Tag Archives: Strategy
The Ultimate Strategy Guide for Microsoft Dynamics and Marketing Automation
Want to make the most of your Microsoft Dynamics and marketing automation platform integration? You’ll need a strategy that considers data, execution, and integration points first.
One of the things we love most about Microsoft Dynamics is how customizable the solution is for sales and marketing departments. It’s flexible enough to match up with just about any customer journey, and the ability to create custom data points makes it an ideal CRM for marketers looking to build hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.
All of that customization, however, can lead to data paralysis on the marketing side–with so much available data, setting automated nurture campaigns can feel like an overwhelming task. Layer in that marketing often gets left out of the CRM conversation, and building out a true strategy for leveraging Microsoft Dynamics with any marketing automation platform can be troublesome.
We’ve worked with marketers across countless industries leveraging dozens of different marketing automation platforms, including our own (the ). Based on those conversations, we’ve put together a guide designed to help marketers better leverage Microsoft Dynamics with their marketing automation platform.
In this guide, we’ve included tips for marketers who would like to better communicate with their CRM stakeholders and step-by-step guides on building seven of the best-performing automated marketing campaigns for marketers leveraging Microsoft Dynamics.
Get our guide for yourself or download it and share with your marketing team here:
“I’ve Got A Guy In Toledo” Is Not A Strategy
Recently, I heard the following from Diane Swonk, Grant Thornton’s chief economist, on Marketplace: “Supply chains are being disrupted.” Your favorite sources – be they in Toledo or elsewhere – have always had your back, but they can’t always anticipate coronavirus, trade wars, and natural disasters.
However, when you have a global supplier network at your fingertips, you can tap into other resources to ensure that critical materials still arrive at your doorstep, especially if your guy in Toledo, for any number of reasons, simply can’t deliver.
Strategic sourcing is the smartest way to save.
In addition, it’s good to be able to get the goods, but it’s even better when you save time, money, and hassle in the process. Nevertheless, if you are operating without a strategic plan for automating, streamlining, and tracking your sourcing activities, it’s likely that you’re spending more than you should.
By accessing a supplier network, you can:
- Positively impact your profits by preventing stock-outs and keeping new product introductions on track
- Secure best-value deals for all your purchases, including both indirect and direct materials
- Eliminate slow, paper-based processes
- Eradicate costly, unplanned, unmanaged spend
With the right solution, you can spend more strategically and save with more certainty. Organizations that source this way, in fact, cut costs by an average of 39%.
How do you source this way?
Like everything you do in procurement, there is a process to strategic sourcing. And give or take a few nuances, that process typically looks like this:
- Identify savings opportunities
- Apply the appropriate category strategy
- Create a sourcing event
- Analyze and optimize supplier responses
- Negotiate and manage contracts with trading partners
Executing that process consistently well takes an automated solution that frees you from spreadsheets and other unrelenting paperwork, plus the hours and human errors that accompany manual processes. With this off your desk – and with a proven plan for smarter sourcing – you’ll improve the cost, quality, and performance of your supply chain and, therefore, your entire business.
There are a few common-sense rules to follow as you plan your plan. Make sure any strategic sourcing solution you choose can support them.
Don’t spend more than you need to. If this rule is so obvious, why do so many well-meaning procurement professionals ignore it? They continue to use paper-based “solutions” and a scattershot approach to sourcing which, without fail, leads to surprises, shortages, and greater expense. The solution you’re looking for supports the entire strategic sourcing process – pointing out where you can cut costs, simplifying supplier selection and responses, and negotiating competitive contracts. The result? You spend significantly less.
Follow best-practice (and far more efficient) procurement operations. Whether you’re buying chairs, procuring direct materials, or commanding a complex services procurement program, your sourcing solution should help you develop an organized, optimized plan for each and every sourcing event. It should be based on current best practices (and adapt to evolving best practices) and enable you to define sourcing phases, tasks, milestones, and team members. Companies with this type of solution in place have achieved 69% compliance with contracts.
