Confidently releasing quality software and digital experiences quickly is much easier said than done — especially in today’s world.
Why? Here are some areas to consider:
- QA testing teams are spread thin and can’t always thoroughly test the functionality and user experiences of their apps, leaving organizations unable to have confidence in their release decisions
- Ensuring quality across web and mobile creates a layer of complexity to testing, and doing so in multiple countries adds another layer
- Organizations want new releases yesterday, and teams sacrifice quality for speed
- Organizations struggle to get testing results from real users, particularly now during a global pandemic and lockdowns
At Applause, our testing services boost organizations in all these areas — and it’s a point of pride for us that our customers are realizing the benefits of those services. In our recent customer satisfaction survey, Applause earned a 49.9 net promoter score, the highest in the company’s history. According to industry research, the average NPS for a B2B company is between 25 and 33.
Based on our survey results, here are the three top reasons why customers love Applause.
Quality testing results are No. 1
We asked customers what they value most about their relationship with Applause, and 43.9% responded that it’s the quality of the testing results.
The quality of our testing results is tied to two factors — the strength of our global community of vetted and in-market QA testers, and our process to ensure customers receive valuable and significant bugs.
Sourcing from our global community, Applause provides custom testing teams for our clients, and those testing teams are outstanding at what they do. Our testers are vetted and rated (gold/silver/bronze) on an ongoing basis, and they’re incentivized to find valuable and reproducible bugs. Applause testers often provide video screenshots of the bugs, enabling customers to easily see what happened, reproduce it, and then determine if and how to fix the bug.
After our testers file a bug report, our team validates and triages all testing results. We remove any duplicate results and grade the bugs according to what’s significant for the customer. This ensures the customer receives actionable and significant bugs in their testing results.
“Applause’s testing team ensured that our chatbot worked to its full potential,” Meredith McNeill, QA Manager, Digital and Innovation at Dignity Health, said in a recent blog post on Dignity Health’s new coronavirus-related telehealth platform. “We were able to scale up our testing quickly and efficiently with their help. This was a high-priority project for us given the questions our patients have about COVID-19 that they want answered quickly without leaving their home, and we were able to execute it with Applause’s help.”
Coverage like no other
In our survey, 31.7% of respondents said they most value the coverage that Applause provides, which includes devices/operating systems, demographics and geography.
Device and OS fragmentation is a problem for organizations that want to test internally. Building a device lab is expensive. Using the power of its global community, Applause provides access to a near-endless list of devices and OSes. The size and diversity of the Applause community enables organizations to test in any region and on any device — desktop, mobile, smart TVs, IoT and more.
On top of that, Applause’s global community is, well, global. Applause can provide testers in any country, region or territory a customer needs, from the United States to Africa to Vietnam — and anywhere in-between.
“Applause helps us to test every device across multiple locations,” Patrick Gross, Engineering Lead QA at Mobimeo, said in a recent case study detailing Mobimeo’s partnership with Applause. “They can make sure that our testers are on the spot and use the transportation means that we need in the place where we want to test.”
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Faster than a speeding bullet
After quality and coverage, speed of results was ranked the No. 1 area of value by 14.6% of Applause customers.
Development moves faster today than it ever has before — and you can’t afford to slow down. Organizations are emphasizing Agile and DevOps methodologies to release quality software on a continuous basis, so they are understandably hesitant to implement new processes that could slow this down. However, our process at Applause is specifically designed to keep up with the Agile workflows of our fastest customers.
Here are a few ways we keep up with the pace of Agile:
- Applause’s fully managed service and vetted testing community handles all the logistics
- Applause’s teams quickly sources users based on demographics and geography
- Applause triages testing results quickly, evaluating every submitted bug report (removing any duplicates) and grading them according to severity level, enabling organizations to quickly determine how to address significant bugs
- Testing teams often work nights and weekends, delivering finished bug reports directly into organizations’ bug tracking systems so they’re available first thing in the morning
“When we needed to shift QA focus to our new coronavirus feature, all it took was one message to our Applause team,” Scott Chesrown, COO at K Health, said in a recent blog post detailing Applause’s telehealth testing work on K Health’s new app that slows the spread of COVID-19. “Our internal team was able to focus on releasing, while Applause managed testing.”
As we head into the second half of 2020 here at Applause, we’re excited to continue to serve our customers well.
“We want to emphasize how much we value our relationships with our customers,” Applause CEO Doron Reuveni said. “In our recent customer survey that evaluates our services, we received our highest score ever. We’re proud of the relationships we’re maintaining in these trying times, and look forward to continuing to partner with our customers.”
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