When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a Customer Relationship Management system, a tool that is used for contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. The goal of a CRM system is simple: Improve business relationships.
Back when CRM systems first appeared, they were more like databases used for storing customer contact details, tracking sales pipelines, and sending promotional emails.
Today they play a key role in helping businesses manage customer relationships and address their pain points. Unsurprisingly, CRM has one of the largest shares in today’s software market, according to the Gartner stats. Most of them are now cloud-based and offer complete mobility and access to an ecosystem of bespoke apps.
Because businesses rely on CRM software to support business objectives and provide an exceptional customer experience, CRM testing is essential to locate, identify, and resolve underlying issues in software and enhance its capabilities.
So, what is CRM testing? CRM testing ensures the software is operating correctly, that data is being saved and retrieved as it should, that reports are generated properly, that it is working properly with other software and that the data is secure.
CRM systems can be adopted as they are, or customized to fit into a company’s infrastructure and business workflows. This makes it more complex, and every new customization and integration adds more complexity, and therefore needs more testing, to ensure that everything works and business objectives are supported.
CRM testing can check for incorrectly filled in fields, duplicated records, or forms being missed, along with much more.
When CRM systems are aligned and sync with business workflows and complex enterprise applications, they can make a business thrive. Complex processes require coordination between systems and departments, such as warehouses, customer service, sales, and operations. CRM testing ensures whether or not these systems are working as they are supposed to be and effectively manage customer sensitive data.
Usability Testing: Usability or UI testing is essential because if your employees can't use the CRM system effectively, the data inputted may be wrong, and users will be discouraged from using it.
Functional Testing: It ensures that CRM is functional, the system works as intended and doesn’t return any errors while operating.
Performance Testing: Performance testing is performed to check the system behavior under continuous and peak load conditions, to know the maximum operating capacity of the CRM system. Besides, test engineers measure the effects of multiple users working with CRM simultaneously: loading speed, response time, and a maximum number of users.
Data Quality: During data quality testing, test engineers check whether CRM handles data as expected: data is reflected correctly, partial and full search functions properly, CRM graphs, tables, diagrams represent it correctly, and data is properly sorted.
Integration Testing: It is important to ensure data flows with no errors between the CRM and other integrated systems. Integration testing checks whether CRM data remains unchanged during data transfer, the changes introduced in one system are visualized in the connected systems, and the relevant change history is available.
Security Testing: Security testing will ensure each user only sees the relevant information needed to do their job, and includes vulnerability and security scanning, security auditing, ethical hacking, ensuring your client base and confidential customer data will be safe.
Regression Testing: Regression testing will ensure that software previously working will still perform the same way after a change, upgrade or integration with another system. CRM systems provide regular updates for bug fixing, issues from previous iterations, or simply for system optimization.
CRM software such as Salesforce mostly rely on dynamically populated fields contained in iframes. This is something that traditional testing tools are not able to handle. With Salesforce in particular, organisations that are using Salesforce Lightning, need to choose a testing tool that concentrates testing through the front-end. Therefore, using traditional code-based testing tools is simply not the option.
Validata Sense.ai is an AI-powered test automation platform, designed to test even the most complex applications through a no-code, model-based testing approach. The tests created are reusable allowing to test from the user perspective with maximum coverage.
Today they play a key role in helping businesses manage customer relationships and address their pain points. Unsurprisingly, CRM has one of the largest shares in today’s software market, according to the Gartner stats. Most of them are now cloud-based and offer complete mobility and access to an ecosystem of bespoke apps.
Because businesses rely on CRM software to support business objectives and provide an exceptional customer experience, CRM testing is essential to locate, identify, and resolve underlying issues in software and enhance its capabilities.
So, what is CRM testing? CRM testing ensures the software is operating correctly, that data is being saved and retrieved as it should, that reports are generated properly, that it is working properly with other software and that the data is secure.
CRM systems can be adopted as they are, or customized to fit into a company’s infrastructure and business workflows. This makes it more complex, and every new customization and integration adds more complexity, and therefore needs more testing, to ensure that everything works and business objectives are supported.
The importance of CRM Testing
- Low user adoption: Incorrect or missing customer data, wrong customer classification, along with slow or unfriendly user interface will discourage users from using the software.
- Low Customer Experience: Wrong emails received by wrong customers, undue or missed notifications of customer appointments, and many more issues affect customer management leading to unhappy clients. Imagine sending wrong lab results or medical conditions to the wrong patient or doctor. This could have life-changing effects.
- Data Leakage: If your CRM doesn’t fully comply with regional or international data security regulations, it can lead to confidential or sensitive customer data being exposed to unauthorized users and result in legal claims, fines, bad reputation and loss of revenue.
CRM testing can check for incorrectly filled in fields, duplicated records, or forms being missed, along with much more.
When CRM systems are aligned and sync with business workflows and complex enterprise applications, they can make a business thrive. Complex processes require coordination between systems and departments, such as warehouses, customer service, sales, and operations. CRM testing ensures whether or not these systems are working as they are supposed to be and effectively manage customer sensitive data.
Usability Testing: Usability or UI testing is essential because if your employees can't use the CRM system effectively, the data inputted may be wrong, and users will be discouraged from using it.
Functional Testing: It ensures that CRM is functional, the system works as intended and doesn’t return any errors while operating.
Performance Testing: Performance testing is performed to check the system behavior under continuous and peak load conditions, to know the maximum operating capacity of the CRM system. Besides, test engineers measure the effects of multiple users working with CRM simultaneously: loading speed, response time, and a maximum number of users.
Data Quality: During data quality testing, test engineers check whether CRM handles data as expected: data is reflected correctly, partial and full search functions properly, CRM graphs, tables, diagrams represent it correctly, and data is properly sorted.
Integration Testing: It is important to ensure data flows with no errors between the CRM and other integrated systems. Integration testing checks whether CRM data remains unchanged during data transfer, the changes introduced in one system are visualized in the connected systems, and the relevant change history is available.
Security Testing: Security testing will ensure each user only sees the relevant information needed to do their job, and includes vulnerability and security scanning, security auditing, ethical hacking, ensuring your client base and confidential customer data will be safe.
Regression Testing: Regression testing will ensure that software previously working will still perform the same way after a change, upgrade or integration with another system. CRM systems provide regular updates for bug fixing, issues from previous iterations, or simply for system optimization.
CRM software such as Salesforce mostly rely on dynamically populated fields contained in iframes. This is something that traditional testing tools are not able to handle. With Salesforce in particular, organisations that are using Salesforce Lightning, need to choose a testing tool that concentrates testing through the front-end. Therefore, using traditional code-based testing tools is simply not the option.
Validata Sense.ai is an AI-powered test automation platform, designed to test even the most complex applications through a no-code, model-based testing approach. The tests created are reusable allowing to test from the user perspective with maximum coverage.