accelerated the need for digital transformation decisions. The disruption has brought out the challenges that enterprises face as they race to get a digital makeover. How do you go about creating a new quality assurance? A continuous 4-phase cycle ensures a future-proof digital assurance framework.
The first step is to define the model from top to bottom clearly to ensure that the framework is consistent. Implementing new lessons and imbibing values across your multi-channel UX is the second step. The third step is to identify a toolset or platform to incorporate the benefits mentioned earlier. The final step in the process is to automate incessantly to course-correct based on customer feedback.
Begin Your Journey
The new normal has accelerated innovative ways of delivering services to customers. It has brought out the urgent need for a seamless digital experience. Agile and digitally mature enterprises focus on improving services across the digital value chain from a UX perspective. Digital assurance is here to stay, and this is probably the best time to begin the journey to make your CX better.
Dilip Patnaik
Dilip Patnaik is the regional vice president and GTM lead for digital services at CSS Corp. The views in this article are his own.
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