Putting the Customer First: How User Acceptance Testing Improves CX

When it comes to developing digital products/journeys, testing, and quality assurance play a crucial role that cannot be emphasized enough. Teams that prioritize high performance and have clear testing standards spend 22% less time addressing issues. This is particularly important given that, on average, 95% of users abandon an app or website within 90 days. Therefore, it's essential to make a positive initial impact by ensuring that the program functions as intended for the user. Moreover, research indicates that fixing defects during development is 15 times cheaper than addressing them after release.

UAT: How and Why?

In case of customer dissatisfaction, only 10% of them get back to firms with their issues & pain points. Firms can then work on addressing and resolving these issues, but this hampers the customer journey, breaking the flow of their interaction and thereby impacting the CX negatively. Any such gap or hurdle can make a customer feel stuck or leave the journey, this is where User Acceptance Testing (UAT) comes into the picture. By properly investing in & conducting UAT, firms can surely save their time & effort.

The UAT phase plays a critical role in ensuring optimal customer satisfaction and loyalty. When users feel that their feedback has been carefully considered and integrated into the final product, they are more inclined to continue using it and recommending it to others. Conversely, an inadequately executed UAT phase can result in user frustration and disappointment, leading to negative reviews and reduced adoption rates.

Typically, the QA process is conducted by developers, in-house QA teams, internal stakeholders, and other professionals who rigorously assess the application against functional requirements. These professionals evaluate the technical and usability aspects of the product, but it is worth noting that the product may also possess business or niche-specific requirements that are only discernible to end-users.

UAT serves a dual purpose of ensuring that the application meets both the technical and business requirements, as well as marketing demands before it is released to the general public or consumers. It is important to emphasize that UAT must only be conducted in real environments with live data and should not involve the use of virtual machines or other emulators. 

UAT Outsourcing - 

Since the businesses precisely understand the importance of UAT, not all of them have an internal infrastructure to properly conduct it. In such cases, firms can outsource the activity or take help of UAT tools, one being offered by QDegrees as well. This UAT tool offers the following benefits:

·         All UAT emails & details are stored in the portal making it easy for everyone to access all UAT-related Data as well as track the productivity of SMEs.

·         Save email search time with all the updates available on the dashboard, and reduce communication through emails & calls.

·         All the data related to UAT will be saved in the portal, users can access it anytime, making future UATs even easier.

·         The teams can analyze the failure ratio of products easily, enabling firms to refine their offerings and stay true to their niche.

·         UAT test and retest statuses are automatically updated on the portal with proper email notifications shared, thereby reducing the manual efforts a lot.

UAT & CX: The relationship

A study found that over 90% of respondents agree that UAT is essential for improving CX and rightly done UAT can help companies save up to $5 for every $1 spent on testing.

UAT can help identify potential issues and bugs that end-users may encounter, which can have a negative impact on CX. By conducting UAT, developers can identify and fix these issues before the product is released to customers, which can improve CX and increase customer satisfaction.