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By David Moore - Client Services Manager
Valentine’s day is the next big consumer event on the calendar, love it or loath it, it’s another opportunity for retailers to boost sales with Valentine specific marketing, products and offers. In fact, it’s a rather large opportunity, with Finder.com stating that a whopping £1.37 billion could be spent by UK customers for Valentine's Day in 2023 with around 40 million Brits (76%) expecting to ‘celebrate’ (or spend money on) Valentine's Day.
As well as the short-term gains, Brands will be hoping to pick up new long-term customers on the back of the event. However, for shoppers to really fall head over heels the experience has to be more than skin deep. They need to know there is a real, high quality relationship on offer with the brand to keep them coming back for more. After all, no one wants to be ghosted after the first date!
If I haven’t lost you with the puns and analogies around Valentine’s day and shopping experience then please stay with me a little longer. I want to explore how retail and ecommerce brands can leverage Quality Engineering (QE) to build quality into technology solutions, enabling rapid speed of change, boosting customer satisfaction and retention and therefore increasing revenues.
If you are in retail, I’m sure this sounds great, so what exactly is Quality Engineering?
There are lots of different definitions out there but at Roq we define Quality Engineering as – Quality being engineered across the whole Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), from inception, planning and development, right through to ‘deploy and maintain’.
The basic premise then is to ensure that Quality is considered at each stage so that the solutions we deliver have quality engineered in, after all “quality is never an accident, it is the result of intelligent effort” (thanks John Ruskin).
For retail technology solutions, be they apps, in-store VR shopping experiences, or the ecommerce returns process – this means if we start to build before we have considered quality, then we are likely to find that quality is lacking. If that’s the case, then when new products or features are tested, its far more likely we will find issues rather than validate that everything is working as intended. This makes technology development slow and costly to get right, or corners are cut and solutions are released that will turn customers off – both outcomes here are likely to leave retailers heart broken.
It is possible to avoid this and build a quality engineering ecosystem that will have your customers coming back for more. We at Roq know this to be true as we have worked with the retail and ecommerce industry since 2009 to help build robust processes that imbue quality, enable speed and delight customers.
We want to share that experience during an upcoming webinar, showcasing not just Roq’s ideas but also those of some retail industry leaders that have been on a QE journey – namely Adam Rockcliffe - Head of Quality Assurance at Specsavers, Mohua Kumar - Test and Quality Assurance Manager at Currys PC World and Steve Mellor - Test Architect at Roq. We will discuss the top 5 things to consider when implementing QE, which will cover
Strategy – what are you trying to achieve and how will you do it?
Culture – does this need to change, if so how?
Performance – on the technical side this needs to be considered
Automation – can we do more with less and at greater speed?
Exploratory testing – are you utilising your best people in the best way?
If that is of interest then please do sign up here for the webinar on 16th March 2023 at 11am GMT.
Now I’m off to buy some red roses, a tacky card and some chocolates – any suggestions on where I can receive a quality retail experience or perhaps who I should avoid?
Thanks for reading