Day After Dark: Reinventing Quality Engineering- Driven CX

The key barometer of the customer experience therefore will be based essentially on how the organizations provide the customers who visit them services that meet their evolving needs with empathy, concern and consideration.

Now is also the time for company leaders to maintain a real-time focus on the longer-term shifts in consumer behavior that result from this crisis and easily innovate to reinvent experiences that matter to every different contexts related to them.

With the adoption of digitalization growing strongly even among the most “digitally resistant” customers, digital delivery is a necessity for every customer who is confined at home. In this regard, the rapid creation of digital functionalities is crucial to ensure continuity of services for many businesses. Banks introducing new in-home Self Service functions, service sectors accelerating digital value-added services such as advice and education are a few among the many business shifts to the digital.

In an attempt to expand business reach, many companies are offering selected digital services free to assist existing customers that have affected by the pandemic and making the services affordable for new ones. Given the current trends, there is a huge increase in the number customers using the digital services as opposed to walk-ins, and this situation is likely to continue even after the crisis is over. Companies making this advent of digital to deliver superior experiences have a potential to boost acceptance and retain these consumer relationships after the crisis.

With the coronavirus outbreak, organizations must show more care, be creative in their thinking, and develop new tools that will enable customers perform various business transactions such as shopping, consultation, checkout, return items, track delivery, transact complex orders etc., with little or no physical interactions, and forge stronger ties in the post-COVID-19 era.

What must companies do to maintain and grow?

Digital services will help organizations in the race to maintain current customers, gain new ones and or increase the existing market-share. It is imperative for companies to constantly leverage emerging technologies such as vocal interfaces, facial recognition, and mobile-based applications while addressing critical challenges such as data privacy, data accuracy, digital millennium copyright act, integration of third-party services, accessibility, availability, security, and usability of the era.

1. Build capabilities to enable continued customer engagement

There are four key practices that must be implored when developing the capabilities for short-term response while preparing for long-term, resilient solutions. Forward thinking companies will need this for success in the days after coronavirus. These practices are:

Many industries are already leading the way with various contactless solutions such as the following:

• Contactless shopping and delivery for Retail
• Contactless order, dinning and delivery for Restaurants and Food Services
• Contactless payments for Banks
• Contactless consultation for Healthcare
• Contactless checking for Transportation
• Automotive Contactless purchase and delivery for Automotive

2. Leverage Agile Innovation

Because of the aggressive competition that this craziness imposes on companies, adopting agile innovation to shorten time to market is of essence. The sooner companies can fulfill new consumer needs during this time, the better off they will be. This also implies speeding up time to market for new consumer experiences, rapidly developing prototypes and reiterating, and releasing technologies in their 'minimum viable' state instead of waiting to perfect them. This process will also have long-lasting benefits in creating agility through functions to cope with changing customer circumstances. Usually, test-and-scale labs enable businesses to create new experiences with a 50 percent reduction in time to market. In order to set goals for new consumer interactions that fit with remote, digital, or home delivery patterns, businesses can quickly analyze their innovation pipeline in addition to agile approaches; for these will undoubtedly continue to accelerate and distinguish CX providers in the post-COVID-19 environment.

3. Adopt effective Quality Engineering approach

In order for companies to ensure that these technologies provide the business value they set out to provide and keep the customers engaged, companies must deploy effective Quality Engineering methods and tools during the technology conception, development and implementation processes and validate that these systems are bugs free to meet customers’ expectation. Organizations can ensure that the voice of the customer is heard and integrated into the systems design. Properly implemented tools and techniques for quality engineering can have a major influence on cost and quality, and on the bottom line of the business.

The following are key quality attributes that customers centered solutions should have:

What is Applexus RunningValidation?

RunningValidation is Applexus’ method of ensuring quality delivery of SAP software development projects. It is built on a combination of Quality Engineering, continuous validation and SAP Activate principles. RunningValidation focuses not only on shifting testing to the left, but also on continuous validation of SAP through the release cycles, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and customer experience. It encompasses all activities related to the analysis of a product’s design and development processes for the purpose of improving the quality of production operation.

RuningValidation starts at the prepare phase of the project, where the process starts with the definition of the solution scope and test strategy. As the project moves into explore phase, the completeness and clarity of the requirements are also validated to ensure they can be developed and tested. Applexus’ SAP RunningValidation consist of prebuilt collateral, such as end-to-end business scenarios and automated scripts for standard processes, among many. During the explore phase, the collateral is analyzed for gaps and the delta is identified. RunningValidation influences the prioritization of the work items for development cycles to enable early integration tests during the development cycles to avoid surprises down the line. Testing occurs continuously throughout the development cycles where the primary focus lies in the functionality, end user experience, performance, security, and compliance. Continuous user exploratory testing is an integral part of the overall testing to ensure early user participation and feedback

How Applexus can help

We believe that as software development continues to evolve, Quality Engineering will become a key differentiator of success for teams and businesses. Effective implementation of Quality Engineering methodologies and tools when developing customer facing business transaction solutions will improve the customer experience and ensure customers loyalty.

At Applexus, we offer RunningValidation as a service to support projects at early stages of developing strategic quality plan and throughout the projects to ensure quality-driven delivery. Our Quality Engineering tools improve quality and reduce development cost through more efficient processes.

Our team of experienced subject matter experts may provide:

• Guidance from project preparation and throughout the software life cycle ensuring that the project is quality driven
• Guidance in the development of a strategic plan to implement Quality Engineering within an organization
• Insight into the current status and effectiveness of quality systems
• Direction and coaching for management teams while establishing or improving Quality Engineering processes
• Documents and templates required to accelerate the development and implementation of quality assurance and control systems