Increase the effectiveness of your sourcing program and category functions. This one is all about working well together, and your solution should provide a centralized “workspace” where project teams and suppliers can collaborate and share documents. It should also offer version control, comment capabilities, and the ever-important audit trail. These things may sound simple, but every little thing that boosts effectiveness boosts productivity. Organizations that have mastered this typically see 17% higher spend under management.
Integrate categories. Building a profitable, competitive supply chain is difficult when you’re trying to source direct and indirect materials separately or on a disconnected system. To bring it all together, find a solution that easily integrates with your ERP and allows you to manage the entire source-to-contract cycle in every category. This level of strategic sourcing, along with industry best practices, results in a better supply-chain collaboration process for your direct materials.
Stay on top of your sourcing activities. With the right solution in place, you can easily compare suppliers; you can trust that you’re making informed decisions, and you can be sure that every purchase and everyone is in compliance. You’ll have dynamic dashboards that enable you to see and track the current status of all your sourcing activities. And you’ll be able to communicate with suppliers in real time — from instant messaging to actual bidding.
Track your savings. You need to be able to measure your success, so your solution must be able to analyze estimated, negotiated, implemented, and actual savings across regions, time periods, departments, suppliers, and spend types. That’s a lot of numbers to look at, but if you want to know where you stand on spending and, more importantly, savings, your strategic sourcing solution has to do the work.
Strategic sourcing can slash cycle time – as much as 50% – and cut costs. It can reduce workload from procurement to IT. It can help expand your trade around the world, breaking language and currency barriers. When you have a solid, secure sourcing plan, you can cut risk out of the equation.
That’s a plan you want to have in place because your guy in Toledo is not infallible.
Learn more about “Strategic Sourcing for Midsize Businesses.”
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How One Airline Won Customer Loyalty with an API-First Strategy
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Maintaining customer loyalty in the travel industry is no easy feat. There are so many factors and variables on the customer journey, many of which are out of an airline’s control. So how is Air France-KLM working toward accomplishing its goal of becoming the most customer-centric airline group in Europe?
Air France-KLM knew it had to find a way to address those variables, making every step of the journey less stressful. To do this, the airline implemented an API-led strategy that enabled agile change in order to move faster than their competition, and their customer’s expectations. The airline group connected every step of a customer’s travel journey using APIs, making any and all relevant information available in one central app, and in real-time.
Air France-KLM is now able to deliver new digital services such as flight change recommendations, seat upgrades, and partner inventory more quickly, with one update reaching the entire ecosystem of connected channels. Customers, partners, and the airline group all have benefitted from the API-first strategy. For example, the group relies on its loyalty programs to retain customers, and APIs make it easier for Air France-KLM as well as its SkyTeam partners, such as hotels and transportation services, to provide the personalized experiences loyal customers expect.
This API-led strategy has proved successful, with Air France-KLM’s Net Promoter Score increasing by 20% since they partnered with TIBCO. To learn more about Air France-KLM’s journey to becoming the most customer-centric airline in Europe, read the full case study.
5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 5
There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Strategy 5: Modernize and strengthen lead generation
Historically, banks have used “push marketing” to drive leads but this is becoming less and less effective. Direct mail, cold calls, and email can be intrusive. The last thing you want is a prospective consumer opting out of all further bank interactions.
Social media should be a lead-generation tactic for every bank. Social selling is considered “pull marketing,” and it often results in warmer leads that convert at a higher rate.
The buying process is changing and banks need to connect with prospective customers by serving them in the customer’s channel of choice. Doing so illustrates a bank’s sophistication and focus on customer experience.
How Dynamics 365 can help: Introduce social selling into your lead-generation strategy
In the age of social selling, researching the companies and people you are about to call is invaluable to the prospecting process. Social media such as LinkedIn and Customer Insights integrations allow for integrated research beyond current bank information.
The tight integration between Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn allows seamless access to LinkedIn profiles, prospects, and leads. Company details infused with social information allow you to drill down into related connections and pull lists of potential targets.
“Today ‘s highly digitally engaged financial services customer has 4.4 products, compared to only 2.7 for the digitally unengaged.”
