Applause Honors Customers Creating Exceptional Digital Experiences
Intuitive, easy-to-use websites and apps require thorough planning and testing throughout the SDLC. At Applause, we often have unique visibility into the behind-the-scenes planning and execution required to deliver product excellence — and we want to shine a spotlight on organizations who get it right. For Q2 2021, we’re recognizing four companies that raise the bar for digital customer experiences at every touchpoint.
BT: Excellence in Test Automation Use
One of the world’s leading communications services companies, BT provides a variety of product combinations to consumers and businesses in more than 180 countries. BT offers fixed-line voice and broadband services, mobile services, pay-TV, cloud and IT services. The company’s large product portfolio and global footprint create significant challenges in terms of quality assurance. BT determined that complementing manual regression testing with automation would help speed testing and improve test coverage.
BT chose Applause to produce a suite of automated tests. Working with BT’s QA and digital teams, Applause’s automation engineers developed tests that ensured BT had the best coverage and the ability to quickly adapt and scale. BT dramatically reduced test time while increasing coverage and test consistency.
“It wasn’t as simple as, ‘here's some stuff that we want to automate. Applause, can you go and automate it?’ We were very much integrated as one team,” said Sandeep Deerhe, Delivery & Enablement, BT. “I’m extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished together… we can leverage automation in a slightly different way, which really helped drive efficiency and hit milestones and make sure that those timelines were being achieved and that quality was there.”
Watch the video to learn more.
First Alert: Excellence in Smart Home Safety Device
First Alert offers residential safety products, including smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors. Many of the company’s products integrate with a mobile app. First Alert needed to validate the quality of its hardware and software products, as well as the overall user experience. The company partners with Applause to ensure its devices and app work correctly: Applause testers conduct structured and exploratory tests on different hardware devices as well as First Alert's Onelink Home mobile app.
“As the most trusted brand in home fire safety, we place the utmost importance on proper functionality of all of our legacy and smart home devices,” said Tom Russo, vice president of marketing and new product development for First Alert. “Our valued partnership with Applause adds to our organizational goal to continually improve on the end user experience that ensures our customers continue to have the very best product experience.”
Learn more about why simplifying IoT device provisioning matters.
Nu Skin: Excellence in Digital Tools to Empower Entrepreneur
As one of the world's leading beauty and wellness brands, Nu Skin focuses on developing innovative products using a science-based ingredients philosophy of with “all of the good, none of the bad.” The company operates in nearly 50 markets worldwide and relies on Applause to support digital transformation by augmenting internal functional and payment testing teams to ensure that websites and programs work seamlessly across Nu Skin’s global markets.
The Applause testers help Nu Skin get an accurate understanding of how the company’s digital experiences will work in different markets, for both customers and independent affiliates. Nu Skin is able to ensure sites work properly across languages, geographies, devices and currencies, a task that would be incredibly challenging to cover with internal teams alone.
Weber-Stephen Products: Excellence in Connected Cooking Experience
Weber has been making its iconic grills since 1952, and has continued to innovate through the years. When Weber decided to enter the IoT space, the company set an aggressive timeline for rolling out new products — and hired a small team to bring the vision to market. Once Weber had launched its first IoT-based grill integration and smart thermometer, staff saw opportunities to hone and improve the customer experience while rolling out additional connected products.
Weber works with Applause to conduct structured test cases and exploratory tests to validate product functionality and assess the user experience. As Weber expands into new geographic regions, local in-market testers help ensure that hardware and apps work seamlessly.
“Working with Applause allowed us to scale validation for new app software and firmware development. It allowed us to have a sandbox, to a certain extent, to really test out different versions of software in a short time. Applause comes back to us with very reproducible test cases and results so our engineers can observe, understand, and directly drive back to fixing the issue for the next release,” said Matt Hannan, Connected Lead, R&D - IoT in a recent webinar.
Congratulations to the Q2 winners.