Software defects don’t just drain budgets — they cost businesses customer loyalty. Poor software quality can drive customer churn, resulting in missed revenue and increased expenses. Learn how better processes, such as test data management, can reduce the cost of software defects and protect your business outcomes.
How Software Quality Impacts Customer Retention
Walmart founder Sam Walton famously said, “There’s only one boss. The customer.”
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Research by Forbes reveals acquiring a new customer is 4-5 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
So, it’s just as important to retain customers as it is to acquire new ones. But maintaining a strong customer base is easier said than done, as customers can be fickle — 60% of customers stop doing business with a company after just one bad experience, according to a 2022 Zendesk report. Therefore, maintaining a consistently great customer experience is crucial for ensuring customer retention and limiting customer churn, while also saving budget dollars on acquisition costs.
In today’s digitally-driven markets, unified customer experience and robust software quality go hand-in-hand in ensuring successful digital-first businesses. All modern enterprises have software woven into their products and services (as well as internal systems), helping to influence customer experience directly across their business offerings.
Consider how many software professionals large enterprises across industries have on staff — retail giant Walmart employs over 15,000 software engineers, data scientists, and service professionals, while investment bank Goldman Sachs has about 12,000 developers on its payroll. Even John Deere, a leader in agricultural and road-building equipment manufacturing, employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers.
While software quality varies in definition from company to company, a generally accepted measure of quality is the absence of defects. After all, a quality product, service, or system should do its job without failure or error. As one would expect, software defects can be a catalyst for customer churn.
90% of app users reported they stopped using an app due to poor performance, while 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience, according to TopTal.
Poor software performance is usually a sign of poor software testing. Updating test data management processes can help your business reduce software defects and the costs of repairing them — helping you reduce customer churn in the process.
The Rising Costs of Software Defects on Businesses
It helps to examine the software development process to get a clear view of how software bugs increase customer churn. Software engineers do much of their work using non-production environments, also called lower environments. These environments are typically temporary combinations of hardware- and software-based workspaces with tools that support development and test systems. The trouble is software defects often escape undetected from non-production environments into production environments, which are the customer-facing “live applications” in which software is used.
These defects can cause a number of application issues that hurt the customer experience, including downtime, errors, lag, corruption, and security vulnerabilities. And while software defects and application issues cause headaches for the developers and testers that need to fix them, they can devastate the business side with revenue losses, high operational and repair costs, and overconsumption of resources.
Software defects cost U.S. businesses $607 billion in 2022, as reported by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ). And 91% of medium and large-sized enterprises face downtime costs over $300,000 per hour, according to an Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) survey.
Fixing software defects also becomes more expensive when defects are detected and resolved later on in the software development life cycle (SDLC).
The ideal time to fix defects is during the early stages of design and coding. Fixing defects down the road during testing costs 15x as much as fixing them during design, according to research from the IBM System Science Institute.
When defects are fixed in the much-later maintenance phase, it costs 100 times as much as fixing them during design.
How Test Data Weaknesses Amplify Software Defect Costs
Finding defects late in the SDLC is often a symptom of poor test data processes. Keeping software professionals efficient requires a steady stream of fresh, up-to-date test data for development, testing, and software releases.
Test data management refers to creating, managing, and delivering test data to ensure consistent, defect-free software releases. It has become indispensable for delivering reliable software into production environments — and reducing those defect costs.
Test data management has been a staple of efficient software development for decades. However, it has traditionally been viewed within software departments as a back-office function. Certainly important, yet far less visible than increasing efficiency by implementing software development methodologies such as Agile or DevOps. While businesses have used Agile and DevOps to streamline and automate many other software development processes, companies are still having multiple teams use the same manual, high-touch, error-prone processes and mechanisms as they did in decades prior.
While manual, legacy processes have worked for decades, the actual data that businesses must manage today is far different than the data they’ve worked with in the past. For one thing, it’s far more voluminous — about 2 zettabytes (2 billion terabytes) of data were generated worldwide in 2010, while about 147 zettabytes of data are projected to be generated worldwide by the end of 2024, per Statista. At the same time, businesses face mounting pressure to secure their data against escalating cyberattacks while also making it compliant with a growing group of data privacy regulations worldwide.
The clash between rapid, automated development and manual processes combined with methodical security procedures manifests itself as bottlenecks of data that lead to massive wait states in the development process. This not only forces developers to focus on processes rather than development, it also keeps the latest test data from non-production environments, which enables defects to grow within software.
Transform Your Test Data Strategy
Discover how modernizing test data management can eliminate constraints, speed up development, and improve software quality.
How to Cut Software Defect Costs and Improve Customer Retention
Implementing DevOps test data management practices automates security measures and replaces outdated manual processes. This alignment with automated development pipelines ensures faster and more accurate defect detection. This involves several core technologies, with the three most prominent being data virtualization, data masking, and connectivity through application programming interfaces (APIs).
These technologies work in tandem to solve various issues facing modern-day data processes. Data virtualization shrinks a company’s data footprint and facilitates quick provisioning of test data, which reduces storage costs, improves sustainability efforts, and improves business velocity. Data masking streamlines compliance and security practices by anonymizing test data. And APIs allow one to orchestrate and monitor these automated actions from other software, such as development tools and IT service management tools.
DevOps test data management solutions carry numerous benefits that include reducing data storage costs and quickly ensuring compliance. Test data automation frees up developer resources. This allows developers to shift their focus towards testing software sooner and detecting defects earlier in the SDLC — a practice known in software development as shifting left.
By shifting left and streamlining software testing, organizations can detect and fix defects earlier in the software development life cycle, dramatically reducing costs and enhancing customer satisfaction. This, in turn, improves customer experience and won’t turn them away from your offerings. It’ll also ensure your business saves money by retaining customers for cheaper costs than acquiring new ones.
Improve Your Quality With Perforce Delphix
Legacy approaches to test data management too often involve manual processes, data subsetting, or shared test environments that delay development — and increase the cost of software defects. Perforce Delphix provides an entirely new approach: you’ll eliminate tradeoffs between test data speed, quality, and security.
Related blog >> What Is Delphix?
Get Quality Test Data in Minutes
Delphix leverages data virtualization to automatically deliver complete, virtual data copies into test environments. Virtual copies function like physical ones; but they take up a fraction of the storage space and can be delivered in minutes. Delphix also gives self-service controls to development and testing teams so they can refresh data to the latest state, rewind after test runs, and instantly share copies.
Integrate Data Masking with Test Data Delivery
The Delphix DevOps Data Platform combines masking with virtualization to deliver compliant data to downstream environments. Delphix masking discovers sensitive values then irreversibly transforms those values into realistic yet fictitious equivalents for protection against breach and compliance with privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.
Reduce Software Defect Costs with Delphix
Request your demo of Delphix and see how it automates the delivery of high-quality, compliant test data. You’ll find out why industry leaders are adopting the next generation of test data management solutions from Delphix.
See How Delphix Can Lower Defect Costs