Source:
Social selling amplifies your ability to reach warm prospects. According to Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner), referrals, including social networking leads, rank highest in their qualification. And company news, recent posts, and promotions can all serve as great icebreaker conversation topics.
helps banks score and prioritize leads, track referrals, monitor social insights and record every customer and employee interaction in one place.
“Nearly half (47 percent) of U.S. social media users today actively seek customer service through social media”
Source: NM Incite Social Care Survey
Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper:
Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.
Crowe CRM for Banking
Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With , you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.
For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit .
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
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Customer Experience Strategy And Overall Company Strategy
The generic company strategies model developed by Michael Porter classifies companies into one of three broad, generic categories: cost leaders (competing on low prices), differentiators (competing based on innovation in their products/services), and segments (competing by focusing on specific market needs) (Philipson, 1992).
A customer experience strategy is defined as “a plan that guides activities and [the] resource allocation needed to deliver an experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations.” There are also three customer experience strategies that align with the generic company strategies: self-service optimization, proactive guidance, and tailored intimacy (Forrester, 2010).
The following diagrams depict how the three customer experience strategies align with the three generic company strategies.
The self-service optimization strategy
The objective of the self-service optimization strategy is to create extremely effective high-touch self-service that is simple, automated, and error-free. Here are some examples of how this objective has been implemented:
The proactive guidance strategy
The objective of the proactive guidance strategy is to ensure customer delight by educating on innovations, solving problems preemptively, and connecting through social media. Here are some examples of how this objective has been implemented:
The “tailored intimacy” strategy
The objective of the tailored intimacy strategy is to use knowledge of target customers to create deep connections through interactions that are attuned, empathetic, and personalized to clients’ needs and aspirations. Here are some examples of how this objective has been implemented:
By focusing on aligning the generic company strategy with the customer experience strategy, it is then necessary to align the customer experience ecosystem to this strategy.
Learn how to choose the right digital experience platform for your business by watching the on-demand SAP Webinar featuring Forrester, “Customer Experience Matters.”
5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 4
There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Strategy 4: Build consumer relationships through data and digital transformation
Banks recognize the need to enhance their competitiveness and create an agile, sustainable advantage.
A bank’s unique customer data provides a rich repository from which to draw. This translates into a significant opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell products and services that are relevant to the consumer.
Data intelligence helps turn the raw data into targeted, effective value propositions and marketing strategies.
How Dynamics 365 can help: Customer Insights helps you engage your customers with intelligent insights
provides rich data visualizations to help you better understand the customer. By composing role-specific visualizations that bring together customer profiles, interactions, metrics, inferences, and predictions, you can uncover new insights with the security and privacy you require.
Banks can use predictive analytics to understand and expand customer lifetime value. Relationship managers can check overall account, loan, and churn rate, which can help them foster customer loyalty. Predicted lifetime events, such as buying a car or college for kids, help relationship managers recommend the next best product or service.
“Smart use of data can enable us to re-establish personalized services and bring back customized one-to-one relationships between the bank and the customer.”
Source:
81 percent of financial services CIOs say advanced analytics have the most potential to change organizations.
Source: Gartner, “,” Feb. 9, 2017
Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper:
Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.
Crowe CRM for Banking
Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With , you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.
For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit .
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
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Optimize Your Marketing Strategy With A/B Testing
Having too many good ideas is a great problem to have, but knowing which of those will resonate best with your audience is not. Choosing the wrong subject line, content asset, or design can lead to lackluster results and send your hard work down the drain. While most of us are allowed a marketing miss or two, one too many could lead to wasted efforts and missed opportunities for ROI.
If you’re like me, you probably prefer to stick to creative tasks and leave data and analytics to others on your team. The problem with that approach is that it leads to random acts of marketing that might not always correlate with the interests and pain points of your target audience or where they are in the sales funnel. So, in order to get the results you want, you need to launch personalized marketing efforts that engage, nurture, and convert your audience.
So what can marketers do to hit the nail on the head when it comes to producing effective and engaging marketing efforts? To start, you have to stop looking at the process of gathering and analyzing data as an unbearable and impossible task, and start thinking of it as a source of inspiration. When fully leveraged, good data opens the door for you to produce creative campaigns that generate results. By taking time to test your efforts and gather insights, you’re carving the way toward producing a more targeted and effective digital marketing strategy.
