Testing a CRM Application

CRM systems are progressively becoming strategic assets for organizations, helping them manage the entire customer life-cycle, streamline operations and improve customer satisfaction.

According to Gartner, CRM implementation failure rates exceed 50% due to lack of effective CRM strategy and user adoption.

Ensuring a successful CRM implementation requires focus on business objective, robust business processes and a focus on the Quality of implementation.

An independent Software Testing process helps identify real challenges for CRM implementation, assess robustness and ensure adherence to user requirements.

This results in higher success rate. Having a verification and validation Testing Team helps achieve greater quality in terms of both technical & business specifications and higher ROI.

A buggy or improperly implemented feature of a CRM application can have direct impact on customer relationship and hurt the revenue. Equally, a well-implemented CRM can help you gain customer insight and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

CRMs also contain a lot of sensitive data about company as well as customers. Any CRM testing program should ensure that the data are accurate and secure during the storage and retrieval transactions.

A typical CRM work flow will look like the below demonstrated image.

Testing Cycles for a CRM Application

Data Integrity and Conversion Check

The first test cycle in CRM testing should focus on issues related to data quality and conversion. At every step of a migration or update the testers should verify that the CRM is working as expected for both with and without data.

Below is the check list to ensure data quality:

1. Duplication of data: No redundancy should be allowed.
2. Hidden data is indeed hidden: Only the appropriate data should be visible according to the user roles and type.
3. Data maps correctly: Grid issues where a selected row’s data goes out of alignment with the fields when scrolled down. This should be eliminated.
4. New and updated data should be saved properly: Customer information and card information should save and update properly.
5. Partial and full search work as desired: Users should be able to search by first name, last name, company, card is deemed necessary.
6. No data is missing: All of the required data should be available to the right user levels.
7. Graphs should represent data correctly: Critical data like store-specific and program-specific filters and sales percentages should be accurate.
8. Data sorting: All of the fields that need to be sortable should works as desired.
9. CRM installs correctly: No critical GUI issues should arise during installation even when the user misses the data during installation.
10. Data saved in one field does not move to another field after saving it: Fields like address, which may need more than one field, should save to the correct fields.
11. Check that data which is not supposed to be editable is indeed not editable: Data like date and time of transaction should not be editable.

Functional Testing

This deals with the application’s function and ensures that it fits during the migration of data from another legacy system. The values and other data should be populated in the correct fields.

Below is functional checklist for CRM Testing –

• Organization wide default
• Access level
• Accessible to hidden data
• Transaction processes
• Connection lost
• Proper exception handling
• Avoid data mismatch
• Pre-Authorization
• Post-Authorization

Performance Testing

The CRM application should be tested under pressure or stress or load. This can measure the effects of concurrent users on the system’s performance.

Performance Check List for CRM Testing –

• Response time
• Server utilization
• Peak hours testing
• Loading speed
• Error with any other integrated applications due to this
• Maximum number of users

Integration Testing

This will be a challenge in CRM applications where we will be migrating or integrating third party applications into the CRM.

Listed are the must see features during integration testing of a CRM

• Field and Labels matching
• Dependencies Integration
• Date format
• Reports
• Data Validation
• Sorting order

Regression Testing

There will be regression testing always in an application like CRM where there is a need to test before migration and after migration.

After migration whether the values are populated into the correct fields and validations are matched with the data. Other fields should not be disturbed because of this. This will measure Functional correctness and completeness of the CRM application. With the help of regression testing the reliability and performance of the application can be ensured.

Security Testing

CRM involves high volume of confidential data which should be secured. A proper security test plan allows how well the system protects the data against unauthorized internal and external access.

Are you into CRM Testing?

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