Delighting Customers With Quality Engineering

In a hyper-competitive retail environment, customer experience can be the deciding factor between success and failure. Retail businesses are increasingly leveraging digital platforms to meet the evolving demands of customers, whether through e-commerce websites, mobile apps, or omnichannel shopping experiences. However, the key to providing a seamless and satisfying digital experience lies in the behind-the-scenes discipline of Quality Engineering (QE).

Quality Engineering encompasses a comprehensive approach to ensuring that the software used by retailers works flawlessly, delivering on performance, usability, security, and reliability. Quality Engineering has become essential in delighting customers and building long-lasting brand loyalty.

Why Quality Engineering Matters in Retail

Retail has rapidly shifted from being product-centric to experience-centric. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, according to a study by PwC. For retail businesses, poor software performance — whether it's a mobile app crashing during a sale or a website bogged down by traffic — can mean lost sales, diminished trust, and negative reviews.

Here’s where Quality Engineering comes into play. Retailers like Amazon and Alibaba have long understood that any friction in the digital experience can have immediate consequences on customer behaviour. Even minor bugs or delays in system response times can lead to cart abandonment, eroding a company’s bottom line. Studies show that 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. With the stakes so high, ensuring a flawless experience through Quality Engineering is essential to success.

Reducing Friction, Enhancing Delight

One of the major goals of Quality Engineering in the retail sector is to reduce friction for customers. This means eliminating obstacles that prevent users from having smooth interactions with your digital platforms. Whether a customer is shopping from a desktop, mobile device, or in-store kiosk, consistency and reliability are key.

Let's take the case of Walmart, which invested heavily in improving its mobile app experience by focusing on performance and stability. Walmart's engineers introduced automated testing frameworks to identify potential issues in the app earlier in the software delivery lifecycle, and certainly long before it impacted customers. As a result, the app became more reliable, leading to faster load times, fewer crashes, and a more enjoyable user experience. This approach contributed significantly to Walmart's growth in online sales, especially during major events like Black Friday, when load times and app performance are mission-critical.

Incorporating automated testing and continuous integration practices ensures that any changes or updates to the software don't disrupt the user experience. Automated tests can simulate various user scenarios, ensuring that everything from product searches to payments runs smoothly across different devices and operating systems. For instance, the German fashion retailer Zalando uses automated testing to conduct over 200,000 daily tests, ensuring that every feature update is robust and customer-ready. And in an example of automation that Roq has delivered for one of its retail clients, test execution time was reduced by 98%, achieving 11,000 tests overnights through a newly introduced BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) approach.

Personalisation and Testing for Scale

In retail, personalisation is crucial. Customers now expect tailored experiences—think product recommendations based on past purchases or personalised promotions during the checkout process. Quality Engineering ensures that these personalised experiences work as intended. Testing the accuracy of recommendation algorithms, verifying the display of personalised offers, and assessing the seamlessness of customer data integration are all vital aspects that Quality Engineers tackle.

Consider Sephora, the beauty retailer. The company’s app is rich with personalised content, including skin tone matching tools, virtual try-ons, and personalised beauty tips. Sephora’s engineering teams employ continuous testing to ensure these features deliver the expected results, without technical glitches that could frustrate users. The result is a highly engaging, personalised experience that has become a significant part of Sephora's success in the digital world.

Additionally, scaling these personalised experiences is a major challenge in retail, particularly during peak-traffic events such as Black Friday or the Christmas shopping season. Without proper load testing and performance validation, even the most well-designed apps can crumble under the pressure. 

Ensuring Security and Trust

For online and omnichannel retailers, customer trust is paramount. Data breaches or payment errors can result in significant brand damage. A report by IBM found that the average cost of a data breach in retail was around $3.86 million in 2020, not to mention the reputational damage and potential loss of customers.

To safeguard customer trust, Quality Engineering must emphasise security testing. Whether it’s testing for vulnerabilities in payment gateways or ensuring proper encryption of customer data, these tests are essential in preventing cyberattacks and data breaches.

How Retailers Can Implement Quality Engineering

1. Adopt Agile and DevOps Practices: By integrating Quality Engineering into an agile framework, retailers can shorten the feedback loop between developers and testers. This allows for faster iteration, bug fixes, and feature deployment, which are critical in maintaining a competitive edge in retail.

2. Automate Testing: Automation is key to scaling quality. It allows for repetitive tests to be conducted quickly and efficiently across multiple environments, ensuring the software behaves correctly under various conditions. This is particularly useful in the retail sector where testing needs to account for multiple devices, operating systems, and user behaviours.

3. Focus on End-User Experience: Continuous testing of user flows, from browsing to checkout, is vital. This is where usability testing and A/B testing come in handy, providing insights into how real users interact with the system and what improvements can enhance the overall experience.

4. Load Testing and Scalability: Retailers must prepare for the unpredictable—whether it's the next viral product or holiday rush. By stress-testing systems under high loads, retailers can ensure their platforms can handle peak traffic without performance degradation.

5. Invest in Security Testing: Customer trust is everything in retail, so comprehensive security tests should be considered as part of the Quality Engineering process.

Offer the best experience

In 2024 the success of a retail business is directly tied to the quality of its digital offerings. By improving performance, ensuring security, and delivering personalised, flawless experiences, Quality Engineering helps retailers not only meet but exceed customer expectations.

As we’ve discussed in some of the examples in this article, investing in Quality Engineering directly correlates with increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue growth. Delighting your customers isn’t just about offering the best products; it’s about offering the best experience—and that’s where Quality Engineering shines.

To discuss how Roq can support you in delighting your customers this Black Friday and beyond, get in touch with a member of the team – ask@roq.co.uk