Walk with customer shoes!

Our customers are our greatest assets. In this competitive world, keeping the assets is a big challenge. The main moto is we should not allow our customer to think about other alternatives, if this storm strikes their mind, its impact will be huge on most of us.

As a QA, we will test the product but still we can’t give 100% guarantee that “Our product is a Bug free”. We have proven results for this. After the major releases, still we do provide patches, service packs and hot fixes.  All these post release activities will disclose our flaws and un-fullness in quality assurance. It arises a question in our mind like ‘Still do we have something to learn? What are we missing to deliver 100% quality assured products?’
The best answer for that question is nothing but ‘Our customers’.  The famous quotation from Bill Gates talks about the same: “Your most un happy customers are your source of learning”.

Yes, we can learn a lot more things from our customers. We do test our product in our way, but it is not the way our customers always do. We have to adopt the approaches from our customer and this is not simple as we talk. we can’t directly wear the customer shoes, and think, but by adopting some approaches from our customers and by integrating them with our own approaches we can strengthen our abilities.

Generally, customers expect a quality service rather than a fast service.
In order to make our customers impressed, the first thing we have to do is we must present our product’s beauty to them. To make our product more beautiful, we have to concentrate more on usability testing to impress our customers.

As a QA, we do perform UX reviews and usability testing to improvise adaptability towards our product. Still we are getting improvement suggestions from our customers. The reason might be lack of keen understanding like how they utilize our product. This can be overcome by

• Encouraging the regular customers to be involved in the sprint reviews  to provide the live feedback in timely manner
• Encouraging the customers to do the usability testing at our presence.

To impress our customers, the other important thing that we need to take care is health of the product features on which we should not compromise. The main role of the QA comes into the picture here. As we have already discussed that the customer scenarios are our treasure, if Quality Assurance performs customer centric testing, we can deliver quality products to our customers.  There will be different scenarios to perform this customer centric testing.

·            By going through the customer bugs we can cover the missing scenarios. But by analyzing those bugs, mainly we can derive more similar test paths to uncover different areas.

·            By continuously following the forums mails from our customers, we will get to know about the customer scenarios and their environment details. So that we can implement those test scenarios in our test bed.

·            Analyzing the samples provided by our customers. We need to replicate the same in our testing environment. To take a step further, we have to append more scenarios on top of the customer scenarios.

·            Communicating with the sales and tech support team, we can get a variety of knowledge regarding the customer use cases.

·            Competitive analysis with other products in the market will always help us to improvise and enhance.  

·            As part of pre-release actions, we can request our customers to work with the new features set and to provide the required feedback.

·            The biggest area that we mostly concern is performance. As the way we do the performance testing is different from what the customers exactly do, by building the replicas of customer setups we can identify the leaks and the hangs.

·            By building some real time applications, we can get more knowledge on product and it allows us to think in different ways. It helps us to build the real-time scenarios which can even cover the security aspects by maintaining the scalability.

·            And finally we can get the more genuine data from our customers through Analytics. By enabling Analytics, we can get the details on most frequently used features by our customers and provide the enhancements in those areas, which ultimately impresses our customers.