By Rahul Pratti, Head of Global Delivery, Cigniti Technologies
Businesses have seen disruption over the past century, right from the manufacturing age to now, a consumer-driven age. As technology is being constantly upgraded to suit the customer lifestyle more, businesses have had to increasingly come up with ways to keep pace with market trends. In this day and age of markets facing near-perfect competition, penetrating niche segments and acquiring a loyal and giant consumer-base seems to be the most significant parameter while measuring success.
Consumers conduct extensive research and often take to raising in-depth questions on online platforms, in order to understand complete specifications of a given product. Naturally, consumers that have better experiences with a product or service tend to influence buying for those looking for similar products or services. Ultimately, consumers that can associate brands that provide a more satisfying buying experience drive revenue.
There is a certain urgency for disruption of various industries, in which technology plays a critical role, Tim Sheedy explains in his Forrester report. Consumers are impatient and are demanding best-of-breed services. With the onset of applications that provide not just information, but also a way to keep in touch with others at any given point of time, consumers are essentially digital.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) rapidly takes over businesses and determines how they interconnect, it becomes essential for organizations to incorporate Quality Engineering (QE). QE services are driven by intelligence and automation. QE ensures that the entire application lifecycle process keeps a tough check on the quality of the product or service being offered, right from the start of the early development stages.
QE services help focus more on customer experience through complete digital assurance, achieved by implementing Agile and DevOps. It helps industries customize their products or services. Mobile labs are being setup, either physically, or through cloud. Such a setup makes it easier to attend to immediate bug-fixing and functionality testing of mobile devices. Modification of these essential services makes it easier for corporations to deliver quality with great speed. In essence, Digital Assurance, Functional testing, Performance engineering, Security testing, Customer experience testing, and Reliability, are all important for seamless integration.
Below, we take a look at a few industries that are constantly undergoing functional transformations and in turn, are making global digital footprints.
# Banking and Finance: In light of countless economic changes, finances have become volatile. Merely depositing money in the bank is no longer sufficient for bank customers. They look to make smart investments, such as lending money peer-to-peer at slashed interest rates, in order to make quick returns. In order to achieve such monetary empowerment, one needs to be able to constantly monitor the inflow and outflow of their money. With QE services, banks are partnering with FinTech enterprises and going digital. They are offering financial services through money market funds,thereby providing customers with services that guarantee higher flexibility and efficiency, ultimately fuelling market growth.
# E-commerce: A real form of empowerment is shaping up E-commerce. Even consumers that prefer the whole “look, touch and feel” of a product from a brick-and-mortar store first conduct several rounds of research prior to stepping into the store and making the purchase. With massive technology upgrades, the choices are innumerable. From fitness trainers and diet experts, to legal services, there is no dearth of information online for customers to decide what might be the best possible solution. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to encode complex algorithms that help establish buying patterns. Quick bug-fixing is done and potential failures are avoided by leveragingQE services and shift-left testing. Such measures elevate website performance, especially during high website traffic and on days of big sales.
#3 Healthcare: Two chief medical parameters that are impacted by technology, and assure that better services are provided, are cost transparency and emergency applications. For any surgery or operation that is required, company web pages and even social media platforms provide commendable insights to medical procedural expenses. QE gives a roadmap to efficiently build applications that connect customers immediately to professional help. Sudden panic attacks or a spiking of the blood pressure can be curbed instantly through the able guidance of medical consultants.Customers are finding such emergency medical applications to be quite time-saving and convenient.
#4 Airlines:Airlines are looking to compete more effectively by leveraging technology. The challenge that airlines face is providing customers a better experience while charging lower rates. Airlines now have their own company applications, and use technology to gain insights from the data, which helps them with their pricing and scheduling of the flights. Airlines have the undue advantage of innovating airline processes and make airplanes more efficient through QE and continuous integration.Since they have the airplane as a product, airlines leverage technology to integrate front-end processes and users to back-end research and developers.
Businesses connect with their end-users so as to strategize more effectively, but how they project themselves online can either make or break their business. According to Forrester, “Over 60% of your customers who have a bad experience with your mobile app will not buy from your company, and over 50% will uninstall the app” altogether!
This calls for an urgent need for businesses to provide services of high standards in their software quality, which can be effectively determined through in-depth Quality Engineering. As a result, there is a burgeoning need for services of software quality specialists.