When you’re looking to shave costs anywhere you can, quality is the one thing you can’t afford to cut. It’s the number one objective driving your product’s success. But ensuring high quality is expensive. You need thorough test coverage before release — that is, you need to see how your product’s features and functions perform with real customers in their actual environments. Taking shortcuts and cutting corners leads to unpleasant surprises down the road in the form of low star ratings, skyrocketing support costs, and hundreds of RMAs.

So how do you, a resource-strapped beta team, reduce the costs of customer testing without sacrificing thoroughness or compromising the quality of your product? Take a cue from world-leading tech companies like Ring, Cisco, and Tableau. They’re using Centercode solutions to improve opportunity costs, bring down support costs, and decrease returns — amounting to a 40% reduction in costs overall.

Let’s dig deeper into how Centercode helps you cut costs and stay lean.

Reducing Opportunity Costs

In the months before a product launch or new release, opportunity costs run rampant. Teams are scrambling against the clock to tie up loose ends and get the product out the door. But oftentimes, reactive decision-making ends up costing the time and money you were trying to save.

Here’s how running your beta tests with Centercode improves opportunity costs based on your role in the product development process.

Beta and Delta Managers

When you’re managing beta and delta testing, you’re tasked with providing accurate, useful insights to several different stakeholders — reporting and prioritizing issues for Engineering and QA, feature acceptance for Product Management, contextualizing insights for UX, even testimonials for Marketing. But without repeatable processes — and specific tools to support them — providing those insights takes a back seat to beta’s many moving parts.

Centercode is uniquely built for beta testing. With automation that takes the most time-consuming aspects of beta testing off your plate and automated reporting to keep your stakeholders in the loop, you have more time to tailor your insights, maximize your efforts, and increase your organizational footprint.

Product Managers

As a product manager, beta testing is a key way for you to validate that your product truly delivers what your customers want and need. But when you’re juggling pre-release testing alongside your many other responsibilities, it often seems impossible to juggle test management, feedback analysis, and bringing the value of your beta tests full circle with product improvements.

With Centercode, you don’t have to dig through emails and use spreadsheets to identify the features that matter most to your audience. The platform provides capabilities like automated feedback scoring that floats your customers’ most important care-abouts to the top of the heap and custom dashboards, so your highest priority features are always front and center.

QA Managers

For QA managers, coverage is the name of the game. The more scenarios you can test before release, the less likely it is that hidden issues will come back to haunt you. But with tight timetables and more scenarios than any lab can reasonably test, the pressure is on to deliver a seamless experience for your customers.

Here’s where Centercode gives you the leg up. The platform surfaces the issues that need your attention first. Not only that, but Centercode also extends your QA lab into the live environments of real testers. With their tech environments and unique usage at your fingertips, you’re able to cover twice the scenarios in half the time.

Decreasing Support Costs

Providing live support for your product is expensive — and providing support for your customers when they’re facing show-stopping issues is even more costly.

On average, an IT support ticket costs $102; a field support ticket costs $221.

Powering your beta tests with Centercode gives your support team a leg-up and keeps costs down in three key ways.

1. Thoroughly surfacing quality and usability issues. The best way to reduce the cost of supporting product bugs? Fix them before your product goes to market. From the Centercode Platform to the vetted processes and practices that power it, our solutions help you efficiently root out bugs that disrupt the customer experience.
2. Prioritizing your most essential fixes. In a perfect world, your engineering team would be able to knock out any issue testers encounter with time to spare. But in reality, time and focus are finite. The Centercode Platform uses automation to prioritize bugs by severity, frequency, and impact, so you can address issues based on their impact on product success. That means fewer show-stopping issues — and less damage control for your support team.
3. Setting up your self-help resources. What about the bugs you can’t fix? Beef up your self-help documentation, support training, and videos with step-by-step processes and specific use cases from real-world customer testers. Centercode is an easy-to-access catalog of tester feedback, and the foundation your support needs to build out cost-saving resources.

Reducing Product Returns

In the same vein as reducing support costs, increasing the efficiency of your beta testing efforts with Centercode results in fewer product returns. Consider these stats:

• In a 2019 Techsee survey, 70% of consumers reported they would return a consumer electronics product if it were difficult to operate. Meanwhile, 54% said they would return the product if it were difficult to install.
• That same year, 41% of consumers returned a non-defective item. Global professional service consultants estimate it contributes to more than $17 billion lost revenue annually for brick-and-mortar and online retailers.
• Accenture reports that more than two-thirds of consumer electronics returns fall under the umbrella of “no fault found.”

Centercode helps you smooth friction in key customer experiences like setup, installation, and onboarding. This means fewer returns and higher revenue for your business, and increased satisfaction, higher star ratings, and more loyalty from your customers.

Let’s Talk Solutions

Centercode is here to help you cut the costs of customer testing the right way — without sacrificing testing or product quality. See how our solutions are helping today’s leading tech companies in areas like saving time, boosting star ratings, and reducing costs in the impact report.