A Comprehensive Guide on Chatbot Testing: Features to Check & Quality Tips to Keep In Mind

Chatbots are AI-based computer programs that simulate human conversations by learning context and deriving sense from spoken or written language. Bots understand the objective of the conversation and give relevant answers or directions. Chatbots interact through text as well as voice and are categorized according to the industry in which they are used such as banking chatbots, personal finance chatbots, medical chatbots, etc. Chatbots have become the favored medium to establish customer support.

Spike in the Demand for Chatbots

Unlike human executives, bots reply to customer queries around the clock, and ever since the rise of COVID-19 there has been a large spike in the adoption of chatbots by organizations around the world. There is enough realization now, that customer support cannot completely depend on human resources, and having an intellectual chatbot is absolutely essential to prevent customer dissatisfaction due to delayed responses.

Why Should You Test Chatbot Applications?

As mentioned above, a first-class chatbot with a complete set of capabilities will make its developers reach out from the crowd. How to build an ideal software solution? In our experience, quality assurance and testing are the most important stages to examine within the development process. 

The biggest pitfall of using a chatbot for your business is its potential failures. Among the most common problems that can disappoint your customers and affect your business productivity and reputation are the following:

• Broken scripts and crashes 
• Some chatbots are not prepared to recognize the confusion
• Impersonal communication
• Chatbots build without prior research on targeted users
• Chatbots that comprehend too much personal information like your date of birth

As a business or product owner, you surely want to bypass all those errors as they influence company reputation. You want to give the highest user experience level, but that’s difficult without testing your software. As a user, you also want to have all your requests fulfilled in a human-like polite manner with a good knowledge of a conversational context. 

Features to be checked while testing Chatbots

Unlike other software products, chatbots tend to break more often. The reasons for frequent failures endure in the conversational nature of chatbots. As a rule, we assume a human-like talk with a bot forgetting that our language and way of speaking/writing are very nuanced. Considering this feature of chatbots, testers employ a quite similar chatbot testing strategy. Below we share this strategy, including the features of the chatbot to be tested.

Conversation flow

You never know what your speaker will say next. However, presented in a conversational context, you may predict the next words. So does a chatbot. However, as we already mentioned, the human language is complete of nuances like slang, non-native speakers, humor, double meaning, etc. Giving clear and natural responses is a fundamental goal of a chatbot, that’s why a tester should review the following things while testing a conversational flow:

• Does a chatbot clearly know the questions?
• Does it always give immediate responses to these questions?
• Are the answers related to the given questions?
• Should a user ask a list of questions until he gets the answer?
• Does a chatbot involve the user to continue the conversation?

Business-specific questions

Once you tested the conversational flow, continue to test how the chatbot is answering business-specific questions. Today, chatbots are employed mostly by banks, retailers, hospitals, service businesses. Each industry has its particular terminology, notions, nuances. So, a tester should have a list of domain-specific questions to examine if the chatbot is able to answer those. 

Confusion handling

Confusion may occur if a user enters some expression with double meaning or an unknown word for a chatbot. The latter should be prepared to answer in such a condition. The tester’s purpose is to check if the chatbot can manage misunderstandings, exceptional conversational scenarios, and unusual patterns. This ability of a chatbot is showing how “emotionally intelligent” it is. 

Speed and accuracy

How fast the chatbot gives response concerns as people want to get answers to their requests instantly. Another important thing to test is accuracy. Test engineers should calculate the number of times when the bot provided correct answers.

Quality tips to keep in mind while testing chatbots

• Data validation should take place promptly and be followed by a corresponding message. For invalid data, the message returned should inform the customer about the mistake in his question. If the information is authentic, a client should see a success message showing that the bot has received the provided information.
• Customers should be requested to review, rate the chatbot experience. Real-time users may detect and report a few defects that might have been missed during the training/testing phases.
• Before going live, the chatbot should be tested on broadly utilized gadgets, programs, and OS versions.
• Chatbots should be formulated with and tested to give an amicable response to perplexing questions.
• Test to check if the chatbot bypasses getting into cyclic loops.
• A discussion with a chatbot should have a sensible stream of the required information, similar to a conversation with a customer support executive.
• Focus on input categories— different languages, formats, lengths, and combinations of characters.
• Ensure that the chatbot is intelligent enough to recognize the details provided by the customer previously in the same conversation. Never should it request a detail that’s been already given.
• When the chatbot isn’t able to fix a critical query it should promote a smooth transition to a customer support executive and he/she who takes over must have all the data that the customer had given to the bot.
• Automation of chatbot testing can be performed by using another chatbot that’s matured to communicate with the chatbot that you are testing.
• Classify the testing of a chatbot into three levels: possible situations expected situations and almost impossible situations and assure that the chatbot provides expected replies in a prompt way for each of these.

Also Read: 5 Popular Tools For Testing Blockchain Applications

Conclusion

Testing a chatbot is not an easy task as it includes a technical understanding of its internal programming, planning, prediction of real-time scenarios, ideation, application of techniques, datasets, and expert thought processes. Furthermore, a chatbot will need constant support and upgrades. After the first release, when the chatbot grows to converse with real-time users, that’s when the real test arrives.

Collect feedback from customers constructively and aim to provide better updates. An ongoing and continuous testing process is necessary to keep the chatbot appropriate, accurate, and future-proof its performance.

Need to implement chatbot testing in your project? Think no more! TestUnity provides the testing services on-demand, serves with projects of any scale, and is ready to start with a few days’ advance notice. Choose to team up with a QA services provider like TestUnity. Our team of testing experts specializes in QA and has years of experience implementing tests with different testing software. Get in touch with a TestUnity expert today.

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