The Best Chatbot Testing Techniques Your Business Needs to Know
When it comes to giving your customers and potential customers, the best experience possible within your business, the most up and coming technology used are chatbots. Installed onto your website, chatbots allow customers to contact your business at any time of day to get the information they need to know.
However, while advanced, the technology is new, and it’s essential to make sure it’s working correctly for your business, and this means testing the tech to ensure it gives the right answers. If this is what you’re after, here are the best ways to test your chatbot to guarantee it’s working correctly and gives the responses you’re happy with when representing your business.
Is It Conversational?
The first thing you need to ask is whether or not the chatbot you’re working with sounds like a person. Of course, it’s not, and people understand and know it’s not, but it still needs to sound humanish for it to have the desired effect of engaging your customers.
For example, you want the chatbot to start with a broad, friendly greeting when the conversation begins, and you need to make sure the following discussion has flow. This means looking at things like the responses and ensuring the original question has been understood, as well as the many varieties in which it could be said.
You also need to make sure the replies are fast and concise. No one wants to sit and read an answer that’s several paragraphs long and doesn’t summarise the information that’s being shared. It would be best if you had your chatbot to work like two friends talking, not a person to a robot.
Run Tests on Your Website
“Of course, it’s practically impossible for you to train your chatbot to be able to answer every single query it could come up against, and someone could type in, as well as all the different ways the questions can be worked; spelling mistakes and all,” shares Sarah Turner, an IT blogger for Writinity.
However, since your chatbot is probably working within a specific niche, you won’t need it too. Try to keep answers as broad as possible, especially when working with what is known as ‘context-specific questions.’ Make sure you’re paying extra attention to how the bot is responding, and whether the information is accurate.
Creating Emergency Responses
As we’ve spoken about above, you’re not going to be able to prepare your chatbot for every single thing someone has the potential to enter, and it could be a load of random letters and numbers, which doesn’t mean anything. In this situation, you still want to handle the query professionally.
For this, you’ll need to create go-to emergency responses. These will be used in exceptional situations to ensure that the chatbot isn’t left stumped and without anything to say, while still representing your business in a professional light. Ask your developer for more information.
Using Professional Chatbot Testing Tools
Since the introduction of chatbots, there has been the implementation of proper chatbot testing tools. There are many versions and varieties of these applications out there, and which one you use is entirely up to you.
“These bots test your chatbots by asking questions that can range from likely conversations to nearly impossible and never going to happen to ensure the responses are valid. They will also test things like what symbols or emojis are and aren’t recognized, and whether it will remember key details to relay back during different conversations,” explains Harry Davis, a tech writer for Draft Beyond.
Don’t Forget Developer Testing
While you can do a lot of testing of your chatbot yourself, don’t forget that the development team where you got your chatbot from, or in-house, will also be testing it as they create it.
You’ll be able to look into the ways the chatbot has been tested by these teams, as well as seeing what kind of potential the chatbot has. You’ll be able to see test reports to ensure the responses are accurate, and the chatbot has the capability to learn.
Never Stop Testing
Since many chatbots are designed to learn and will continuously update themselves, it’s essential to make sure you’re not just testing your bot once and then letting it run, but always testing it to make sure it’s consistently delivering a quality experience.
You could do this weekly, monthly, or quarterly, but it’s always a good idea to pop on now and then to see what it’s saying.
Ashley Halsey is a professional tech and business writer at Luckyassignments.com and Gumessays.com, who has helped many businesses maximize their potential. Mother of two children, she enjoys reading and tinkering with her computer and smartphone. Also, she tutors at Researchpapersuk.com.
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