Quality Assurance in Call Centers - The Power of QA

Don’t underestimate the power of Quality Assurance

What is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance (QA) is the systematic and planned set of actions that guarantees that the products and the process conform to standards, requirements, and procedures. Processes encompass entire activities involved in designing, creating, improving, as well as handling the software.

“That’s the dictionary definition. QA in real life are those instances when you recheck your doorknob while getting out of your house, or make sure your little one has a clean diaper before stepping out, or in fact double check your stovetop is still hot even though you switched off the main switch or for that matter pull your car doors to check after you’ve locked them, etc ”

Why do startups need QA?

Startups rely on the problem-solving nature of their service/product in order to succeed. Your offering needs to solve a problem for the end-user over the long term. Satisfaction is the real benchmark. That is why Quality Assurance lends context to your service/product. Because regardless of how good the development is, there are many unpredictable variables in the real world that will affect the performance. QA ensures that your product is truly able to deliver the best in the context where it is targeted. Essentially, a QA analyst helps keep developers in check. Not only that, but also slowing down their progress in the short term, it helps them develop a much more efficient, higher-quality end product. Andrea Corey, VP of QA dept. Eloqua (Oracle), also advises startups to use some Agile methods for their QA process.

“Imagine yourself starting a job, getting hitched & basically starting life just about a few months back. Isn’t every buck an extra more special which you would like to spend on the most useful and important things? Now that means you do much more research on anything you want to buy first online then maybe offline then again online before walking through the store and making the actual transaction. And once you have done that you feel more confident about what you have. In fact, now you are ready to have those used by your spouse/friends/family anybody for that matter since it is already tested and verified by you. That’s exactly why QA is good for beginners. “

Benefits of QA

Confidence: Confidence in a product or service is the most crucial component for its longevity. When a product actually knows itself, is aware of its strengths and its weakness, it provides an honest experience for the end-user and an honest testimony for the investor to refer to. Quality Assurance is the absolute process in order to make sure that whether it is a prototype or the final product, it is geared towards delivering the best of its ability. That’s what wins your startup the brownie points from the consumer and the investor.

Stability:

As the saying goes “There is always one more bug to find.” No matter how meticulous you are, no matter how many redundancies you acquire, there will always be one small chink in the suit and that could be the reason for failure. Or it could be the reason for improvement. But the latter is possible only when you run the quality checks diligently. Only when you make sure that your product is a stable facility that satisfies the want/need with reliability and will continue to do so, that you switch to the fast lane of success.

Security:

Whether it is collaborators or customers or investors, the question of security is a credible factor to make a decision about any startup and its product/service. Identifying loopholes will make your work on the bugs, iterate and re-iterate, bringing the end result closer to a stable and more reliable product. Also, for your customer, a reliable product is one that is secure and tested. Hence, security is also an important function of quality assurance and is very much needed to kickstart your product in the market.

Reduced Costs:

You can reduce costs because there is less wastage and re-working of faulty products as the product is checked at every stage

Team Motivation:

It can help improve worker motivation as workers have more ownership and recognition for their work (see Herzberg). With all staff responsible for the quality, this can help the firm gain marketing advantages arising from its consistent level of quality

Planned Releases:

It Helps make Your Releases Trouble-Free & get stable versions quickly ensuring the quality & control of deployment

“All in all, complete Bragging Rights that your decision and research have worked out really well; therefore any further transactions require your approval at home or outside.”

How ZIWO QA Process Works?

At Ziwo currently, we are using a combination of automatic and manual Test techniques which is better than what we had earlier but we have a long way to go. The goal is to come up with a fully functional stable test suite that can be easily triggered by anyone at any time. This will make our releases trouble-free & get a stable version quickly ensuring the Quality & Control of Deployment. We would also like to Align QA Process With the Development by

Getting Involved in the Deployment Process

Solid Manual Test Suite

Stable Automation Regression Suite for the Front End Functions

Automation Backend / API Suite
Ziwo software currently includes 4 types of QA:

Manual testing: QA team can launch it manually, not to mention they can check the software’s correctness, user experience, and report bugs.

Performance Testing: This happens in two aspects
1. Ziwo agent and admin performance impact with bulk voice requests.
2. Performance impact while multiple users using the ziwo (Admin + Agent using Locustio scripts (This is an open-source python based module provide simulate bulk user behavior on ziwo)

API Testing: We have an automated API test Suite that has been designed using open source tools with over 2000 test cases

UI Automation Testing – Simulate the user flow which will act like a real user via browser and will replicate the flow. The automation framework used is Protractor / Cucumber ( BDD ) It handles browser functionalities and user flow for complete regression testing.