The Beginner’s Guide to CRM System Testing

We live in a world where the consumer directs markets and decides the fate of businesses across the world. Managing customers effectively is not only essential for growth but also important for ensuring your business’s survival.

CRM software plays 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. However, despite being a highly demanded solution, the quality of the software is not the same in all CRM system software.

HBR reports that one in five CRM directors found that error-ridden CRM software failed to meet their expectations and even damaged long-term relationships with their customers. From a complex interface, CRM analytics errors, and long response times, faulty CRM solutions hinder the performance of your staff and make customer management difficult.

CRM system testing is essential to locate, identify, and resolve underlying issues in software and enhance its capabilities. In this guide, we will discuss what we need to do in CRM testing and outline the main components of the CRM testing checklist.

Table of Contents

1. What Can CRM System Testing Reveal?
2. Essential Features of CRM System Testing
3. Important KPIs for CRM System Testing
4. CRM System Testing PFLB

What Can CRM System Testing Reveal?

CRM system testing can uncover potential defects in CRM software, helping companies improve the quality of software. 

Low User Adoption

One of the most common problems in CRM software is low user adoption, which means that they lack sufficient features for offering an optimal user experience. Issues like wrong customer classification, incorrect or missing customer data, as well as, badly designed UI make things difficult for staff. These defects discourage staff sales, customer service, and marketing from making most of the CRM system.

Faulty Customer Management

When you have insufficient data from your customers, it can severely impair your staff’s ability to address a customer’s pain points. At the same time, undue or missed notifications of customer appointments misrepresent return and complaint data.

Moreover, issues such as delivery delays due to miscommunication in emails and incorrect payment, sales or delivery status affect customer management. Therefore, defects in the CRM system keep on disappointing your clients.

Lack of Customer Management Visibility

Some CRM systems provide staff with inaccurate, inconsistent, and inadequately altered data because of wrong calculation or classification of data. This also happens when there is poor integration of different ERP modules such as document management, finance, or data warehouses.

These defects give managers a misleading picture of customers, blindfolding strategic decisions as a result. Meanwhile, your competitors use accurate CRM data and set realistic sales targets and quotas. Because of this, companies with faulty CRM systems are always suffering from a continuous disadvantage. 

Information Leakage

In many industries, there are considerable restrictions and compliance requirements. Therefore, CRM solutions need to fully comply with various international or regional data security regulations such as HIPAA, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and California Consumer Privacy Act.

If a CRM system doesn’t adhere to these compliance requirements, it will risk-sensitive customer data or confidential business information of being exposed. When unauthorized users access sensitive data, your client will face legal claims and fines. As the number of departments in your organization increase, a CRM system must improve role-based access verification.

Essential Features of CRM System Testing

CRM software is a product that has extremely high stakes for any company. This is why it’s essential to create a comprehensive procedure for identifying mistakes and optimizing the utilization of the system. 

Data Quality & Data Conversion

One of the most important features of any CRM system is its ability to provide reliable, consistent, accurate, and timely insights from data. In the first stage, we try to address the errors identified related to data conversion and data quality. At every step of the customer’s journey, we must test whether the CRM is serving the desired information.

Here are some of the most important things we should see:

No Data Duplication

Eliminate replication of data as it can make insights from data inaccurate.

Don’t Test Data Hidden from a User Role

Only test data visible to the particular user role, you’re testing for.

Avoid Populating Wrong Fields

Verify that update in one field doesn’t modify the historical information in another field.

New and Updated Data Saves Well

Ensure that card and customer data is saved and updated legitimately.

No Missing Data

Test that all relevant information is accessible to users at their relevant levels.

Correct Data Mapping

Verify that all chosen fields show up in the correct gridline.

Graphs Depict All Data Accurately

Verify that that critical data such as sales rates show up accurately and exactly.

Data Sorting Done Perfectly

Test and verify that all sortable fields cam be sorted accurately.

Functionality

After we’re done with the first round of testing, it’s time to test the functional features of the CRM platform. The following are some of the most common functional ranges of a CRM system that we must test.

Access Level

Ensure that all user accessibility permissions in your system are running as expected. This is especially important for non-admin users, as they can’t have access to any admin roles.

Connection Dropped

In any enterprise-grade CRM system, the system should display the relevant error message whenever the connection to the stores drops. The card should stop functioning whenever this happens. 

Transaction Upload

If your CRM integrates with a point of sales software, it needs to update every subsequent customer’s purchase data accurately at the Point of Sale (POS) instantly.

Insufficient Card Balance

Many times, customers may have insufficient card balance to complete order payment through one card. In such situations, a customer needs to have the option to pre-authorize payment from the remaining amount in one card and relay to another payment option for the outstanding balance of the transaction.