Today, we’re on a quest to help you eliminate the guesswork by outlining how your marketing team can benefit from practicing A/B testing. Keep reading if you’re ready to start gathering data that will help you optimize engagement and drive sustainable results.
What Is A/B Testing and Why Should You Implement It?
In the marketing world, A/B testing allows you to compare two versions of the same marketing asset with one distinct variable to determine which one resonates best with your audience and will garner better results. If you want to reap the full rewards of A/B testing, it is important to make this process a continuous effort. You can continue to test the same asset (also known as the constant, this is the version that usually generates the best results) against a new contender every time.
But why is A/B testing so important and why should it be a continuous effort? Repeating this process will help you uncover insights regarding your audience’s preferences and enable you to optimize your efforts for better engagement and conversions. While there might be a great amount of guesswork the first go around, you’ll eventually learn what your audience wants to hear and see — and when. And the more you practice A/B testing, the more your focus will shift from figuring out what works to fine-tuning campaigns and efforts that you already know will be a big hit.
What Should You A/B Test, Why, and How Often?
Now that you get the gist of what A/B testing is, you’re probably wondering how to implement it as a holistic part of your marketing plan. You can A/B test pretty much anything, but we recommend that you focus on the variables that are likely to pack the most punch to begin with and then move on to more minute details.
For example, if you’re trying to generate better results from your email marketing, you should consider the buyer journey as you work on A/B testing different elements. Your first goal should be to get your email delivered and opened, so your subject line is a good place to start. Once you’ve gathered enough data to understand what kind of subject lines resonate with your audience, you can move on to testing copy and CTAs. The end goal is to optimize your efforts so that they motivate your customers to keep progressing through the entire customer journey.
As to how often you should A/B test your efforts, that’s really up to you, but we recommend not to let your efforts remain stagnant for too long. At Act-On, we meet monthly to review the results of our campaigns and optimize them accordingly. We’re very fortunate that the Act-On platform makes it easy to A/B test elements in email, landing pages, and forms so that we can ensure that every single effort we launch is tailored to pique the interest of our audience, encourage them to engage, and convince them to convert.
What Can You Do With the Insights You Collect Through A/B Testing?
As we’ve mentioned a few times, the greatest benefit of A/B testing is that it allows you to optimize your efforts. A mistake that many marketers make, however, is not looking at the bigger picture when analyzing their results. Whether you’re testing a subject line, preview text, design, or CTA, you should use your findings to inform your overall marketing strategy and business efforts.
Think about where else you can apply your findings aside from the variable at hand. These are a few areas where you can leverage the results of your A/B testing for maximum impact:
- Content Strategy: Using the results you gather from A/B testing CTAs and topics is a great way to determine which direction to take when it comes to developing your content strategy. If you notice that certain content pieces or topics are generating a lot of buzz across the board, that’s a good indicator that you should produce similar content in the future.
- Sales Funnel Optimization: Have you noticed that, despite the fact that you’ve invested a great amount of time A/B testing and optimizing your efforts, your leads still seem to disappear at certain points in the customer journey? If so, you should take a step back to determine what kind of changes you can make (beyond testing variables) to improve the customer journey and keep your target audience moving through the sales funnel.
- Pricing Strategy: Comparing your pricing with your competitors is a good place to start if you want to determine how much to charge customers for products or services. A/B testing prices with your own customers, however, can provide more thorough insight into how much your customers are willing to pay for what you have to offer. This practice can help you figure out a pricing strategy moving forward and also provide information about things you can do to increase the value of your offerings in the eyes of your consumers.
You don’t have to be sneaky about testing pricing. Sustainable clothing company Everlane, for example, has a pretty interesting approach to A/B testing pricing on their website. The company’s “Choose What You Pay” section gives customers the option to pick one of three listed prices on overstock items. This enables the company to get rid of surplus stock by offering discounted prices while collecting important data that tells them how much customers are willing to pay for their products.
