How Testing Can Increase Customer Satisfaction and Avoid Reputational Slips

A key question companies ask themselves is how to increase customer satisfaction. It’s not just about releasing new features and updates but also avoiding bugs. Customers are unforgiving when it comes to details or errors. Poor feedback can make its way relatively soon on web platforms, as users are more likely to share negative reviews.

Comments on social media are the new norm, and most would-be customers will always trust them more than your claims of improved products. If you want to see how it works, I suggest you search for the #ProductName on online platforms and see what people say about the product. 

Good testing aims to mitigate high potential risks by designing a strategy that considers your situation’s project, product, and quality context. One project’s generic strategies cannot be directly copied and pasted into another. It is common for teams to hit a blind spot regarding quality, only to then experience unpleasant surprises in the production.

Testing can Increase Customer Satisfaction

Testing is an important part of software development and deployment. It helps to ensure the quality of the delivered product and detect potential issues that may arise after the product has been released. 

Testing can help you to: 

• Identify bugs 
• Address security vulnerabilities
• Increase user satisfaction
• Avoid unknown pitfalls
• Advocate for business risks
• Increase the sellability of the product
• Verify if the product holds true against its marketing claims
• Reduce the risk of costly rework or recalls and much more

Production Bugs

In most cases, production bugs are caused by one or more of the following factors:

• Unreliable assessment
• Shallow testing
• Ignorance of customer personas
• Poor understanding of the product
• Poor bug advocacy or reporting

Fixing a bug in production is extremely costly and risky. Good testing can help you save most of this cost by helping you identify issues before it reaches the customer. This way, you can focus on your business more proactively than reactively.

The severity and impact of any bug in production are inversely proportional to the likelihood that your customer will retain your subscription or service.

If revenues don’t meet initial product expectations, even large tech giants have had to kill or replace the product with a new one.

Increase Customer Satisfaction Through Feedback

By incorporating user feedback, engineers can gain insights into real-world usage scenarios and can make informed decisions about their development and testing strategy. Since user feedback provides a direct line to understanding users’ problems and challenges, software products can be refined and optimized to deliver a superior experience by addressing these.

Positive user feedback also helps as a marketing tool for your product:

• Highlighting customer satisfaction and working as an effective marketing tool.
• Written or video testimonials can influence potential users and build trust.
• Positive reviews generate organic publicity, which plays an important role in purchase decisions.

Engaging with users in a genuine and attentive way fosters loyalty and connection. It can also lead to building a good relationship with your customers. However, it’s important to:

• Respond to user feedback promptly to demonstrate commitment.
• Be empathetic and understanding of their frustrations and concerns in order to build positive relationships.
• Providing transparency about the progress of fixing or featuring requested functionalities builds trust.

As a tester, user feedback is crucial reference data that enables you to be a strong advocate for testing:

• Helps make the case for fixing bugs found during testing more credible and persuasive.
• Highlights the impact of identified issues on user experience and the risks associated with not fixing them.

User feedback is key for exploring project requirements, as it can provide:

• Valuable insights into customers’ desires and expectations.
• Identification and prioritization of features or enhancements.
• A way to refine and align software requirements with user needs.

Minimal Testing Decreases Customer Satisfaction

Performing little-to-no testing has risks and potential costs further down the line. It can seem like an afterthought, yet investing in quality comes with the benefit of customer satisfaction later on. 

Building scalable and complex products without any testing safety net becomes increasingly difficult. When your product development strategy does not include any or very little testing, you’ll most likely encounter the following risks:

1. Poor Quality: A product or system that isn’t tested or is not tested enough will have unexpected errors and bugs. Customers are paying for a high-quality product. Don’t risk losing revenue and sales.

2. Security Vulnerabilities: With governments enforcing strict data privacy guidelines, it’s very important to protect your systems from any form of data as well as vulnerability attacks. It is crucial to conduct security testing to ensure that the system is secure and not susceptible to malicious activity. 

3. Higher Maintenance & Support Costs: Product development is an iterative process. The ability to identify and fix problems before they become problems at the customer’s end is impossible without testing. As a result, maintenance and support costs often shoot up in such cases.

4. Poor User Experience: User experience is often the most ignored aspect of software products. Product features can be sold once, but high customer satisfaction sells the product in its subsequent cycles. A product or system with bugs or usability issues can lead to user migration as soon as there’s a comparable product in the market. 

5. Poor software performance: In today’s era of scalable and web-based systems, your software needs to be optimized for good performance. Customers are unforgiving when it comes to load times, image rendering, and server response times. When software is not tested for performance and load, it may not perform as expected, resulting in user dissatisfaction and decreased productivity.

6. Compromised data integrity: Customers can become confused and frustrated by minor mistakes. If the software isn’t properly tested, data may be lost or corrupted as a result of inaccuracy in storing, processing, and retrieving data.

7. Unreliable features: While everyone gets excited about releasing new features, if these are not tested properly, they can instantly turn users off. 

8. Unmet customer expectations & standards: If software is not properly testing, besides not meeting customer’s expectations, it can also be difficult to ensure that it reaches regulatory or industry standards.

In Summary

The best way to increase customer satisfaction is to ensure that the app or software works correctly, and is as devoid of bugs and errors as possible. Listening to users can also help see what might not be as obvious, even leading to finding unexpected errors or glitches. Listen to your customers, as they might have insights that can create new features.