How to Test Chatbots: Explained

You must have been living under a rock for the past 15 years if you’ve never had the ‘pleasure’ of bumping into a chatbot. This software has been integrated into customer service, e-commerce and other online platforms. Since these bots are essentially the face of their organisation, they must perform flawlessly. A well-functioning chatbot will significantly improve the overall user experience, whereas a poorly tested buggy one will infuriate potential customers. Additionally, the brand’s reputation will be tarnished. Testing these bots requires a combination of techniques to not only assess their functionality but also determine if they provide natural responses to user input. The testing process can take months, possibly years before becoming fully refined. In this week’s blog, we’ll be covering some of the techniques used to best test chatbots.

Usability Testing

Here, you’re testing how user-friendly the chatbot is. This involves getting real people to have a go at using it, and then give their unfiltered feedback on their experience.

Easy to use: One of the stand-out features people seek is an easy-to-use platform. If people do not understand how to interact with the chatbot, then it’s back to the drawing board.

Natural conversation: How natural does the chatbot sound in its responses? Bit robotic and constantly recycling responses? That’s no good. Most customers would like their interactions to feel as close to human as possible.

Dealing with mistakes: Nothing is perfect. Even the chatbot will likely make mistakes but how it can deal with those mistakes is very telling. Does it ask the users to rephrase the question or will it not compute the user’s input?

Performance Testing

In any customer service environment, there will be times when things get really busy. The bot will have to be able to cope with significantly increased footfall. Performance Testing is used to see how the chatbot performs under pressure. Since these bots are typically run off a cloud-based infrastructure, it’s difficult to gauge the performance under stress.

Scalability: If the user base expands, will the chatbot still run smoothly without sacrificing response quality or speed?

Latency Testing: Users expect immediate responses and any noticeable delay will irritate them. A latency test will identify where response times can be improved.

NLP Testing (Natural Language Processing)

NLP enables the chatbots to understand and interpret human language. However, human communication is often filled with idioms and slang. The chatbot will have to make sense of the various different ways that people express themselves.

Multi-turn Conversations: A chatbot must remember what was said earlier to provide context and respond even when users jump between topics.

Different wordings and slang: Not everyone’s dialect is the same, so you test if the chatbot can understand synonyms and slang.

Conclusion

As the digital face of many organisations, chatbots must deliver seamless natural responses to uphold the brand’s reputation. By testing how well they handle real-world situations, businesses can make sure they’re ready for action. Though testing may be a long continuous process, it will pay dividends in the long run. If you would like to read some of our other blogs, please visit Blog Grid – eTestware.