- Paid Search: Whether you’re a B2B or B2C organization, chances are you rely on some sort of paid ads to capture the attention of your target audience and generate new opportunities. A/B testing can help you determine the best social media platform to use to promote your ads, the most effective placement, and even which keywords to use. This will not only lead to better conversions but also help you effectively manage where you allocate your budget.
- Email Marketing: If you’re not already A/B testing your email marketing efforts, then you should start doing so as soon as possible for multiple reasons. To start, you can’t see results from your email efforts if your messages are not getting delivered, opened, and read.
In addition to following best practices for deliverability, you need to ensure that everything from your subject line to your copy, design, and CTAs all resonate with your audience and motivate them to convert. Testing each email element individually can help you uncover many insights about your target audience’s preferences, which you can use to inform and optimize your email marketing strategy over time.
The Right Platform Can Make A/B Testing Your Efforts Second Nature and Empower You to Leverage Your Findings
Let’s be honest, this is probably not the first time you’ve heard about the benefits of A/B testing, but you’re probably not making it a consistent effort because of the amount of time and resources it takes to test variables, gather data, and analyze your results. Implementing this practice and leveraging your findings doesn’t have to be a tedious task, however — especially if you’re using a comprehensive marketing automation tool such as Act-On.
Act-On not only makes the A/B testing process a breeze — allowing you to test practically any variable on everything from emails to landing pages to your website — but it also allows you to put the insights you gather into action easily. Our platform’s Data Studio enables you to consolidate your data and create reports so you can easily analyze your results. To top it all off, Act-On provides the tools you need to easily build email nurture campaigns and landing pages, score leads, segment your audience, and more.
If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On’s powerful marketing automation platform can help you enhance every single aspect of your marketing strategy, we invite you to schedule a demo with one of our digital marketing experts.
5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 2
There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Strategy 2: Streamline complex processes while elevating the customer experience
Manual or partially automated processes create internal inefficiencies and inconsistencies in service that affect and degrade the customer’s experience and satisfaction.
Customers expect banks to answer questions and solve problems quickly, without the extra step of forwarding questions across various departments to provide a customer with a solution. Follow-up and completion of customer requests are key to the collective trust customers have in your bank.
Customer retention is critical. Banks need to keep track of customer behaviors and predict needs, and then automatically target customers to illustrate how the bank can fulfill those needs.
81 percent of bankers agree: Organizations that can truly tap into what motivates human behavior and design the customer experience accordingly will be the next industry leaders.
Source:
How Dynamics 365 can help: Predict needs, provide knowledge and insights, and automate complex processes
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the ideal operational platform on which to automate complex work-item processing and business process challenges, including sales, operations, approvals, and quality reviews.
- Proactively manage operational work items and customer service cases through dashboards and escalation workflows.
- Knowledge management provides help in getting the best answer the first time.
- Personalize and track responses.
- Up-sell and cross-sell to turn issues into opportunities for increasing loyalty and satisfaction.
Process automation across sales, service, and marketing can free your employees to spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships.
provides dashboards to easily access information such as recent interactions, upcoming meetings, relationship health, upcoming deadlines for loan maturities or open opportunities, and current marketing offers.
A 5 percent reduction in your customer defection rate can increase profits 25 percent to 95 percent.
Source:
Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper:
Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.
Crowe CRM for Banking
Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With , you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.
For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit .
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
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REST API Testing Strategy: What Exactly Should You Test?
The API layer of any application is one of the most crucial software components. It is the channel which connects client to server (or one microservice to another), drives business processes, and provides the services which give value to users.
A customer-facing public API that is exposed to end-users becomes a product in itself. If it breaks, it puts at risk, not just a single application, but an entire chain of business processes built around it.
Mike Cohn’s famous Test Pyramid places API tests at the service level (integration), which suggests that around 20% or more of all of our tests should focus on APIs (the exact percentage is less important and varies based on our needs).
Once we have a solid foundation of unit tests which cover individual functions, API tests provide higher reliability covering an interface closer to the user, yet without the brittleness of UI tests.
API tests are fast, give high ROI, and simplify the validation of business logic, security, compliance, and other aspects of the application. In cases where the API is a public one, providing end-users programmatic access to our application or services, API tests effectively become end-to-end tests and should cover a complete user story.
