Is your company ready to face the evolving needs of your customers? Are you prepared for 2020? The year customer experience will become the key brand differentiator over products and price.

Meeting customers’ expectations through business transformations

In response to these increasingly higher customer expectations and an increasingly competitive business environment, organizations will need to undergo a business transformation, rethinking and reinventing their processes, products and services in ways that more fully meet and exceed customer expectations.  Business transformation goes beyond digital transformation and operational change. It’s not just about doing what you do in a better way.  It’s about developing a new business model, breakthrough innovations, or doing something completely different to meet customers’ needs.

Business transformation requires new approaches to IT processes that increase speed to market:

  • DevOps transformations
  • Embracing continuous integration
  • Continuous delivery

The move toward Quality Engineering

Traditional quality assurance and testing techniques play an important role in business transformation. However, to be truly transformative, those processes need to be integrated into one comprehensive platform.  Quality engineering does just that by incorporating quality management practices, enterprise architecture, product management, IT operations management, and software engineering to create a single platform that focuses on the expectations of the business’ customers.

Quality engineering provides a platform that enables each of these disciplines to approach their decisions in a customer-centric way.

7 crucial steps in Quality Engineering:

As IT partners with the rest of the enterprise to deliver exceptional customer experiences, quality engineering will become an essential component of successful teams and businesses. The following are the key steps that need to be taken to ensure that Quality Engineering is incorporated throughout the development lifecycle:

  1. Engineer quality through the entire delivery pipeline, with a focus on optimizing customer experience.
  2. Incorporate the complexity of testing by including functional, non-functional, security, accessibility, localization and globalization, but more importantly, address how each of these practices impacts the overall customer experience.
  3. Determine what application performance metrics are most critical to the customer experience.
  4. Question if the features under development are of the highest priority to the customer.
  5. Adopt an outcome-based test approach that delivers innovative solutions for risk mitigation as well as cost reduction.
  6. Focus on delivering business value based on KPIs that are customized for your organization.
  7. Launch an Agile and DevOps transformation using techniques to “shift-left” and Implement continuous testing to ensure high-quality releases.

As CIOs wake up to the fact that they control or influence much of the customer experience, they are beginning to integrate quality into every stage of the dev cycle so that it’s embedded into every line of code.  By taking a holistic approach to quality across platforms, networks, and technologies, the roadmap to optimal CX becomes clear.