Quality Assurance for CRM

CRM allows companies to create, manage, and maintain relationships with existing and future customers and robustly organize their processes. CRM is an empowering tool that helps organizations increase their competitive edge and market worth. This is precisely why a CRM system, much like any other business element, needs to maintain quality.  

There is a strong relationship between Quality Assurance (QA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and we will be discussing that in detail through this post. In this post, we are going to shed some light on what you need to do to ensure that the core competencies of your CRM are adequately cared for! 

Common Problems in CRM 

If you are wondering whether you need to get your CRM tested or not, the following problems might help you decide. 

1.    Little User Adoption 

User adoption rate can help you understand whether your CRM is running smoothly. If you are logging in incorrect information or you have missing customer data, you are in for a mess. Improper customer classification and sluggish or problematic UI will eventually cause problems across your marketing, sales, and customer service department. Your employees will be discouraged from using the CRM, and you will lose out! 

2.    Dissatisfied Clients 

We all know how vital customer management is for companies. Happy clients mean that the company is doing well. Therefore, if customer satisfaction is hampered due to let’s say unnecessary notifications, missed appointments, lost complaint data, wrong emails sent to clients, and delivery delays, customers are disappointed and dissatisfied. 

3.    Lack of Visibility for Customer Management 

If your stats are unreliable or changed improperly due to poor integration between CRM and ERP, you are likely to make decisions that do not serve to the best advantage of the company. This misleading data can be disastrous, and you will be making strategic decisions that have a lot rooting on them with a blindfold on. You also lose your competitive edge as your competitors are working with a reliable and tested CRM hence have full visibility of all their data. 

4.    Information Seepage 

If you have not made sure that your CRM complies with the regional and international data security regulations, then you might be at the risk of losing your confidential company information or sensitive consumer data to unauthorized users. This would put the company at risk of lawsuits from clients and consumers. Therefore role-based access is one of the essential needs of a CRM using company. 

Now let’s discuss the elephant in the room. How do you get started with CRM testing? Well, I have prepacked some perquisites for you to make the decisions a lot smoother and time efficient. It would be best if you keep the following aspects in mind: 

• A well-laid-out testing process 

You need to ensure that the QA lead has devised a plan after he has done an in-depth analysis of your existing CRM and its requirements specifications. The test plan should naturally comprise a proper schedule, criteria for both pass/fail scenarios and well-defined roles and responsibilities for the team. 

• An Experienced Testing Team 

A testing team will make or break your CRM quality assurance process. Ideally, testing teams should have a handful of testing experts who are well aware of the CRM testing specifics and usual scenarios.  

• Automation Testing should always be on the table 

Automation testing is exceptionally efficient when it comes to time-consuming and data-oriented tests such as regression and usability testing. However, it is essential to note that automation testing is more useful when it comes to long term testing projects. 

• Focus on Improving Testing Quality 

A professional testing team is devoted to maintaining quality throughout all project stages. They should regularly revise and improve test cases and test scenarios. If the company is using automation testing, then this becomes even more vital. 

There are various other specific focus points that a tester should pay close attention to when checking a CRM system for quality assurance purposes. It is always a good idea to create a checklist, but before a tester even gets to that, he/she should ensure he understands what the use of a CRM is. A CRM system is meant to improve the sales and customer relationship management services of an organization. Since the whole idea of a CRM is to make everything more client-centric, the tester should thus focus on ensuring that relationship channels with the client, such as means of communication, are efficient. 

Additionally, if let’s say an organization is installing direct lines with any social media service, this should not delay communications with the client or, in any way, impact saved information such as chat history. Furthermore, a tester should ensure that the CRM is compatible with technologies that the business may incorporate, such as the IP-telephony functions such as call forwarding, recording, etc. 

It is also vital for companies to keep a check on the operations of robotics and triggers involved in their processes. For example, companies might use automatic responses or scheduled replies to their clients using specific templates. You might often find a lot of company promotional letters and newsletters in your inbox sometime after you register on a company site and not make any contact within a few hours. This is a tactic used by companies, and such processes need to be tested out before they can be set up. 

Moreover, companies often need to check CRM updates in terms of functionalities and bugs. It is essential for QA experts to review a CRM after updates, even if the CRM was tested before the new features. A talented and experienced QA expert understands that complex functionalities are prone to bugs, and not all CRM systems can cope with other services. Therefore, a lot of crucial bugs are detected during the integration process of CRM with other services. Bugs are also common when integrating social media services with communication channels. 

Conclusively, CRM and QA do share an integral bond as QA ensures that the core competencies of your CRM are adequately cared for. This allows the CRM to run smoothly, and thus, all dependent functionalities and processes run efficiently.