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For the moment, companies strive to win end customers’ attention in all sorts of ways. Digital transformation was one of those processes that tremendously changed this attitude. Building long-term relationships with end users and making them stay with your brand is essential for every company that has a software product.

The products differ. What about CRM that has become the largest of all software markets by 2018 according to Gartner research?

CRM – a strong technological system – can be also considered a unique strategy helping companies improve customer management and achieve greater business goals.

In this material, we are talking about our experience in testing CRMs and highlighting some useful advice on how to make the QA process more efficient.

Preventing major perils of CRM functioning

In the ever-growing IT world, the cost of one little CRM software mistake can take its toll and strike many business areas including finances (low ROI, up to market share loss, and more), customers (e.g. dissatisfied clients, decreased time to market, ropey brand reputation, and other), etc.

When can low-quality CRM damage the relationships with the customers?

There are many reasons for CRM failures be it a poor business need setting, unstructured planning, implementation missteps, or lack of change management.

Missed appointments because of non-working notifications, late arrival of goods as a result of wrong delivery status – the list is endless. These cases can dishearten sales, marketing, and other departments from using the system at all.

For this reason, after a clear goal-setting and deciding on a shared company vision about CRM, it’s high time to think about delivering a strong software product. No matter what target audience is involved in using CRM – they expect you to roll out a flawless application.

Why should you take action and start improving the system quality?

The CRM, which is tested incorrectly or not tested at all, is vulnerable to numerous mistakes, which can take an impact on your work. The unfound and unfixed defects can bring an erroneous impression on the customer relationship management process. This can result in wrong decisions leading to the loss of clients. At the time, your competitor utilizes top-notch software to build long-term relationships with the customers and boost sales.

Indeed, the vast majority of CRM failures can be exposed during the accurate QA process. To organize the checks correctly, create a clear test strategy, onboard skilled industry specialists, and go further.

What should a successful CRM testing embrace?

To bring impressive results, CRM checks should encompass the main aspects of smooth system functioning.

  • Data accuracy

It makes sense to prioritize data checks, as high-quality customer data management (CDM) is the heart of your system. While testing the data warehouse (DW), the QA engineers assure that the system is not filled up with invalid data. During data quality testing, the specialists ensure whether CRM processes data as expected: no duplicated or lost data; no hidden data becomes public; no inaccurately reflected or sorted data.

Moreover, as soon as you have some amount of data migrated to the CRM platform, you need to make sure data can move around freely.

  • Functionality

When you want to ascertain that all the required functional ranges are processed accurately, go for functional testing.

Some CRM system features that ought to be tested by QA engineers include smoothly running user permissions, absence of data mismatch of users with similar names, receipts-specific aspects (e.g. right name of the brand) as well as the saved connection between stores.

  • Performance

Are your team players waiting 30 minutes for each report to generate? Performance testing is here to define the level of platform operability and help improve the system to achieve the desired level of load handling. The QA team will identify whether the system can cope with hundreds or thousands of simultaneously working users, will explore parameters that influence performance, and provide its recommendations for improvements.

  • Security

If the terms GDPR or CCPA are not first-told, there is no secret for you that each CRM should fully comply with data security arrangements. It is about the system comprising a high volume of confidential data including established for ages client base that ought to be secured.

The need for security testing becomes more considerable when a vast array of employees and institutions apply for CRM. A correctly settled checking process helps ensure that the data is well-protected against unauthorized access and cannot be damaged or lost.

  • Integrations

In CRM, a large amount of information is transferred to the ERP platform, financial system, DW, and many more. In a chase to avoid pitfalls, the QA team conducts integration checks and ensures that CRM data remains consistent during data pass and new adjustments are available in the connected platforms.

Another important moment: while developing customizations, be sure the code of the introduced ones is compatible with the existing CRM code and is not hindering the system performance.

  • Regression

Custom-developed improvements can create more new defects. After adding even a small adjustment, one should necessarily ensure that the code of the newly introduced feature hasn’t disturbed existing software functions. Through this testing, the QA team will permanently verify that your CRM works smoothly after all changes and is still stable.

Test automation? Yes!

It is an indispensable assistant in long-term projects helping save time and increase ROI by developing test scripts that can be applied in regression testing. Test automation facilitates performing lengthy QA activities and those embracing the huge scope of data.