So the importance of API testing is obvious. Several methods and resources help with HOW to test APIs — manual testing, automated testing, test environments, tools, libraries, and frameworks. However, regardless of what you will use — Postman, supertest, pytest, JMeter, mocha, Jasmine, RestAssured, or any other tools of the trade — before coming up with any test method you need to determine what to test…
API test strategy
The test strategy is the high-level description of the test requirements from which a detailed test plan can later be derived, specifying individual test scenarios and test cases. Our first concern is functional testing — ensuring that the API functions correctly.
The main objectives in functional testing of the API are:
- to ensure that the implementation is working correctly as expected — no bugs!
- to ensure that the implementation is working as specified according to the requirements specification (which later on becomes our API documentation).
- to prevent regressions between code merges and releases.
API as a contract — first, check the spec!
An API is essentially a contract between the client and the server or between two applications. Before any implementation test can begin, it is important to make sure that the contract is correct. That can be done first by inspecting the spec (or the service contract itself, for example a Swagger interface or OpenAPI reference) and making sure that endpoints are correctly named, that resources and their types correctly reflect the object model, that there is no missing functionality or duplicate functionality, and that relationships between resources are reflected in the API correctly.
The guidelines above are applicable to any API, but for simplicity, in this post, we assume the most widely used Web API architecture — REST over HTTP. If your API is designed as a truly RESTful API, it is important to check that the REST contract is a valid one, including all HTTP REST semantics, conventions, and principles (here, here, and here).
If this is a customer-facing public API, this might be your last chance to ensure that all contract requirements are met, because once the API is published and in use, any changes you make might break customers’ code.
(Sure, you can publish a new version of the API someday (e.g., /api/v2/), but even then backward compatibility might still be a requirement).
So, what aspects of the API should we test?
Now that we have validated the API contract, we are ready to think of what to test. Whether you’re thinking of test automation or manual testing, our functional test cases have the same test actions, are part of wider test scenario categories, and belong to three kinds of test flows.
API test actions
Each test is comprised of test actions. These are the individual actions a test needs to take per API test flow. For each API request, the test would need to take the following actions:
1. Verify correct HTTP status code. For example, creating a resource should return 201 CREATED and unpermitted requests should return 403 FORBIDDEN, etc.
2. Verify response payload. Check valid JSON body and correct field names, types, and values — including in error responses.
3. Verify response headers. HTTP server headers have implications on both security and performance.
4. Verify correct application state. This is optional and applies mainly to manual testing, or when a UI or another interface can be easily inspected.
5. Verify basic performance sanity. If an operation was completed successfully but took an unreasonable amount of time, the test fails.
Test scenario categories
Our test cases fall into the following general test scenario groups:
- Basic positive tests (happy paths)
- Extended positive testing with optional parameters
- Negative testing with valid input
- Negative testing with invalid input
- Destructive testing
- Security, authorization, and permission tests (which are out of the scope of this post)
Happy path tests check basic functionality and the acceptance criteria of the API. We later extend positive tests to include optional parameters and extra functionality. The next group of tests is negative testing where we expect the application to gracefully handle problem scenarios with both valid user input (for example, trying to add an existing username) and invalid user input (trying to add a username which is null). Destructive testing is a deeper form of negative testing where we intentionally attempt to break the API to check its robustness (for example, sending a huge payload body in an attempt to overflow the system).
Test flows
Let’s distinguish between three kinds of test flows which comprise our test plan:
- Testing requests in isolation – Executing a single API request and checking the response accordingly. Such basic tests are the minimal building blocks we should start with, and there’s no reason to continue testing if these tests fail.
- Multi-step workflow with several requests – Testing a series of requests which are common user actions, since some requests can rely on other ones. For example, we execute a POST request that creates a resource and returns an auto-generated identifier in its response. We then use this identifier to check if this resource is present in the list of elements received by a GET request. Then we use a PATCH endpoint to update new data, and we again invoke a GET request to validate the new data. Finally, we DELETE that resource and use GET again to verify it no longer exists.
- Combined API and web UI tests – This is mostly relevant to manual testing, where we want to ensure data integrity and consistency between the UI and API.
