Quality Task Force - An Ever-Changing Insight Portal

AN EVER-CHANGING INSIGHT PORTAL

Project Partner

1

B U S I N E S S I N T E RV I E W

BEN SYKES

2

NEW HEIGHTS QualityTaskForce is a global leader in high-quality testing, offering clients, both large and small, cost-effective solutions for their companies’ quality assurance measures. We spoke with CTO, Ben Sykes, about its success.

Written by Anna McMahon • Produced by Tom Barnes

3

It has been six years since QualityTaskForce was launched, in answer to a gap in the product-testing market.

I

t was a natural progression for Ben and his team, responding to an increased need for quality assurance. And the story behind the company is a rather interesting one, with humble beginnings stemming from an informal chat in a noisy Swiss café.

Ben picks up the story. “We have quite a history. We were founded in 2012 in Switzerland, spun out of our sister company, b-mobile. What happened was that b-mobile was a large consultancy, offering our services to telecommunication companies, but as the years went on, we were taking more and more work in the area of quality assurance. Quality assurance and testing somehow didn’t fit so well with the core business, so Thomas,

4

the CEO, and I sat down one day in a greasy spoon, and we decided to form QualityTaskForce, specifically to take on the quality assurance business.”

Since its launch, the nature of the quality assurance work has evolved. Ben explains, “As a Swiss business, we found EU markets incredibly difficult, as Swiss prices are significantly higher, so we were struggling to compete. Although the business was working well, it was always a problem. Our core story was that it didn’t matter if we were working with huge customers or tiny customers, large banks right down to very smallscale start-ups in app development or new technology. Whether working with these huge customers or these tiny customers, we always faced the same

“InsightPortal is a unique platform designed to improve the quality of your online business�

5

6

question. What should we actually be testing our software on? Which mobile phones should we be using? Which tablets? Which web browsers? This was a problem everywhere. Our traditional model in answer to this problem was to provide some consultancy, so we decided to address this by getting into the product world and developing our own online tool to help our customers select the best devices to test their products. That was how InsightPortal was born.”

one-stop portal for advice and selfservice consultancy on the internet. And it was an instant hit with the company’s existing clients. Ben explains,” After we developed it, we sold it to our existing customers, and the feedback was absolutely fantastic. One customer, before they took our portal, had two full-time staff members doing this job of trying to understand which devices were the best ones for testing their products. Because of our portal, these two staff members were redeployed

InsightPortal is a unique platform designed to improve the quality of your online business, thanks to marketdriven test advice informing you on which products are necessary to be tested. The development centre is in Wroclaw in Poland, where a young, dynamic team drives the company forward, offering a successful graduate recruitment scheme, attracting the best development and marketing talent.

InsightPortal has shown incredible growth – news stories are now available inside the portal, so you can read all the latest from Google, Apple or Samsung, for example. Covering the whole of the market, InsightPortal has become the

into a much more useful part of the business, doing more productive things than trying to Google for 40 hours per week to understand the market. We provided cost savings immediately to this particular customer. Our portal subscriptions are 149 euros per month, and a full-time staff member in Switzerland is considerably more. It pays for itself in a matter of hours.”

As all the company’s existing customers chose to subscribe to InsightPortal, a decision was made to take the product to the next step, with a more public launch last year. Subscriber numbers have since grown. Ben says that it was 7

InsightPortal has been referred to by one customer as the Bloomberg of testing – a sentiment that fills Ben with pride, being the trusted source for customers

8

9

purely accidental how QualityTaskForce was able to find its niche. He adds, “As a testing company, we work with a lot of external software vendors who sell testing tools and software. When we told them about InsightPortal, there was a eureka moment. Our data and advice is so useful to these software companies. They would traditionally be our competitors, but they are not anymore because they actually take our data from us.”

One such company is pCloudy, which provides access to real mobile phones over the internet. You no longer need to buy phones to test on, as pCloudy enables you to rent them on a perminutes basis. Speaking about the relationship, Ben said, “pCloudy integrated our data services into their portal so that, not only could they offer devices, but they could also offer advice on which devices should be used by the customer. It links the two things 10

together. They are providing devices; we are providing advice about devices.

They fit together very well. Now all our information services are available in the pCloudy portal for their customers, joining the dots together and helping their customers a lot more. Their business model is to sell device time, so if we tell customers what they need to be using, that enables pCloudy to sell more device time, as we are suggesting that more devices need to be tested. So, we have a double-benefit, both for the end-user, who gets good, data-driven advice, and to pCloudy, who sell more device minutes.”

InsightPortal has been referred to by one customer as the Bloomberg of testing – a sentiment that fills Ben with pride, being the trusted source for customers. He said, “Our data changes on a daily basis, and we bring into our database, millions of data points every day. We developed our first portal which

is now live, and a complete redesign is ongoing on at the moment, bringing new features and making it much more user-friendly. That’s our focus right now.

We will be bringing out our new service portfolio, which will be going into soft launch at the end of March. We would like to add end-users to the portal and expand our business-to-business integrations services. Our target is to keep growing. What is important for us is that our customers can be one-man bands working from home, or large multinational companies with offices on every continent. The business model caters for both.”

And it’s a business model that appears to be working. Ben added, “We will keep

doing what we’re doing, but we have to move with the market. The tech landscape is moving all the time, and we have to move with it. We are very nimble, so we can react quickly. If we have a customer that wants help to understand something, then we are doing it for them. Coming from an area of user experience and testing, we aim to delight our customers and users, and now we are using those exact same principles with InsightPortal to make sure we satisfy our customers’ day-to-day testing needs.”

So, just as Bloomberg satisfies our requirements for news, InsightPortal is satisfying its customers’ quality assurance needs with an ever-changing InsightPortal.

Why don’t you see for yourself?

11

Gemeindehausweg 1 CH-6330 Cham Switzerland Phone: +41 (0) 41 760 75 71 www.qualitytaskforce.com