With the digital world moving faster than ever before and customer expectations evolving along with it, digital transformation is no longer just a fancy buzzword. It’s now an essential part of any financial services business strategy – something that became all the more apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Successful digital transformation strategies are crucial to unlocking more revenue, customer satisfaction, and efficient processes. But without performance testing, all that money you’re pouring into new software, tech talent, and team training could all be for nothing.
If your goal is to enhance customer experiences for your financial services business and compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace, then you need a solid performance testing plan to get the most out of your digital transformation investments and make your strategy a resounding success.
In this blog, we’re exploring why performance testing is the best and most essential tool in your digital transformation and customer experience arsenal. But, before we get into the benefits of performance testing, let’s take a look at exactly what this testing method actually entails.
What is performance testing?
According to Blazemeter, one minute of downtime costs an average of $4,700, with web giants like Amazon losing as much as $120,000 per minute of downtime! But stopping websites and apps from crashing is just one of the reasons why performance testing is so important.
The main goal of performance testing is to, well, test performance. But what does that involve? Performance testing typically checks the speed, responsiveness, stability, and reliability of a particular piece of software, app, tool, or website under high traffic volume, changing networks, and bandwidths.
Look at it this way, would you stay on a website or keep using an app if it’s buggy or loads slowly? Ever heard of websites crashing during product launches from big brands? That’s potentially millions in lost sales, a ruined reputation, and tons of customer complaints – something these brands could have avoided with (you guessed it) performance testing.
The benefits for financial services companies
According to a survey of 100 c-suite executives by BDO, 77% of financial services leaders are planning to increase their digital investments this year. With such rapid increases in digital spending, how does performance testing make sure these investments pay off?
Performance testing powers digital transformations
What role does performance testing play in improving digital transformations and ensuring their success? Let’s explore three key benefits below.
1. Successful integrations
New technologies must be integrated effectively into the organisation and adopted successfully across all teams for a digital transformation to succeed. Performance testing ensures all new tools, software, products, and apps are working as they should, loading fast, and are properly integrated across your entire tech stack.
2. Continuous improvements
Digital transformation isn’t something that’s implemented, completed, and then abandoned. It’s an infinite process that has to move with the changes in your company and the digital world at large. Performance testing enables early identification of bugs to continuously improve the quality of your software and wider digital infrastructure.
3. Better ROI
Investing in new technologies, banking apps, in-store infrastructure, software training, and more racks up quite a hefty bill. Performance testing makes sure you make a better return on investment by minimising downtime, speeding up loading times, and identifying and rectifying potentially catastrophic problems – before they happen.
Performance testing elevates customer experiences
What role does performance testing play in improving the customer experience? Let’s explore three key benefits below.
1. Better digital experiences
A study by BostonGlobe stated that a 10-second wait for a page to load would result in 50% of consumers abandoning ship. So financial services brands should take things like load speed, navigation, and performance across all devices and different connection speeds seriously by implementing a continuous performance testing strategy. Performance testing is key to offering your customers a better quality experience.
2. Improved brand reputation
With the scale and speed of social media, if your website or banking app is down, you can bet the whole world (and potential customers) will hear about it. Performance testing proactively identifies bugs, loading times, and usability to offer your customers a smooth, reliable, and consistent experience leading to happy customers and great brand reputations.
3. Financial protection
We all know what it’s like when our financial services app is down, the website isn’t working, or we can’t access our account – frustration, panic, and disappointment. Performance testing ensures you never lose a customer to faulty digital products, payments are processed correctly, and customers always have access to their money.
Performance testing innovations
In this new digital age, performance testing is only getting better. By reducing the need for manual testing, automated testing is more reliable, cost-effective, and proactive than ever. AI is leading the way in terms of visual testing tools which almost behave like a human to identify bugs, glitches, slow speeds, or navigation issues.
Some companies are even using brainwave scanning technology to test how users feel while navigating an app, giving performance testers a deeper understanding of how people react to their technology and the pain points they’re experiencing.
Ready to test performance for better CX and digital transformations?
Financial services investing in digital transformations often share the same goal; to improve customer experiences. We hope this blog has proved that performance testing is the best strategy to help you do just that – by finding flaws early and continuously improving your software.
At Assured Thought, we provide quality assurance and software testing for financial institutions, from wealth and asset management, investment management to private banking, and everything in between.
We deliver a complete testing solution, mixing objectivity with experience to solve software delivery challenges by defining, preparing, facilitating, and delivering exceptional testing solutions that perfectly complement your goals.
With our expertise and support, you can go live with confidence, deliver change faster, and enhance both user and customer experience from all angles.
Get in touch with us today to craft a bespoke testing solution to accelerate and support your digital transformation and significantly improve your customer experience.
