Beginning as two separate entities, Quality Assurance (QA) and Customer Experience (CX) have historically existed independently in software development and support services. But as customer engagement and retention have become increasingly important, companies have strived to maintain the engagement of their user bases.

When both services are required, operating a CX and QA team under the same roof, or integrating an outsourced CX team with your internal QA, can provide benefits that would be unattainable without cross-team integration.

QA teams are the knowledge powerhouse for post- and pre-release problems, workarounds and usability advice for software products. Harnessing such benefits produces a more informed, reactive and efficient CX team. In turn, this complements the ongoing hard work that goes into understanding and adopting the client’s culture, whatever the product.

The feedback loops that integrated CX and QA teams create are symbiotic, and provide a wide range of benefits to both teams. Who better to inform your CX Agents about processes, limitations and known issues than your own QA team? With their unrivalled experience, QA teams can be the guiding light to help keep your response times fast and your customer interactions helpful and effective. Well-informed CX Agents reduce costs and add value with superior customer interactions and faster ticket processing.

This knowledge sharing is not just a cross-team benefit, but also cross-language. Technical issues unique to, or reported in, one language within the user base can be translated by CX, conveyed to QA, and subsequently applied across all versions.

Similarly, linguistic content or formatting issues in the user interface of one language may provide an early warning for other languages. When managed well, this multilingual, multidirectional information flow is a formidable reservoir of knowledge that provides unparalleled efficiency across your services.

With a more informed CX team, customer reported issues become far more valuable. CX Agents can use that shared QA knowledge, backed up by dedicated training, to help support customers and report to QA in a way that’s far more efficient, exact and useful to the QA team.

Similarly, information fed back to QA from customers can also improve testing, allowing QA to focus on popular areas of the application or on aspects and sections where most issues are encountered.

This feedback loop adds value to both teams. It reduces time spent investigating issues by QA, and reduces the length and number of tickets to CX. It’s a way for Agents and Testers to constantly learn from each other, while creating a project-wide knowledge bank that benefits stakeholders at every level.

And this in-depth understanding doesn’t stop with the integrated teams.

Informed Agents can create informed customers. More accurate and knowledgeable responses from CX can help create a user base that shares this knowledge through online forums and social media. This can help decrease ticket counts and increase customer engagement. Greater satisfaction in CX responses is a direct user benefit, and increases trust from customers who receive a fast, informed, and efficient service.

Increases in efficiency and productivity across teams can of course be measured.

Integration provides an opportunity to align common KPIs between QA and CX. Both services value productivity, quality, and client satisfaction. And by integrating these measurements, you can gather invaluable insight into how your services perform as a whole, rather than as isolated units.

As an experienced global partner, PTW can offer standalone or integrated QA and CX services to provide all-round support to development teams, applications, and their communities.

With a heritage in the highly competitive interactive entertainment industry, we bring our vast experience in fast-paced, changeable markets to our clients and their products in many innovative industries worldwide.