Four elements of a thorough CRM system test

Before your new CRM goes live, take the time to thoroughly test the system. Problems at launch can affect overall adoption, so make sure everything works and your data is secure. Here are the system areas you should test:

 1. Data quality and conversion

 Hopefully, you managed to take care of most of your data quality issues before and during migration, but you should still test this before your new CRM system goes live:

1. Is there duplicate data in the CRM?
2. Are the right fields populated?
3. Is your hidden data actually hidden?
4. Is the data mapping correctly?
5. Does new and updated data save correctly?
6. Do partial and full search work?
7. Is there missing data?
8. Do graphs represent data correctly?

Test your CRM effectively and implement efficiently using this comprehensive CRM implementation guide

2. Functionality

Duringimplementation, you should test each functional aspect of your new CRM, especially for point-of-sale (POS) transactions:

1. Are your access permissions set correctly?
2. Do transactions upload properly?
3. Do department-specific transactions work properly? 
4. Do failed transactions process properly? 
5. Are users able to change the transaction type?
6. Is there data mismatch? (For example, customers with the same name are accidentally merged.)  

3. Reporting and integration

Next, see how well the CRM solution passes data to or from external systems, including accuracy of these reports:

1. Do CRM data and reports match existing records?
2. Are reports exported in the right format?
3. Does the AND/OR filter work properly? 
4. Are fields with no input value being overlooked?
5. Do labels appear continuously?
6. Does the right data appear when store filters are applied?
7. Do reports show the right date and time? 
8. Do reports show the right heading and build versions?

4. Regression and user acceptance testing

Once you’ve addressed all these potential issues, go through each section again and confirm. Then you’ll be ready to start training end users in your organization and test the system in real-time with them.  

1. Does your CRM documentation meet all the needs of your end users?
2. Are customizations you’ve made to the CRM system easy to use?
3. Are all features implemented correctly? 
4. Is system data reliability available for end users? 
5. Are customer details kept confidential?

After addressing these user acceptance issues, you can ensure the application integrates well with other systems the end user needs.

And remember, any time you fix a defect in your CRM system, run these tests again to see if other areas were affected.