Elevating Customer Experience Through the Power of Test Automation

What if we told you that you can win the hearts and minds of your clients with test automation? Would you like to know how? Read our article to explore and find out the secrets to improving the customer experience with test automation.

Why is Customer Experience Important?

Customer experience is important because it directly impacts the reputation, popularity, and profitability of your brand. Numbers always talk better than words. So, take a look at the following statistics to see the value of customer experience for the company:

• 1 out of 3 clients will walk away from a business after a single negative experience (at the same time, 90% will surely walk away after 2 or more bad experiences.)
• 94% of clients who like the brand’s user experience are more likely to purchase more from the company in the future.
• 70% of companies’ CEOs consider user experience a major differentiating factor between their competitors and themselves.

So, now when you see in practice the significance of customer experience, there remains one question – how to make customers happy? 

Importance of Test Automation for Customer Experience

There are numerous real-life examples that demonstrate the importance of test automation for customer experience:

• Example 1

You enter a large online e-commerce store to buy clothes,  however, you fail to finish your purchase, due to some unexpected error that keeps appearing, each time you try to buy a product. With automated testing, the errors are identified and corrected before they reach the user. Consequently, customers can shop seamlessly with a frictionless user experience.

• Example 2

You need to send money to your relative if you encounter a malfunction at the website of your banking institution. With automated testing, banks can be sure that their digital services operate smoothly and without any glitches.

• Example 3

You wish to schedule an appointment with the doctor and access your medical records but fail to do both due to a buggy medical portal. Automated testing can help to ensure that the system works well, therefore the patients can focus on solving their health-related problems, instead of fighting with technological blocks.

The list of examples could go on and on since test automation could be applicable and beneficial to practically any digital project.

How to Boost Customer Experience with Software Test Automation

There is a funny saying that automation testing is catching glitches faster than Grandma is catching gossip. No wonder, since the process is really quick. However,  let’s move from theory to practice since doing is much more difficult than talking. We have prepared a list of recommendations that you can use to boost your customer experience with test automation.

• Implement Automation Regression Testing – It can help you to identify defects brought by code changes, ensuring everything works as intended and as expected.
• Complete Automation Security and Data Privacy Testing – It can help you to identify vulnerabilities and provide your clients with a safe and secure user experience that corresponds to regulatory standards and requirements. Such an approach would help to build trustful relations with the clients, that will be confident in the brand they use.
• Do Performance and Scalability Automation Testing – It can ensure that the software maintains optimal performance under different user loads. This can help to avoid and prevent buffering issues.
• Implement Consistency and Reliability Automation Testing – It can help you to meet the market standards and to ensure that the engagement with your client goes in the right direction.

The outcome and extent of satisfaction would depend on the type of automation testing you perform, as well as the efforts and financial resources that you invest.

When is it better not to automate your tests?

Yes, you heard it right. Test automation is not a solution for all problems. There are many situations, where it wouldn’t help you to improve customer experience and where its usage doesn’t have much sense:

• Small Projects

If your project is small, automation testing would take you more time, effort, and resources compared to manual testing, with practically the same outcome. Let’s compare it to cooking food. When you cook just for your family, you manage to handle this task quite easily without any additional help. However, imagine that you need to cook food for a wedding of 500 people. Additional assistance would, of course, be very logical, helpful, and useful.

• Projects that Require Human Touch

Even though AI and computers today have very powerful capabilities, they still can’t replace humans in many situations. If you need to complete ad-hoc, usability or exploratory testing of your solution, it’s better to choose a manual approach.

• Projects with Frequently Changing Requirements

Automation is a long and complex process, therefore if the requirements of your project are changing very often, you will not have enough time to organize and install all the processes properly.

So, take your time, examine the requirements of your project, and think well about whether you need test automation or not.

Conclusion

Overall, test automation is no longer a “nice to have” option, it is rather an imperative in the contemporary software development world. The Modern clients are spoilt – if they don’t like the user experience on the website or in the app, you will never see them back again. So don’t underestimate the power of test automation. Do your best to please the customers and make them satisfied and you will be amazed by the results!