In the beginning, the heaviest users of online information services were librarians. For several decades now these ‘power-users’ have had incredible insight into how frequently and in what specific ways their end-users were using the electronic tools the librarians purchased for them. Librarians leveraged this information to inform their purchasing decisions (i.e., “Should we renew our subscription or not?”) and savvy online publishers took notice.
These publishers realized the immense value of this kind of information and created user groups and other forums where they could gather and channel this feedback (e.g., What functions were popular; What types of searches were unsuccessful; What tools didn’t work as advertised) to their product development and IT teams. This ‘virtuous circle’ of power-users sharing information that allowed publishers to improve their online products, improve renewal rates, and justify price increases, continues to this day.
At the dawn of the new millennium, another group of digital information service power-users emerged: offshore data management teams. Publishers were increasingly outsourcing much of their day-to-day work of maintaining the quality of their services to offshore firms, and these remote teams used the same content management platforms that delivered data to subscribers to update data on the back end. Over time these offshore teams became the new “power-users”.
These stealth users can number in the hundreds for a single service and they are effectively performing software testing services, routinely becoming aware of problems on the front-end before paying subscribers ever discover them. Put another way, they are much the same as the librarian user groups of yore.
For this reason, IEI has been working with some of its customers to provide formal software testing services for their custom-built content management and delivery platforms. The way it works is that glitches experienced by our offshore teams are identified and then diagnosed by dedicated IT resources who then define methods for their resolution and communicate this back to the client’s dev team. In addition, major roll-outs of software upgrades can be preceded by a series of standardized processes like regression analysis and browser compatibility testing that are performed in the customer’s ‘sandbox’ before they go live. All of this results in smoother product upgrades, a better end-user experience, and higher renewal rates.
We didn’t foresee this new line of business when we built this company, but we know a win-win-win opportunity when we see it. If your customer software platform is evolving, too, don’t hesitate to drop us a line and ask how we can help.
