Finally, the world has come to the realization that everything in the business should be customer-centered. By building the business around customer needs, you are more likely to get customers and keep them engaged in what you are doing. If you truly care about what your customers need and provide the best service, you will have clients and profit. If you are interested in sales only, you are likely to lose customers who see that you are indifferent toward them. 

It is time to test the customer experience. You may think that by testing and improving different components of your business, you can enhance the customer experience. It is partly true. Yet, if you test customer experience, you are likely to find out how customers behave at every step of their journey and what steps they never get to. Therefore, you will optimize stages that need improvement in the right order.

Moreover, you will be able to move from predicted behavior to actual behavior and optimize digital customer experience according to what is really happening and not to what is written on paper. 

So how do you test customer experience? Here you’ll learn the art of testing and how to optimize the digital customer experience according to test results. Get ready for the test with us!

Choose Your Fighter

The main question you have to ask yourself before getting started is “Who will test?” With customer experience testing, you have three options:

1. Сrowdsourcing: This is a group of people who are socioeconomically and culturally identical to your potential customer. They are not exactly customers, but they do share the same background. It can be a large group so that you can get feedback from very diverse sources. If you are able to hear from and satisfy these different buyer personas, you will be able to win the attention of many customers. 

2. In-House Employees: In-house testers know what to look for and how to give feedback. However, they are not customers. You can put yourself in the customers’ shoes, but you will never be able to be them. Therefore, results can be not full.
3. 
Control Group: It is a group of potential customers. They are not close to customers like in the first group, and they are not trying to be customers as in the second case. This is the target audience in its finest. It is easy to follow their customer journey, and it will be more realistic than you will ever be able to build in your head. 


You may combine groups or choose only one, depending on what kind of feedback you want to hear. If you want to satisfy a bigger number of clients and attract more people, choose the first one. If you want professionals to test your business and take control of the process, you are free to choose the second option. In the case where you want to be as precise as possible and get a real customer journey and digital customer experience unfolding in front of you, the third option is designed for you. 

Create a Customer Journey

Follow your customers on every step of the customer journey and find out what makes them stop at different stages or what keeps them engaged. You can learn what features customers lack while using your app or product by living through their typical day. Such an approach could also help you identify at which stage of a customer journey you might be losing most of your clients and at which stage you are gaining them. After the evaluation of the results, you can work on the weak sides and enhance the strong ones. If you feel that you don’t have enough knowledge to create a correct customer journey, you can take a course about that on the edX educational platform as it offers many programs on this matter.

For example, you develop a mindfulness app. Your customer has been busy and forgot about their 15-minute session during lunch. Do you have notifications? They had a tough day at work. How will you motivate them? They feel like they are not making any progress. Do you have their results map? Follow a day or a week of the customer, and you will know exactly what they need.

Source: helloericritter.com

Get Customer-Facing Teams Involved

Nobody gets a customer better than a customer and or someone who faces customers and their problems every day. In order to get the best digital customer experience testing plan, involve teams other than quality assurance teams. Sales and customer service are not experts in testing, but they may give you a hint on what needs a closer look. They have been on the real-life battlefield, and they know more real experiences than predicted experiences. 

Customer support and sales teams can conduct surveys in order to understand the level of customer satisfaction with the service provided and to find the main areas of improvement.

Test Emotional Experiences

When it comes to digital customer experience, we deal with human beings—not only tech sides of the product matter. People have complex psychological and emotional patterns that affect their experience. 

You want your customers to be attached to your product, and it is possible by implementing different techniques. You can convey important messages through your channels to support them. You can make them smile with funny messages. You can go personal by congratulating them on birthdays, making cultural-appropriate campaigns, asking how they feel while using the app, etc. 

Sometimes you really can excuse the product’s small flaws just because it makes you feel great, and it really does matter. 

Summing Up

There are only four steps between you and customer experience testing. These four steps will bring you closer to a customer-centered business and the great benefits that it contains.

Choose your testers, follow the customer journey, create a cross-team working experience, and do not forget that customers are humans and have emotions. As simple as that!