CRM Testing: What? How? And Goals.

• Pabitra Kumar Sahoo
• December 21, 2021
• 2 Comments

The functionality of any IT based product is the driving factor of its success. So, it is critical to check and double check for the functionality of your product whenever possible. The product has to also comply with the regulatory norms and ethics thoroughly. Apart from these, there are numerous tests an application, software, website has to pass in order to work fully and be satisfactory to the masses as well. Here, we discuss about one of such testing conducted on an IT product for betterment of the product and company. So let us begin with, CRM testing: What? How? And Goals.

First, let us help you understand about CRM in brief.

What is CRM?

CRM is short for “Customer Relationship Management”. For any sales or marketing oriented business, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a vital part. CRM includes the required important customer or userbase data. By analyzing this data, predicting the user behavior and trends becomes easy.

Although, first appearance of CRM systems was more than mere databases for customer details, tracking sales, and sending marketing mails. However, CRMs are now responsible to hold around 75% cloud hosted new updates, processes, linkage of business operations and enterprise applications.

CRM testing is the analysis of your CRM system’s functionality and proper operation. Furthermore, CRM systems can be fully customized. Such that, if you want a new CRM set-up for a new venture of yours; you can easily transfer the existing data to new CRM system.

But this in turn makes them CRM system more complex. Because this data transfer is kind of linkage or integration of multiple CRMs. From different business departments to plethora of company applications, binding every aspect of business is easily achievable with CRM systems. So, addition of each element makes the CRM systems more complex. Therefore, CRM testing is crucial before the launch and after integration as well.

Moreover, integrating the entire business operations and application to one CRM system raises the stakes for any company. As if the CRM has any vulnerability, it is directly a threat to the credentials, data and business side of any company. So, the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems require heavy and thorough testing to be operational and usable.

Now, let us discuss about how the testing is done.

How is CRM Testing done?

For the best support and operation of CRM systems for betterment of business and customer experience; businesses require a CRM testing strategy. Planning for new updates to data migrations and any error during that phase is integral part of testing strategy.

CRM testing has evolved way more than just assuring the data quality. It now consists of making sure each and every component works, departmental/business workflow integration synchronization, business objectives are seamless.

CRM testing is now an amalgamation of many different testing aspects. We explain the main aspect of CRM testing in brief below: –

-Data Testing

In this, the testing engineers verify the operations of the CRM systems are performed correctly when new data is fed. Plus, it is also made sure that the entire system data is retrievable after it. Moreover, the data depicting the reports, graphs and charts are represented correctly.

-Performance Testing

This is to be done during the peak usage time. Testing engineers ensure the loading speed and waiting period for any operation within the CRM system is not more than permissible. It should be as less as possible. Employees and managers should be able to use the CRM software during the testing pastes. This ensures that the CRM system can handle loads. Moreover, it also assures that the training received by the employees was apt for them to use the CRM system successfully.

-Security Testing

Poorly stored sensitive customer data is a punishable offence. The government is intolerant towards companies with such unethical practices. Storing your sensitive business data is crucial for development of business. CRM systems contain loads of sensitive data regarding the brand and its userbase. This data should not be accessible to outsiders( hackers/individuals outside company). This data includes, address, names, contact details, mail id, and etc. of employees as well as customers. The more people who are using your CRM system, the harder it is to ensure that your system is airtight from a data security perspective.

-CRM problems testing exposes

CRM testing is to be done before and after new updates are introduced to the system.

Moreover, additional threats or problems might be highlighted by regular testing. Like slow or non-intuitive UI, non-accurate data representation, faulty charts and analytics and etc.

Finally, let’s discuss the goals.

Goals for CRM Testing.

By deciding the optimal goals for CRM, you and your company can benefit a lot from CRM Testing.

1) Increased customer retention

Here the goal is to keep the customers coming back to the product for more and more time. 70% of the customers which churn(leave) the product is because they believe that the company doesn’t care about its users.

We mention a few tricks and techniques to make the user realize company intentions:

• Rewards and prizes for repeat customers and random lottery.
• Sending personalized emails and messages to customers based on their purchase/usage history.
• Rewarding on certain milestones with the consumer usage.
• Feedback and surveys to ensure the satisfaction from userbase.

With CRM, tracking and rewarding the right customers become easy.

2) Shortening sales cycle

The goal is to fasten the process of sales and closing deals quicker. CRM was developed for this purpose.

Manually entering every customer feedback is way more difficult than CRM system tracking and auto-tracking it for you. Moreover, sales automation is also possible with CRM systems.

3) Increase Sales

The goal is to increase sales. This can be done by segregating the users on basis of their usage, demographics, and requirement.

Using CRM software to track what best customers have in common ensures this.

CRM can differentiate using demographic info based on:

• Age
• Race
• Occupation
• Gender
• Marital status
• Income
• Education

And previous interactions with your company:

• Website visits
• Form submissions
• Content downloads
• Email opens and replies
• Past purchases

Therefore, this helps in prioritization the customers according to their demographics and requirement. Eventually increasing the sales.

4) Decrease the CAC

The goal is to reduce the spend per sale. This includes reducing the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) required to close a deal.

For this you need:

1. Decrease how much you spend on marketing and sales, and/or
2. Increase the number of customers you acquire.

CRM helps you do both:

1. By segregation, you focus on important customers and sales more.
2. You save time and money by automating parts of your sales and marketing processes

Conclusion

We now conclude with CRM testing: What? How? And Goals. We sincerely hope we helped you understand CRM testing: what? how? And goals.

Finally, you require a testing provider as your solid partner. Here’s where QualySec comes to play its part.

QualySec is India’s best QA, pen-testing and CRM testing service provider. Moreover, with their best team of testing engineers and rock-solid dedication, QualySec guarantees best quality product delivery!

Contact us right away, to begin with world-class CRM testing for your product and brand!