Digital India: Challenges and Opportunities

By Sai Chintala, Senior Vice President, Global Enterprise Solutions, Cigniti Technologies

“To consistently meet or exceed customers’ expectations, firms must take a systematic approach to digital customer experience management... For firms to turn their digital customer experience into a sustainable source of competitive advantage, they must define a digital customer experience strategy and introduce robust tools and repeatable methodologies to support it.” – Forrester

India stands 4^th in the world in leveraging digital world, which is primarily contributed by 200 million people using social media and with over 250 million smart phone users. It is also observed that customers are increasingly finalizing purchases through search engines, digital banking, and social media inputs. It is also expected that this growth will be multi-fold and reach extraordinary milestones in the coming years.

The above stats make it clear that the end users are increasingly preferring digital (Web and Mobile) media, and thus further accelerating the new “Digital Trends” paradigm as opposed to traditional media. Enterprises that are bracing the changes and adopting “Digital Trends”, are keen on implementing “digital transformation” initiatives, to be “consumer” centric and stay competitive in the market. This shift is compelling organizations across verticals especially in BFSI, Retail, eCommerce, HCLS, Travel and Hospitality, et al to adapt to “Digital Trends”. Here are some more statistics:

• 250 million people using hand held devices
• Paytm has 20 million active users
• E-Commerce spend to reach $22 billion by end of 2015
• M-Wallets transaction reaching approx INR 70K crores

Above statistics clearly indicate that not just Banking Industry, but entire ecosystem comprising of Digital Commerce, e-Commerce, Payment solution providers, Technology providers are poised for exponential growth.

As is obvious, digital technology’s impact is visible in a big way due to widespread adoption of smartphones, tablets, and social apps. These offer great ease to customers who can use digital channels for interacting with financial institutions from anywhere anytime. The transformational potential of digital technology had undoubtedly eased the customer connect. Customer convenience is more evident in the smart usage of digital technology, like in the case of online, mobile and now social banking. However the real issue is to offer reliable, secure, and superior customer experience through these new ways, and software testing has a major role to play in ensuring these goals.

This immense usage of digital media makes testing digital technologies a key to ensure trust and confidence of the people. Digital technology implementation, thus, is the need of the hour to transform products & services and offer superior user experience to reach customer expectation.

5 Quality Assurance (QA) Initiatives for Digital Success

Cigniti recommends 5 QA initiatives to ensure digital success of businesses and to have a lasting impact on the customer experience that will improve productivity for Enterprises embarking on the journey of “Digital Transformation”. Cigniti has developed checklists, testlets, frameworks, processes, methodologies and best practices to ensure effective and efficient validations to support all 5 QA initiatives.

Cigniti’ methodologies, techniques, and specialists ensure that the Enterprises applications (created/updated for Digital Transformation) are thoroughly validated for “User Experience” covering responsive web design patterns, screen resolutions, accessibility, usability, content, navigation and more.

1. Continuous Testing

Continuous testing accelerates continuous integration and delivery. It provides project teams with continuous feedback and enables them to test earlier with greater coverage, thus removing traditional testing bottlenecks such as unavailability of test environments. Continuous monitoring between development and IT operations helps success of Agile teams using DevOps practices.

2. Omni-Channel Testing

If a product or service offering has to be made available to anyone, at anytime, anyplace, it should be available to customers using multiple devices with a single process spanning across multiple devices. Omni-Channel testing helps ensuring performance across all channels – whether offline or online.

3. Customer Experience Testing

The major factor that defines acceptance of a product or service when it goes live is the customer experience. It is crucial to test a product or service from the perspective of a customer. Unlike technical testing, customer experience testing can differ from assumptions of a product success. It impacts a product or a service success as it is based on customer expectations and emotions and also the physical performance and processes.

4. Cyber Security QA

As technology trends are playing a huge role in enhancing digital transformation, they are also introducing a threat environment to the organizations. Due to the emergence of new payment methods using digital technologies, organizations have been exposed further to new gateways of cyberattacks and fraud. Security testing, thus, is crucial and has business critical importance as organizations hold huge volumes of sensitive data of customers for which they are targeted daily.

5. Analytics and Testing

The ever growing demands related to speed, cost of delivery, and ease of online transactions is compelling. With applications attracting customers 24/7 across the globe, Testing Analytics for site performance, ROI, and conversions becomes critically important for accurate data for crucial decision making. Testing applications is crucial because it involves critical business validations, security confirmations, and high transparency for users.

To conclude, “Going Digital” has now become mainstream, and will continue to be the preferred choice by end-users and will grow exponentially in coming years. Organizations need to rethink their business processes to reap the real benefits of Digital Transformation and should keep in mind these QA initiatives that will help them ensure quality, security, and integrity of their services and products. Business providers must adopt digital transformation to avoid “Disruption” in their market place, build differentiating solutions, deliver unique value proposition that are end-user centric, and stay competitive.