Increasing productivity, efficiency and customer retention by aligning QA and CX teams in a multilingual, multidisciplinary environment, by By Pole To Win…

Beginning as two separate entities, Quality Assurance (QA) and Customer Experience (CX) historically existed independently in software development and support services, but as customer engagement and retention have become increasingly important, companies have strived to maintain the engagement of their user bases.

When both services are required, operating a CX and QA team under the same roof, or integrating an outsourced CX team with your internal QA, can provide benefits that would be unattainable without cross-team integration. QA teams are the knowledge powerhouse for post- and pre-release problems, workarounds and usability advice for software products. Harnessing such benefits produces a more informed, reactive and efficient CX team, complementing the ongoing hard work that goes into understanding and adopting the client’s culture, regardless of product.

The feedback loops that integrated CX and QA teams create are symbiotic, providing various benefits to both teams. There is no-one better to inform your CX Agents about processes, limitations and known issues than your own QA team. With more hours of experience than it would be possible for others to have, QA teams can be the guiding light to help keep your response times fast and your customer interactions helpful and effective. Well-informed CX Agents reduce costs and add value with superior customer interactions and faster ticket processing.

This knowledge sharing is not just a cross-team benefit but also cross-language. Technical issues unique to, or reported in, one language within the user base can be translated by CX, conveyed to QA, and subsequently applied across all versions. Similarly, linguistic content or formatting issues in the user interface of one language may provide an early warning for other languages. This multilingual, multidirectional information flow, when managed well, is a formidable reservoir of knowledge that provides unparalleled efficiency across your services.

With a more informed and erudite CX team, customer reported issues become far more valuable. CX Agents can use that shared QA knowledge, backed up by dedicated training, to help support customers and report to QA in a manner far more efficient, exact and useful to the QA team. Information fed back to QA from customers can also improve testing, allowing QA to focus on popular areas of the application or on aspects and sections where most issues are encountered. This feedback loop adds value to both teams, reducing time spent investigating issues by QA and reducing length and number of tickets to CX: Agents and Testers can be constantly learning from each other, while creating a project-wide knowledge bank that benefits stakeholders at every level.

This in-depth understanding doesn’t stop with the integrated teams. Informed Agents can create informed customers. More accurate and knowledgeable responses from CX can help create a user base that shares this knowledge amongst users through online forums and social media, decreasing ticket counts and increasing customer engagement. Greater satisfaction in CX responses is a direct user benefit, increasing trust from customers who are provided a fast, informed, and efficient service.

Increases in efficiency and productivity across teams can of course be measured. Integration provides an opportunity to align common KPIs between QA and CX. Both services value productivity, quality, and client satisfaction, and by integrating these measurements, invaluable insight is gathered into how your services perform as a whole, rather than as isolated units.

Pole To Win is an experienced global partner offering standalone or integrated QA and CX services to provide all-round support to development teams, applications, and their communities. With a heritage in the highly competitive interactive entertainment industry, PTW now brings this experience in fast-paced, changeable markets to clients and their products in many innovative industries worldwide.