In an Everything-Digital environment, businesses must stress on operations that provide accurate, rich and engaging digital content, and distribute it satisfactorily across channels to improve accessibility coupled with a high-end user experience. This translates into an inordinate focus on infrastructure and application performance, process optimization and stability, usability, design, functionality and security. Together, these deliver what every organization wants: digital assurance.

Digital assurance is vital. It makes a morethan-significant difference to business performance. For example Shopzilla, one of the largest online retailers, unlocked a 7-12% increase in revenue through a 5 second speed up in page loads. The speed up resulted in a 25% increase in page views, leading to improved revenues and a 50% reduction in hardware deployments.

Staples redesigned its website to make it easier for customers to place orders, thereby increasing the likelihood of repeat purchasers. Staples reported that repeat customers had increased from 180,000 to 300,000 over a single quarter after the new design had been tested.

In addition, speed is of the essence. In 2013, during a 34-minute blackout at the Super Bowl, Oreo sent out a Tweet that said, “You can still dunk in the dark.” Some believe that the Tweet resulted in better customer response than the actual Oreo Super Bowl ad that had a multimillion dollar budget2 For Digital Marketing to be agile, systems need to be continuously tested and kept on the ready for a response on scale, else opportunities can be lost.

What this tells us is elementary but often overlooked: digital businesses can achieve considerably more with greater ease than traditional businesses -- but they are also vulnerable to multiple points of failure.

Today industries across the globe are leveraging innovations in digital technology to reinvent and transform their businesses. They bank on an omni-channel strategy for deeper market penetration. And they use digital content to effectively market their services and products and provide great customer engagement through digital user experience.

The challenge is to do this seamlessly and consistently across platforms, operating systems and device form factors – all of which continue to evolve. In addition, content itself is growing in velocity and formats. Today, rich streaming content is the norm, digital decoupling is being employed for effectively managing digital marketing operations, and devices and consumer actions are unleashing a flood of data that must be assimilated, validated, crunched and put into the feedback loop of businesses. There is no room for error. Testing infrastructure, applications, process, usability and design, functionality and system security using standardized tools is an effective and essential method to create digital assurance. This insulates systems from unexpected failure.

The strategy of rigorous testing is relevant to internal, employee-facing applications as much as it is to external customer-facing applications. Businesses must therefore ensure they have a 360 degree test strategy that prevents failure at both levels.

References

1. Michael Wang. Real Usability Success Stories [online]. Great Web Design Tips. Available at: http:// www.great-web-design-tips.com/web-usability/78. html [Accessed 13 Nov. 2014]
2. Oreo’s Super Bowl Tweet: ‘You Can Still Dunk In The Dark’ [online]. The Huffington Post. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/oreos-super-bowl-tweet-dunk-dark_n_2615333.html [Accessed 13 Nov. 2014]