Digging a little deeper into efficient CRM testing

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.

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.