Customer Experience Testing

I've had a quick look around the web for articles about customer experience testing. There is a lot of testing articles out there and one interesting one was also one of the older ones I found. It ranks from way back in 2005 and the start of that year at that. It can be found at xchange, entitled simply enough "Testing the customer experience". Go there for the full article but the intro sets the scence well for the article:

More service providers are starting to do customer-experience testing to gain the assurance they need that new offerings won’t wreck their reputations with customers, their bottom lines or both. Traditional enterprise testing seeks to answer whether applications and technologies behind a service launch will perform as intended. Customer-experience testing moves beyond that exercise, going further to evaluate whether the people working with the systems and the business processes defined for them are likely to prove successful.

There’s a standard suite of enterprise tests -- unit testing, string testing, system testing, integration testing, user-acceptance testing, stress-and-volume testing, 508-compliance testing, etc. -- that almost every service provider relies on to ensure the systems underlying an offering will perform as intended. These application and technology tests are critically important.

But as traditionally executed, these tests fail to show whether the service can be implemented and serviced successfully. A service provider must go further and evaluate people, processes, technology and the interrelationships among all three. In doing so, the service provider can eliminate logistical uncertainties and uncover operational complexities that could undermine profitability and ruin its reputation with customers.

Customer-experience testing -- delving more deeply into the service provider’s processes and internal and external user communities -- is designed to deliver these results and benefits.