Have a look at the process of how the a1qa specialists introduced test automation on the project with the client – a US-based manufacturer of home appliances – and helped him save 90% of manual testing efforts.

Test automation report at the 9th a1qa summer conference

Source: the presentation from the 9th a1qa summer professional conference

What to expect in the future?

Based on the latest Gartner’s technology predictions for CRM and best-in-class customer experience, we are sure that awareness of trickiest CRM testing cases can help understand the process better, apply for demanded service, and not be overwhelmed by software specifics.

The research and advisory company states that organizations shouldn’t be afraid of innovations like AI and ML. Together with AR/VR, they are revolutionizing sales and customer service.

To strengthen at minimum one basic sales process, 30% of all B2B companies will adopt AI by 2020. Besides, customer service organizations implementing artificial intelligence in their multichannel customer engagement platform will enhance operational efficiency by 25% by 2025.

Does your CRM system need to be diagnosed? Our team of experts will jump-start your move to the flawless software.

One of Microsoft’s flagship products, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a full-scale customer relationship management system. It can be successfully adopted by various departments such as sales, marketing and operations to get an in-depth visibility into the state of both the sales funnel and the customer base in general. This is made possible as tthe system combines operational, collaborative and analytical features, all with dedicated dashboards and flexible user rights.

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, both B2C and B2B companies can successfully solve a number of business-critical tasks and improve its relations with customers at every stage of their lifecycle. Among such tasks, there are the following:

  • creating and keeping a unified customer base with complete data on the history of customer interactions and communication
  • sales automation, including updates of customer records
  • management of marketing and customer service
  • data analysis and reporting

The Dynamics CRM platform can be easily adjusted to different business needs, as its out-of-the-box, basic functionality is customizable and expandable. Though this requires professional help of CRM customization consultants, the efforts pay off with having a more flexible, user-friendly, and relevant system that’s tailored precisely to the company’s needs.

In technical terms, customization includes the following. The administration module can be expanded with new entities, or the current ones can be changedor retargeted. Apart from that, in the CRM you can develop all the necessary views and forms, as well as set up the Workflow for every entity. Using CRM plugins, you can expand basic system functions, develop new ones or integrate with some sub-systems.

On the whole, it’s possible to customize your CRM by developing the following on top of it:

  • entities, attributes, forms, views, basic functions
  • plug-ins, business processes, ASPX-pages, reports, add-ons

When it comes to QA outsourcing as part of the customization project, here’s our list of tips to help you on the way.

What you need to know before testing your CRM

The standard, out-of-the-box functionality of Dynamics CRM comes in 24 languages, which simplifies localization testing considerably. It means that when customizing the system, only newly developed or configured functionality need to pass localization tests.

When localizing the customized part of CRM, testing engineers usually check forms and views, customized entities and/or fields, control elements, plug-in functionality, functional updates made on JavaScript (messages, additional webpages) and custom reports.

Localization testing is not the only one necessary, however. Running functional and GUI tests is important to check and validate how correct the current functionality was developed, regardless of whether it is basic or customized. The results that you get at this stage will define the overall testing plan.

Keep in mind that in a customized CRM, the largest part of the functionality is likely to come pre-checked. This means that you’re left with testing only the newly added and customized part, which usually have to do with entities, attributes, and fields. Often, there is no need ito validate new fields as the control elements acquire the standard features according to the data type.

For the newly developed functionality, which is alsoto be thoroughly tested, the testing requirements are similar to the ones for the customized functionality. Along with that, all the forms, windows, control elements and other important items, which were developed separately and added to the CRM via JavaScript or other plugins,toned to get through the full-scale check. Otherwise, the time spent on customizing your customer relationship management system won`t bring you much value.

Afterword

Having a well-functioning and tailored CRM system is often the staple of a successful business. Yet, buying off-the-shelf products may be limiting for your organization if you want to improve business processes in your sales and marketing department. To ensure the system addresses your urgent needs, customization of a CRM platform is frequently the solution to this, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is not an exception.

In the article above, we’ve outlined major areas of focus when testing the customized solution. Hopefully, you’ll use them when localizing your platform, as well as when testing its functionality and user interface.

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