In 2016, Cognizant’s Asia-Pacific head Jayajyoti Sengupta and Swami Nathan C, director of its QE&A Technology Centre of Excellence, argued that customer experience had become the deciding factor in digital success. Their case was that businesses had to be built around customer needs, because customers who could search, compare, try and buy in real time expected personalised service and instant results.
They also argued that customer experience could not be left to marketing alone. It had to be tested, from development through to live operation, and IT teams were expected to build software quickly without letting quality slip.
The trend they were responding to
The pair pointed to a fast shift in how companies competed. By their account, 90 percent of businesses in 2016 would compete on customer experience as well as product quality, up from 36 percent in 2014 and 58 percent in 2015. They did not name the source of those figures in the piece.
They also cited IDC Asia Pacific, which described the shift as customer intimacy at scale. IDC predicted that by 2018, 80 percent of business-to-consumer and 60 percent of business-to-business organisations would overhaul their digital front door. The aim was to handle 1,000 to 10,000 times as many customer touch-points as they did then.
The authors said the risk was lopsided. One strong digital experience could win a customer from a rival, and one poor one could lose that customer permanently. They also cited a Forrester study of 500 organisations worldwide. It found that many firms accepted the importance of digital in principle but had not turned that into a firm focus on software quality and speed.
User experience versus customer experience
The authors said the two terms were often mixed up, which confused IT teams mapping the customer journey. User experience, they said, covered a person’s interaction with one product. Customer experience covered the whole lifecycle, from discovery through action and feedback to support.
A customer-centric strategy therefore had to cover tangible, functional qualities such as ease of access, use and navigation. It also had to cover less visible human factors: cultural fit, psychology and emotion.
The testing approach they proposed
Live the customer journey. Customer experience architects would build journey maps and end-user personas. Personas would differ by intent, whether that was finding information, making a financial transaction or buying online. The intent and the map would then set priorities among functional, performance, security and usability testing.
Assess maturity. A company would first measure itself against a customer-centric maturity model. That would show how well customer experience matched the business vision and how far different parts of the organisation worked together. It would also show which measures, tools and technologies were already in use.
Execute the strategy. Testing would not stop at release. The authors wanted post-production quality assurance built into an extended test lifecycle. It would draw on crowd testing, social sentiment analysis, support-ticket analysis and non-functional requirements testing. Together these would expose defects in live systems and show what users needed next. The architects would decide which techniques to use, and when, where and how, including A/B testing and social analytics.
They closed on the point that customer experience testing was a continuous journey. New channels and devices would keep changing it, and architects would need to follow interactions across channels and look at post-purchase behaviour.
How the argument held up
Later research commissioned by Cognizant backed parts of this view. Its Quality@Speed study, conducted by Forrester Consulting and titled “The Key to Digital Success”, reported that 78 percent of enterprises saw quality and speed as the main factor in project success. It also reported that 41 percent of companies had delivered faster after adopting Agile or DevOps principles, and that 75 percent had formed DevTest teams to bring developers and testers closer together.
In June 2018, Cognizant commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey 517 IT and line-of-business decision makers in the US and the UK. The study found that most respondents rated their own customer experience and front- and back-office integration highly. Deeper analysis showed gaps between those ratings and what companies said they actually did.
A separate Cognizant survey of more than 2,000 business professionals and consumers pointed the same way. It found that only 15 percent of respondents rated their company 9 or 10 out of 10 for online experience. The same study described a lack of consensus across departments and legacy infrastructure barriers.
The authors’ 2016 emphasis on maturity assessment and cross-departmental alignment matched these findings. Companies in the later surveys often rated themselves higher than their practices justified.