What do IBM, Lexus and Apple all have in common?
From a product view, they seem worlds apart.
But all of these companies share two common characteristics: a premium brand and a strong reputation, built around excellence.
Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, IBN built its brand around the fact that it was the most reliable choice in its industry. Lexus constantly tops consumer surveys on the most reliable car brands. Apple has repeatedly ranked first in studies of consumer laptop reliability.
While many people associate branding with ad buys and clever marketing slogans, one of the most fundamental aspects of branding isn’t something that you can buy with a large marketing budget. It’s consistency, reliability and quality.
When you consistently deliver a higher quality product than your competitors, it doesn’t take long for your brand to strengthen. And since word of mouth is the best form of marketing, it’s rare for customers to keep their positive opinion of your brand to themselves.
The Importance of Quality Assurance for Software Brands
In the world of software, it only takes a small bug to completely change a person’s opinion of your brand. If a bug occurs at a critical time — no matter how rare — it’s likely to alter the user’s opinion negatively and make them have a lower opinion of your brand in the future.
Because of this, quality control is extremely important for software brands. If your software has unsolved bugs that affect user experience, word can quickly travel from one user to others and negatively affect your brand.
A great example of this reality in action is Windows ME. ME’s bugs affected Microsoft’s brand for years after the software’s release, even after its bugs were patched and subsequent OSes were released.
Likewise, Apple’s glitchy map application caused the previously exalted company to deal with a long-term branding issue that seriously affected its reputation for quality.
No matter how much time and money you’ve invested in developing your brand, it only takes a single error to cause lasting damage. Because of this, it’s essential to focus not just on building a brand through marketing, but maintaining high standards of quality for your software.
One of the most cost-effective, efficient ways to bug test your software and improve its quality is through crowdtesting. Crowdtesting lets you tap into the crowd—a big online audience of QA testers—to review your software for bugs, stability problems and performance issues.
How Crowdtesting Makes Efficient QA Possible
While it’s certainly possible to perform in-depth QA testing in house, crowdtesting has several unique advantages:
- Since the crowd contains tens of thousands of testers, it’s possible to test at a scale that simply isn’t available with an in-house QA team.
- Because tens of thousands of device and OS combinations are available, crowdtesting gives you access to device diversity that’s impossible in house.
- Crowdtesting is there exactly when you need it (and never when you don’t), letting you control expenses and only test when you need to.
Because crowdtesting is on demand, it’s also perfect for long-term QA testing. Long-term testing with each new release, update and change helps you to avoid losing revenue or damaging your brand through ineffective quality assurance.
Beyond QA, crowdtesting is also invaluable for ensuring your software or mobile app delivers a great user experience.
From forms to user paths, crowdtesting makes it far easier to gain real insights into how your app performs, as well as how it can be improved.