Card Data

The customer’s card number or card type shouldn’t be disturbed once the transaction has been carried out successfully.

Transaction Type

Users should have the option to switch the transaction class before they complete the transaction. Later, the transaction should be handled according to the updated transaction class. 

Pre-Authorization

In case the transaction fails because of a pre-authorized card, the system should not print the payment bill wrongly.

Data Mismatch

The system should not trigger data mismatch or other issues if the users have similar first and last names.

Department Particular Events

Ensure that limitations on the type of businesses accepting loyalty cards and gifts are functioning as expected.

Tax

All tax-related calculations and deductions should work well on pre-authorized transactions, complete transactions, as well as canceled transactions.

Store-Specific Deals

All receipts should print the right store label and address.

Performance Testing

For CRM applications, performance testing is one of the most important stages in its development. It gives testers a general overview of how various components are performing in a certain situation.

Specifically, testers need to test for the impact of failure in one user action on the performance of the entire CRM system for other users. During this procedure, testers will the CRM for stress or pressure or load and see how the performance of the system is affected when used by several users. Here are some features you must test first:

• Response time
• Peak hours testing
• Loading speed
• Error with some integrated applications
• The highest number of users
• Server usage

Regression Testing

Because we need to test a CRM system both pre-migration and post-migration, regression testing is an essential part of CRM system testing. It’s important to test the system post-migration to see if the values have been populated into the correct fields and whether data has been validated accurately.

At the same time, it’s important to ensure that other areas are not disrupted because of this. Doing so helps us verify the completeness and functional accuracy of the CRM system. We need to target the following testing features during regression testing:

• Confidentiality
• Functional completeness and accuracy
• Reliability
• Scalability

Security Testing

The level of security in a CRM system is fundamental to its success. Security testing helps developing teams evaluate the authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of data in the system. Therefore, as testers, you must verify that only an authorized customer gets access to data, which they should encrypt otherwise. 

Important KPIs for CRM System Testing

Like most business activities, it’s essential to gauge the testing efficiency of a CRM system to improve it. This is why we must assess CRM testing performance by validating it against important KPIs, at least once every month. Later, we can prepare test reports to help us determine testing performance metrics. Here are some common testing KPIs.

Testing Velocity

Testing velocity shows us the overall testing scope a testing team could cover in a given period. We can evaluate the test team’s velocity by comparing the testing pace agreed upon against the actual testing pace.

Requirements not Covered by Test Cases

The test suites and cases you design need to cover all software requirements. If a testing team fails to cover a requirement, or even if it partially covers it with test cases, then it is alarming. Testers must resolve all missed requirements and prioritize essential features over other things.

The Number of Rejected Defects

In some cases, developers don’t fix a bug identified by test engineers, saying that it is irrelevant. This happens when they think that a reported bug is only working as designed. However, if your CRM system has a high number of such reported bugs, then your CRM requirements aren’t documented in detail and they must be improved. 

It’s also possible that the CRM requirements are sufficient and the testing team has misunderstood requirements. So, the testing lead must resolve this problem. Whatever happens, you should remember if the developers reject more than 5% of all the submitted defects, then you should investigate the matter further. 

The Number of Missed Bugs

Ideally, CRM system testing must report zero missed bugs. However, research has shown that only 0.015% (2 out of 13,000) testing projects reported no defects after a software release. Moreover, even if a testing project has eliminated all critical bugs, all bugs are normally differentiated based on their severity (i.e., critical, major, minor, and trivial). 

It’s acceptable to miss anywhere from 5 to 15% of minor and trivial bugs after a testing project, although every testing project is aimed at eliminating every single bug. This is why its crucial to ensure the highest quality of software, and it’s best to encourage users to report bugs in software that’s already tested.

The Test Automation Rate

The greater number of automated tests you perform as a team, the fewer tests you will miss because of fewer human errors, and the quicker testing will become. That said, maintaining a good test automation rate should be a priority mostly in long-term projects that have a stable set of requirements, and you can apply test automation effectively.

The test lead needs to discuss the scale of test automation at the test strategy development stage. In the end, test automation indicates how optimized the test strategy is and whether the testing team is carrying out the right amount of test automation.

CRM System Testing PFLB

Untested or improperly tested CRM is riddled with numerous defects that endanger customer relations. To create a reliable CRM system, you must testing examine all key features of the software and eliminate bugs to maximize the application’s performance. That said, you also need a test team that has relevant CRM testing experience, and the drive to continuously improve the software.

PFLB is a testing service dedicated to ensuring the best software quality for CRM systems, finance, healthcare, and other enterprise applications. Our in-depth knowledge of various testing procedures helps us find hidden issues in the CRM system and deliver the best solution for your business.

To learn more about the company, feel free to visit our website at PFLB.