We execute requests via the API and verify the actions through the web app UI and vice versa. The purpose of these integrity test flows is to ensure that although the resources are affected via different mechanisms the system still maintains expected integrity and consistent flow.
An API example and a test matrix
We can now express everything as a matrix that can be used to write a detailed test plan (for test automation or manual tests).
Let’s assume a subset of our API is the /users endpoint, which includes the following API calls:
| GET /users | List all users |
| GET /users?name={username} | Get user by username |
| GET /users/{id} | Get user by ID |
| GET /users/{id}/configurations | Get all configurations for user |
| POST /users/{id}/configurations | Create a new configuration for user |
| DELETE /users/{id}/configurations/{id} | Delete configuration for user |
| PATCH /users/{id}/configuration/{id} | Update configuration for user |
Where {id} is a UUID, and all GET endpoints allow optional query parameters filter, sort, skip and limit for filtering, sorting, and pagination.
| # | Test Scenario Category | Test Action Category | Test Action Description |
| 1 | Basic positive tests (happy paths) | ||
| Execute API call with valid required parameters | Validate status code: |
1. All requests should return 2XX HTTP status code
2. Returned status code is according to spec: |
|
| Validate payload: |
1. Response is a well-formed JSON object
2. Response structure is according to data model (schema validation: field names and field types are as expected, including nested objects; field values are as expected; non-nullable fields are not null, etc.) |
||
| Validate state: |
1. For GET requests, verify there is NO STATE CHANGE in the system (idempotence)
2. For POST, DELETE, PATCH, PUT operations |
||
| Validate headers: |
Verify that HTTP headers are as expected, including content-type, connection, cache-control, expires, access-control-allow-origin, keep-alive, HSTS and other standard header fields – according to spec. Verify that information is NOT leaked via headers (e.g. X-Powered-By header is not sent to user). |
||
| Performance sanity: | Response is received in a timely manner (within reasonable expected time) – as defined in the test plan. | ||
| 2 | Positive + optional parameters | ||
| Execute API call with valid required parameters AND valid optional parameters
Run same tests as in #1, this time including the endpoint’s optional parameters (e.g., filter, sort, limit, skip, etc.) |
|||
| Validate status code: |
As in #1 | ||
| Validate payload: |
Verify response structure and content as in #1.
In addition, check the following parameters: Check combinations of all optional fields (fields + sort + limit + skip) and verify expected response. |
||
| Validate state: |
As in #1 | ||
| Validate headers: |
As in #1 | ||
| Performance sanity: | As in #1 | ||
| 3 | Negative testing – valid input | ||
| Execute API calls with valid input that attempts illegal operations. i.e.:
– Attempting to create a resource with a name that already exists (e.g., user configuration with the same name) – Attempting to delete a resource that doesn’t – Attempting to update a resource with illegal valid data (e.g., rename a configuration to an existing name) – Attempting illegal operation (e.g., delete a user configuration without permission.) And so forth. |
|||
| Validate status code: |
1. Verify that an erroneous HTTP status code is sent (NOT 2XX)
2. Verify that the HTTP status code is in accordance with error case as defined in spec |
||
| Validate payload: |
1. Verify that error response is received
2. Verify that error format is according to spec. e.g., error is a valid JSON object or a plain string (as defined in spec) 3. Verify that there is a clear, descriptive error message/description field 4. Verify error description is correct for this error case and in accordance with spec |
||
| Validate headers: |
As in #1 | ||
| Performance sanity: | Ensure error is received in a timely manner (within reasonable expected time) | ||
| 4 | Negative testing – invalid input | ||
| Execute API calls with invalid input, e.g.:
– Missing or invalid authorization token And so on. |
|||
| Validate status code: |
As in #1 | ||
| Validate payload: |
As in #1 | ||
| Validate headers: |
As in #1 | ||
| Performance sanity: | As in #1 | ||
| 5 | Destructive testing | ||
| Intentionally attempt to fail the API to check its robustness: Malformed content in request Wrong content-type in payload Content with wrong structure Overflow parameter values. E.g.: – Attempt to GET a user with invalid UUID – Overflow payload – huge JSON in request body Boundary value testing Empty payloads Empty sub-objects in payload Illegal characters in parameters or payload Using incorrect HTTP headers (e.g. Content-Type) Small concurrency tests – concurrent API calls that write to the same resources (DELETE + PATCH, etc.) Other exploratory testing |
|||
| Validate status code: |
As in #3. API should fail gracefully. | ||
| Validate payload:
Validate headers: |
As in #3. API should fail gracefully. As in #3. API should fail gracefully. | ||
| Performance sanity: |
As in #3. API should fail gracefully. |
Test cases derived from the table above should cover different test flows according to our needs, resources, and priorities.
