Today’s global markets are rapidly evolving, with continual shifts in customer needs and preferences across both B2B and B2C industries. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to deliver innovative, high-quality product experiences that retain customers — which ultimately limits the ability for companies to remain competitive.
Many companies focus on quickly launching features to attract new customers, but it’s product quality that has the greatest impact on the customer experience. That’s because delivering features too fast without adequate testing introduces bugs, leading to a frustrating customer experience.
The question is: how can your organization balance innovation and quality to keep existing customers happy? DevOps and quality engineering allow development teams to introduce new features faster with much more confidence. This is the key to improving customer happiness, and in turn, increasing business resilience in the long run.
The Impact of User Experience on Customer Retention
Companies spend enormous amounts of resources on building a brand that attracts new customers, but a poor user experience can destroy any loyalty in a matter of minutes. In fact, 76% of consumers have said it’s now easier than ever to choose another brand after a subpar experience. A frustrating product issue encourages many customers to look to a competitor that might make them feel more valued through a stronger user experience.
While marketing teams focus on positive customer experiences to drive sales, the responsibility for customer satisfaction largely shifts to the product team after the purchase. That’s because a key contributor to poor user experiences are bugs and other product defects that impact usability. The product team, therefore, can directly improve the quality of a user experience by reducing the amount of customer-facing product issues.
In B2C markets, consumers know that they can easily turn to a similar product from a competitor, so they expect a very high-quality and innovative experience to stick around. And these consumer expectations are creeping into B2B markets as well. That means product quality plays a fundamental role in building a positive customer experience that retains both B2C and B2B customers.
More Testing Leads to Higher Customer Satisfaction
We already discussed how software testing supports customer happiness during transition phases — such as DevOps adoption — but a quality engineering strategy is crucial to the long-term growth of a business as well. Since quality engineers are responsible for quality throughout the entire user journey, they’re also critical to maintaining a competitive customer experience.
The most straightforward way to improve quality is to increase testing throughout the development process. This might sound expensive and time consuming, but testing early and often can actually minimize the effort to fix bugs. Through automated and AI-augmented testing tools, quality engineers can more easily contribute to delivering a market-leading product that stands out from the competition.
In short, quality engineering is an essential link between development teams and customers. By investing in automated software testing, companies can make a direct impact on customer satisfaction and customer retention without slowing down new product releases.
Customer Happiness Builds Business Resilience
Most companies recognize that faster release cycles enable development teams to bring new features to market faster, which allows them to attract new customers with innovation during growth periods. But market contractions reveal the true resilience of a business — and a key measure of this is customer retention.
For most businesses, returning customers generate the most revenue because customer acquisition costs continue to rise for both B2C and B2B markets. The ability to improve quality through automated software testing, therefore, can have a greater impact on revenue than delivering new features for some companies.
Continuously improving quality throughout the user experience means existing customers are more likely to remain customers, even during market contractions. That means increasing customer happiness is the key to building business resilience and remaining competitive despite shifts in consumer expectations and market conditions.
By investing in software testing as part of a quality engineering strategy, companies are really investing in their existing customers. This is the key to growing a competitive and resilient business in today’s loyalty-driven world.
Content provided by Mabl
