What makes a great digital user experience in banking?
There are several good answers for the question above: Innovation. Human-centered design. Speed. Those answers deserve an emphatic “yes.”
What about quality assurance (QA)? It needs to be near the top of the list—and a priority across all the channels you use to engage customers.
Consider digital account opening. An attractive interface and low-friction process flow won’t win customers if the experience doesn’t load or presents glitches. You lose potential customers to quality issues. They abandon their account applications and complete them with a competitor.
A recent study by Celent shows that 25% of banks have a digital account opening application completion rate of less than 20%. At the other end of the spectrum, 25% of banks have application completion rates greater than 60%. The study doesn’t get into the “whys” behind those numbers, but some banks are winning significantly more customers. A low-quality digital experience is often a contributor to sky-high abandonment rates.
Barriers to quality
In a traditional workflow, QA comes at the end of a siloed, rigid process. You develop a product or a feature. When it’s almost complete, you test it against a set of use cases. Then, you fix the issues. Time constraints can mean that only issues identified as major are fixed. This process is a leading cause of delays in releases, with some issues requiring significant rework. The testing is manual, which limits the number of use cases. So this delay-prone process misses many issues. Customers are sure to find—and be frustrated by—the problems missed.
Culture drives quality
Today, banks are creating the future of banking for the digital-first world. They’re investing in digital transformation and working to build the kinds of user experiences that consumers expect. Quality must play a central role in transformation. What’s the benefit of an innovative, well-designed digital banking experience that doesn’t perform?
Success requires a new approach to QA. It calls for non-stop QA and a culture in which everyone feels accountable to improve quality. You replace siloed workflows with more connected ways of working. Within such a culture, quality is always top of mind—not a stage at the end of development. This culture takes root when you upskill teams in modern Agile methodologies, including DevSecOps. And when you empower internal teams with tools that help them get the most from their training and skills.
Testing is still the foundation for QA, but it’s no longer simply one discrete phase in the development process. QA never stops. If you think of DevSecOps as a left-to-right process, testing shifts “left” into development and “right” into operations. You achieve it by translating business requirements into testable units early, and by bringing production data into testing activities. It’s a way of working that addresses issues before they drain internal resources or annoy customers.
Automation backed by AI
Automation and AI-based smart analytics tools are essential to a QA process that never stops. They uncover opportunities to fix issues early. You create and run test use cases in simulated environments with synthetic data that’s based on real-life scenarios. This enables your team to find issues, test fixes, and keep advancing projects. You make the digital experience you offer to customers better as you propel release cycles forward. Within your workflow, you also gather feedback from a community of users, automating the process of capturing their feedback and testing fixes based on their comments.
Continuous transformation for banks
At Amdocs, we help banks and other highly regulated businesses accelerate transformation and enable continuous QA. Our team includes more than 3,000 quality engineers. They use advanced automation and AI to enable cognitive and predictive QA. This helps businesses deliver better products to customers faster. As importantly, we make training and upskilling core to transformation efforts. When banks work with us, their teams are empowered with the skills they need to build high-quality digital experiences for customers and internal audiences. It’s a proven approach that helps cut time to market 50% and reduces testing costs by up to 30%.
At Amdocs, we build our QA approach using Ginger by Amdocs. It’s our open-source automation framework that accelerates continuous testing via automation and orchestration capabilities. Your team takes advantage of end-to-end flows built using automation scripts. It’s a formula for continuous QA: Automation, AI, and open-source technology driven by an upskilled team.
Bank gains 100% coverage
A European bank came to us with a problem. Its technology landscape was too complex and expensive, especially for fee management. Plus, the fee management process delivered a poor customer experience. We helped the bank streamline the processes with a unified system. As part of that, we helped the bank transform QA. Not only were its testing methods complex, but they were also highly manual. This impacted release schedules, with on-time releases rarer than delays. We worked with the bank to discover and automate manual processes. Using our testing tools, we collaborated with them to build non-stop QA. AI-based smart analytics tools spot issues faster. The bank is fixing issues sooner—well before they drain development resources or impact customers.
With 100% coverage of the bank’s business requirements, the bank is delivering a better customer experience. The bank saw a 50% improvement in its customer satisfaction scores. Improvements in on-time releases were equally dramatic. The bank has largely ended release delays. After transforming its QA processes with automation, the bank released 13 monthly, two quarterly, and one major release on time.
A transformation ally for banks
Our team helps businesses in highly regulated industries achieve digital transformation goals. We take ownership of outcomes, as our 96% project success rate shows. Talk to us about your transformation goals.