Following the test matrix above should generate enough test cases to keep us busy for a while and provide good functional coverage of the API. Passing all functional tests implies a good level of maturity for an API, but it is not enough to ensure high quality and reliability of the API.
In the next post in this series we will cover the following non-functional test approaches which are essential for API quality:
Security and Authorization
- Check that the API is designed according to correct security principles: deny-by-default, fail securely, least privilege principle, reject all illegal inputs, etc.
- Positive: ensure API responds to correct authorization via all agreed auth methods – Bearer token, cookies, digest, etc. – as defined in spec
- Negative: ensure API refuses all unauthorized calls
- Role Permissions: ensure that specific endpoints are exposed to user based on role. API should refuse calls to endpoints which are not permitted for user’s role
- Protocol: check HTTP/HTTPS according to spec
- Data leaks: ensure that internal data representations that are desired to stay internal do not leak outside to the public API in the response payloads
- Rate limiting, throttling, and access control policies
Performance
- Check API response time, latency, TTFB/TTLB in various scenarios (in isolation and under load)
Load Tests (positive), Stress Tests (negative)
- Find capacity limit points and ensure the system performs as expected under load, and fails gracefully under stress
Usability Tests
- For public APIs: a manual “Product”-level test going through the entire developer journey from documentation, login, authentication, code examples, etc. to ensure the usability of the API for users without prior knowledge of our system.
Thanks for reading. To be continued!
5 Strategies for Digital Transformation in Banking – Strategy 2
There are 5 strategies banks can use to overcome challenges with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Strategy 2: Streamline complex processes while elevating the customer experience
Manual or partially automated processes create internal inefficiencies and inconsistencies in service that affect and degrade the customer’s experience and their satisfaction
Customers expect banks to answer questions and solve problems quickly, without the extra step of forwarding questions across various departments to provide a customer with a solution. Follow-up and completion of customer requests are key to the collective trust customers have in your bank.
Customer retention is critical. Banks need to keep track of customer behaviors and predict needs, and then automatically target customers to illustrate how the bank can fulfill those needs.
81 percent of bankers agree: Organizations that can truly tap into what motivates human behavior and design the customer experience accordingly will be the next industry leaders.
Source:
How Dynamics 365 can help: Predict needs, provide knowledge and insights, and automate complex processes
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the ideal operational platform on which to automate complex work-item processing and business process challenges, including sales, operations, approvals, and quality reviews.
- Proactively manage operational work items and customer service cases through dashboards and escalation workflows.
- Knowledge management provides help in getting the best answer the first time.
- Personalize and track responses.
- Up-sell and cross-sell to turn issues into opportunities for increasing loyalty and satisfaction.
Process automation across sales, service, and marketing can free your employees to spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships.
provides dashboards to easily access information such as recent interactions, upcoming meetings, relationship health, upcoming deadlines for loan maturities or open opportunities, and current marketing offers.
A 5 percent reduction in your customer defection rate can increase profits 25 percent to 95 percent.
Source:
Interested in more strategies? Download the full white paper:
Learn how banks can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help improve the customer experience, streamline processes, optimize opportunity management, build relationships, and modernize lead generation.
Crowe CRM for Banking
Crowe works with 1,800 financial services organizations across the country, including more than two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. banks. With , you can get a true 360-degree view of the customer – with a single view into all communications, interactions, operations, and relationships.
For more information about Crowe CRM for Banking, contact us at +1 877 600 2253 or visit .
By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner
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