Feb 11, 2016

Shaping Customer Experience with Digital Assurance, by Subbiah Muthiah

What is Digital Assurance? It is a model to deliver solutions that unite business and customer needs faster and better. A company can assure their exists a consistent digital strategy and requisite capability throughout their entire customer value chain. It can identify advantages across the development lifecycle and across the business as well as promote quality and deliver real business process change. The aim is to super please customers.

So you can see that many companies–whether born digital, have extensive digital capabilities, or are just starting to transform–are using Digital Assurance solutions –to make things better for consumers and employees.

Quick Wins to Super Please Customers

Let me share a few “quick win” practices across Digital Assurance that have been working effectively with born digital organizations:

1. Define what constitutes customer experience. While technology can act as the change catalyst for any initiative, the customer and end user experience is the face of the change that creates the customer experience.

But sometimes it’s difficult to articulate what defines the customer experience. So consider identifying parameters that reflect a customer’s sentiments and work towards improving the experience across bias. Examples could be the total number of downloads/rating of an application on the app store or the overall Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Customer sentiments could also be improved by using Social Listening to monitor user feedback (either through app store or NPS or other channels) and perform sentimental analysis. As you create new experiences, ensure the customer sees, hears and interacts the same way across various all touch points. This should include not only the traditional channels such as mobile or internet, but also call centers and IVRs. Also, don’t forget to perform crowd testing to identify end user sentiment before production and unearth non-functional observations.

2. Understanding the underlying technology. Technology is the underlying change catalyst for all digital transformations. This emphasizes the need for Digital Assurance teams to have an in-depth understanding of newer technologies and their impact on the existing technology ecosystem. After a through review of new and legacy technologies, newer services could be identified to elevate the customer experience.

For example, Manulife uncovered a new service as it transformed how to disrupt the basics of insurance and how a premium is calculated with Manulife Hong Kong’s “Move”. This is a unique insurance concept for Hong Kong consumers that rewards customers for being healthier and more active by offering discounted premiums. ManulifeMOVE will allow the company to continually engage with its customers through regular advice and tips on staying healthy through a mobile app.

3. Focus on process and operational efficiency. The best ideas are moot if they don’t translate into actual business benefits. To deliver greater value more efficiently, faster and at lower cost consider these practices:

Predictive Application Quality — Proliferation of data from an application’s history and its defects, predictive quality assurance is best positioned to identify future defects and potential delays in scheduled delivery of services.
Shift Left Automation — Move quality measures earlier in the development lifecycle to create savings advantages. Shift Left Automation extends further and includes middleware automation, backend automation and even establishing common automation strategy including unit testing. This in effect, brings Digital Assurance even more closer to developer testing.
DevOps is a tool-set to automate, virtualize services or manage test data. This can be aligned with the overall enterprise digital strategy and work closely with other technology environments to ensure continuous delivery of applications and services. With co-location becoming a de-facto expectation for most businesses, ramp up time can be minimized utilizing DevOps.
Quality Across the Whole Lifecycle — Better manage multiple vendors and greater interconnectivity, end-to-end.

The new normal is moving from being digital to doing digital. Digital Assurance can enable an organization to better employ new engineering techniques and tools that promote quality and deliver real business process change.

Opinions expressed in this blog are of the author and may not represent Cognizant’s point of view.

Subbiah Muthiah

Subbiah is a graduate of Annamalai University for Electronics and Instrumentation. He has 14 years in mobile technology and business from setting…