As your organization and its competitors come out with new products left and right, your company relies heavily on your Quality team’s testing efforts to deliver thorough insights that can ensure its new products are built right and operate as expected. But while your QA team is full of experts and your tools are reliable, the reality is that unique environments and use cases are multiplying, and will keep multiplying even while product development schedules continue to shrink.
More and more organizations are integrating the Customer Validation Framework into QA processes as they discover its ability to help them minimize the risk of product failures and enhance the value of lab testing results. What distinguishes Customer Validation from other customer research disciplines is its deliberate emphasis on gathering data from real, targeted users in actual environments, and giving them enough time to have a real-world experience.
But with product development deadlines breathing down your neck, does integrating CVF into your team’s current efforts really make sense?
Quality + Customer Validation = Enhanced Outcomes and Better Products
According to Alex Larsen from Alarm.com, a leading provider of home security solutions, the answer is a resounding “yes.” By integrating Quality team efforts with real-customer feedback, Alarm.com has experienced significant benefits, including:
- Discovering additional usage scenarios that wouldn’t have been found without customer input
- Prioritizing which feature issues need the most attention before product release
- Adding real-world insight and validation to product issues identified by Quality
Ultimately, this symbiotic partnership has enabled Alarm.com to improve communication between different teams – and deliver a better product to market.
QA teams that incorporate CV have also reported other benefits, including:
- Sussing out bigger bugs with field data from highly individualized technical environments
- Identifying outdated test cases with fresh product usage data
- Expanding on patterns in the bugs your team is uncovering
- Proactively identifying gaps before launch to inform solutions that minimize risk after launch
- Contributing to reduced support and overall development costs
DID YOU KNOW? Product issues that are found before launch are a lot cheaper to resolve. A recent study found that product issues can cost up to 100x more to fix after product launch.
Tying customer feedback to quality processes allows Quality teams to elevate their contribution to the product development discussion beyond the traditional bug hunt. What’s more, adding the voice of the customer to your quality metrics makes it easier for your team to deliver the frictionless experience that your customers deserve.
To learn more about how leading Quality teams are leveraging Customer Validation to enhance both QA and product launch outcomes, join us on Thursday, June 28, 2018 for our next webinar, Upping Your Game: Enhancing Quality Outcomes with Customer Validation.
