Ever since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, chatbots have gained critical acclaim in the business world. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and similar AI-based solutions have provided significant benefits for not just businesses or enterprises but also for customers as well. Experts concurrently predict that AI based smart bots will see an increase in industry wide acceptance even in the post pandemic era. This was proved true, as several brands have recognized the multiple advantages of integrating bots into their existing infrastructure, therefore the demand for smart bots will only increase in the near future.
With the adoption of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and predictive analysis, chatbots have now become much advanced and can integrate a wide range of features. Chatbots are now capable of understanding emotions with sentiment analysis, converting text to speech and vice versa, and can also process natural languages. Efficient chatbot development service providers can implement all these technologies and functionalities into your chatbot, but how do you ensure that it all works correctly.
For this, chatbot testing is leveraged.
Similar to the complete product development life cycle, testing is also an imperative part of the chatbot development process. It is not just about deploying the bot and verifying that it works. It’s also essential to analyze various other parameters to make sure there are no errors and the bot is of high quality.
Why Chatbot Testing Is Necessary?
Since bots integrate a lot of functions and change dynamically with the growing market demands and customer requirements, it is essential to ensure that they are efficiently tested. Continuously testing chatbots assures quality at scale and helps developers solve errors within the product development lifecycle itself. Similar to other platforms where direct customer interaction takes place, chatbots too have a user interface and customer experience (CX) channels, these channels must be continuously tested with each modification.
AI based technologies are continuously evolving and there are significant new platforms through which humans express their needs. Only through automating and testing can you continuously adapt to these growing demands.
Also Read: How To Perform Data-Driven Testing in Robot Framework
7 Features To Be Checked While Testing Chatbots
1. Conversational flow
Testers must ensure that the fundamental aim of the chatbot is performed efficiently. As the basic function of the bot is to interact and provide answers to customers, testers must validate if the bot is able to understand human queries. The bot must not only understand the question but respond immediately with precise solutions 24/7. Testers must also analyze and ensure that the interaction is effective and the chatbot is able to keep customers engaged all throughout the conversation. For this chatbot testers can first analyze whether they respond as required to the most frequently asked questions and then move on to other critical test scenarios.
2. Confusion handling
The human dialogues contain several paraphrases, sentiments, multifaceted nuance, or obscure words. The chatbot must be tested to ensure that it provides amicable responses in such circumstances, such as requesting to input text again or to select options from a drop-down list. The chatbot tester’s purpose should be to identify whether the bot gets confused under such circumstances and provides irrelevant answers.
3. Speed and accuracy
As mentioned above, customers expect the bots to provide accurate solutions quicker. In fact, most enterprises employ chatbots so that customers will no longer have to wait to talk to a human representative and will get answers much faster. If the bot is not able to answer accurately within seconds then its main purpose is not met. Therefore, testers must ensure that the bot undergoes several performance tests to reduce the time taken by a chatbot to retrieve the response and relay it to the customer.
Also Read: How Advanced Artificial Intelligence Based Chatbots Help Save Time In Customer Service
4. Format validation
Some websites or platforms ask visitors for email ids, phone numbers, etc to generate more leads. Sometimes, users tend to provide incorrect information both purposely and mistakenly. Chatbots must have the capability to accept such inputs only after verifying the right format. If the number or email ids are not in the right format required, then chatbots must reject such inputs. The bot must ask users to modify or correct the errors in the given information before further processing it. For this, the bot must be trained on an exhaustive dataset using which format validation behavior and it needs to be tested thoroughly by chatbot testers.
5. Interface and Graphical content testing
Sometimes chatbots will have to respond to user queries with links in the websites, images of various formats, PDFs, etc. Therefore, testers must make sure that not only texts but also the above mentioned elements are functioning as expected. The bot must be able to showcase other elements in the conversation without any lag or glitch. Therefore, all accepted formats, apart from text, should also be included in the training to see if they are displayed on the chatbot interface as expected.
6. Compatibility testing
A business will not build a chatbot just for a single platform such as a website. Businesses will want bots to provide accurate responses to customers on all platforms and even on social media networking sites such as Facebook (now known as META) and Whatsapp. It should also work efficiently on different operating systems such as iOS and Android as well as on multiple browsers or platforms. To test whether the chatbot is responsive on all these platforms and works efficiently, the tester must run compatibility testing. These tests help the QA teams identify if the chatbot user interface (UI) elements and their usability remain consistent on multiple platforms.
Also Read: Conversational AI To The Rescue: How Deploying Chatbots Can Boost Lead Generation
7. API/Integration Testing
We all know chatbots don’t operate on their own. It must be integrated into an existing business architecture such as website, software solutions, social networks, employee ERP or any other digital medium. Therefore, a tester will have to conduct API and integration tests to analyze whether the chatbot will work as required when implemented on any of these platforms. Chatbot tester will have to utilize custom arrangements to ensure that the chatbot is implemented into the existing framework without any disruption and interacts with the framework when needed. Such as it must provide data analytics capabilities to the website admin to show the leads generated, actions performed or pages visited. These functionalities will only work efficiently if the chatbot is properly integrated with the website and can share resources with each other.
ThinkPalm’s Chatbot Testing Services
At ThinkPalm, our chatbot developers and testers leverage cutting edge infrastructure and automated services to ensure that your bot will perform efficiently in the real world. For a chatbot or virtual assistant to be successful, they need to be helpful for customers from every platform including Mobile, Website, Social Media, etc. They also need to provide accurate answers immediately 24/7 based on any inquiries made by the customers. Our chatbot services ensure that your bot provides all these and much more. We test and make sure that the bot is 100% reliable, safe and private so that all confidential messages with the chatbot are kept secure. With our chatbot testing services, we ensure that chatbots can be easily integrated into your existing business architecture or any other platform.
Interested in learning more about our chatbot development and testing services?
Schedule a free consultation with our expert chatbot consultants and accelerate your company’s digital transformation today.
Author Bio
Ricky Philip is a content strategist, who has an unparalleled dedication to building productive and engaging website content that attracts traffic and increase search engine rankings. If not typing furiously on his keyboard, Ricky is constantly learning ways to enhance search traffic acquisitions.
