BlogATAhon2021 

Customer Encounter Testing
by Jency Stella

Customer Encounter Testing

Customer Experience has become a digital phase over the years. No firm or person has been left untouched by this technological shift, the current pandemic has been a piece of evidence to this; an example of it – China has seen 55% increase in consumers permanently shifting to online grocery shopping since the pandemic. Lives have irreversibly changed. Now although our lives are slowly returning to normality from the current pandemic situation, we still see digital life growing at a faster pace. 

Organizations that have already recognized and adjusted to this new digital era in customer or user behavior stand to profit the most. Customers’ interactions with any business are more digital nowadays. And with it, expectations have also grown even more demanding. It does not matter what model or brand customers use; customers just don’t expect the application to work, they expect a soothing user-friendly experience with the device that they handle. Things that are considered here are digital customer experience and quality software.

One out of the group of customers willing to depart from a brand that they loved once would be because of just one bad experience. And the root cause of all this is failure to test your software from a customer perspective, which impacted the user experience, and now the customers landed up to the competitors.

Gone are the days of just verifying the applications and their quality against technical specifications. A piece of a script may function as specified however, when the whole application is within the hands of the user, it can be confusing. What’s required here is a shift in mindset towards validating the application rather than just verifying, which focuses on understanding whether or not your software satisfies the user’s wants. 

Organizations need to stop concentrating fully on whether a build works or not. In its place, they need to implement a way of testing that understands how users interact with software. Organizations that ignore this testing technique and continue creating specification or acceptance criteria will quickly discover their users moving to their competitors without any hesitation.

Customer experience testing goes beyond usability testing, in other terms, customer journey testing considers everything your target user goes through because it is everything that a user would hear, see and touch throughout the exposure to the product.

Understanding how the users interact and use the software is crucial to optimize the customer experience and deliver a quality business outcome. Merely checking if an application works must be eradicated and replaced with a user-focussed approach.

Happy Testing! Happy Customer!

About Author

^{I’m Jency ‘The Software Tester’ and I have been investigating the line between Software and Testing for the past 8years. My love affair with ‘Software Testing’ began years ago. Starting from a ‘ETL Test Engineer’ to currently ‘Senior QA Engineer’ in the role of a passionate ‘API Tester’ at “Billennium IT Services (M) SDN. BHD.”. I love to spend my time exploring the concepts and interesting facts about Software Testing. My BLOG “A Software Tester’s Blog” is a space all about a Tester’s Tech Work-Life sharing. Do checkout my LinkedIn profile HERE to get connected. Other interesting facts about me – MOM of a 3year old Superhero | ISTQB® CTFL and CTAE | Certified Mentor | Blogger | Community Contributor.}