Product Lifecycle and Beta Testing

Home > Products > Product Features > Product Lifecycle and Beta Testing

In today's business world, new products fail at a rate of 50% each year, with technology products pushing even higher to 70%. One of the main reasons for these failures is a lack of customer validation or beta testing.

A 2002 study funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology¹ estimated software errors alone cost the U.S. economy about $59.5 billion a year. And the majority of the cost - more than half - is absorbed by users. In response to this, many organizations prefer to test or "beta test" their products and services through the use of focus groups, surveys, group testing, and limited releases or markets.

Beta testing to many organizations can be a tedious and time consuming process, consuming up to 80% of development costs in some cases. Since most organizations run beta tests infrequently, the skills, processes, technology, and personnel required to make them successful can come at a high cost both in time and money.

Further problems with beta testing come from the information received. Since most of the systems used to support beta tests are not unified with other customer management systems, they typically provide little or no historical and utilization value with other customer and product life-cycle data. They effectively become yet another "silo" of useful information in an un-useful form, and fail to address the entire life cycle of the product, service, and customer.

The Customer Feedback Center™ (CFC) Product Lifecycle / Beta Testing system is designed to address many of the time and cost considerations in running beta tests. With the CFC, product and service testing or "beta testing" acts as a component of the enterprise system, as opposed to working outside of it. Once beta testing takes place, all feedback is accessible throughout the entire system, both real-time and through historical utilization from the product and customer relationship perspectives.

Key benefits of the CFC’s Beta Testing functionality:

• Time savings in candidate recruiting through the use of auto-solicitation and auto-qualification processes, allowing you to reach the desired number of qualified candidates with little or no human intervention during beta tests
• Cost reduction via the automation of the feedback management process, from recruiting, feedback and evaluator management, reporting and utilization review
• Ability to run multiple programs simultaneously from a single system, saving time and cost of management, and making information easier to share company-wide
• Multi-language support allowing for testing world-wide

The capabilities of our Beta Testing functionality include:

¹ Sources: Clugston, C.O. "Product failures: Why are we implementing the wrong solutions?" Electronic News, Jeordan Legon "When good software goes bad" CNN.com 8 August, 2003