Beta Testing Challenges
Beta testing often suffers from a bad reputation amongst product managers due to the challenges inhibiting a successful project. The following outlines the most common of these challenges.
1. Managing Communication and Feedback
The single greatest challenge in running a successful beta test is simply collecting, organizing, distributing, and acting on the enormous pool of feedback and data generated by the participants involved. This may come in the form of bug reports, feature requests, testimonials, survey results, user forum posts, completed tasks, and much more. Many companies attempt to organize this mass of information via E-mail and simple spreadsheets.
These methods may be sufficient for very small quick tests, yet they become extremely frustrating and progressively less useful as both the project duration and participant population grow. In addition, spreadsheets and E-mail are extremely difficult to distribute and share to the appropriate product team members who would benefit the most from the data, and even harder to effectively archive and compare one project to the next in an effort to learn and become more efficient.
Beyond E-mail, many companies often elect to use an assortment of general single-purpose tools such as web-based surveys and user discussion forums. These generally integrate very poorly and provide for a confusing and negative end-user experience - severely degrading beta results. In addition they provide scattered data which then must be compiled slowly and distributed manually.
How We Can Help: Centercode's Connect Beta Test Management System can help you effectively recruit participants, collect their feedback, and well as organize and distribute the results to the right people.
2. Lack of Available and Experienced Resources
Another of the most prominent challenges of running a successful beta test is simply obtaining sufficient resources with the experience and available time to effectively manage every aspect of the beta project. Often product managers step in to help fill this role, and while they're generally a great fit due to their knowledge of both the product and the customer (the two key components of a beta), the beta itself is generally occurring just prior to the release of their product, when they have very little time available to dedicate to the process.
How We Can Help: Centercode's Connect Beta Test Management System is designed from the ground up to help you run highly effective beta tests with the least amount of time required. If you are highly resource constrained, you can outsource your beta via our Managed Beta Test offering, and we can execute a highly effective beta designed specifically on your unique defined goals. Given our resources (including our established participant Community) we can generally accomplish this in a shorter period with fewer participants than you're likely able to accomplish on your own.
3. Insufficient Number of Qualified Participants
Finding highly qualified and willing participants is an extremely common dilemma for many beta tests. This problem often initially appears much less challenging than it actually is, since customers interested in trying out new products generally seem very easy to come by.
Unfortunately, having an interest in trying out your upcoming products does not necessarily equate to an individual appropriate for achieving your project goals, nor does it guarantee they won’t simply walk away with the product without providing the valuable feedback that you need.
How We Can Help: We offer an effective Participant Panel Selection service. This includes companies who've outsourced their beta to our team, as well as those who've purchased annual subscriptions to Centercode Connect. This service ensures that your participants will meet the unique goals of your individual project.
4. Low User Participation
Limited participation is the single most widely understood problem by both new and experienced beta and product managers. This challenge alone has earned beta it's frustrating reputation amongst product managers world-wide. Even when completely qualified and appropriate participants are recruited, successfully motivating them to contribute consistently throughout the entire duration of a beta test can often turn out to be an extremely challenging affair.
Based on our experience, the average participation rate for most companies is between 30% and 40%. In other words, 60-70% of the participants in their beta are not meeting their requirements for that project to succeed. This means that a confidential and often extremely expensive product must be distributed to a much larger pool of individuals in order to sufficiently achieve the goals of a beta test. This greatly increases exposure risk, significantly amplifies the project cost, and adds an enormous amount of unnecessary time to managing the project.
How We Can Help: Centercode generally achieves participation rates of 90% or more. Our tools, processes, and best practices can help your beta accomplish the same results.
5. Distributing and Collecting Beta Products
Allocating released products in bulk to retail, channel partners, and end-users is something that most companies have built great processes to accomplish. Manually distributing a limited number of unreleased and often unpackaged products to a group of dispersed customers who are likely not in any of your systems today, is an entirely different animal.
This process is loaded with potential complications, including (1) Distributing and monitoring multiple builds of unreleased software; (2) Manually packaging and rapidly shipping potentially hundreds of unfinished products; (3) Interacting with Customs for international distribution of an unreleased product; (4) Supporting and trading out defective units; and (5) Successfully collecting products at the closure of a project. This is all further complicated by the extremely tight timeframes generally granted to most beta projects.
How We Can Help: We're experts at packaging, distributing, and retrieving beta products on extremely short deadlines. We know how to deal with the various international complications, and we have effective processes to quickly engage participants encountering defective units. This entire process is handled as a portion of nearly every beta test we manage. In addition, we can help you use our software to build a program and procedures to accomplish it yourself.
- Centercode Clients
