Testing Services

Quality Assurance in chatbots powered conversations

Conversational chatbots are in phase of revolutionizing the way that interaction takes place with customers across industries as this would replace websites and some applications since chatbots use the most natural method of human interaction - a dialogue. It is the advent of a technology era and simplifies the traditional interaction processes via phone by providing instant, tailored, two way conversations at scale and all through natural human language. Ensuring quality in these interactions paves a way for testing widely. Though the usual web application testing, like functional, compatibility, security and performance testing is required, it is important and necessary to have usability testing first for a great chatbot, some of the top features to test to create an engaging experience and make users come back for more would be Interaction, Answering, Navigation, Handling errors etc. Agile and continuous testing models are excellent approaches to be followed for chatbot testing as minimum viable product can be enriched during each iteration.

Creating a machine that can be useful with novelty features is challenging and ensuring quality for such an entity comes with different obstacles when compared to existing software. The underlying principle for any well performing chatbot is to keep it simple, stupid which means a bot shouldn't be built to answer any question, instead there should a definition in details as what they need to perform flawlessly focusing first on frequent cases, then possible cases and lastly address infrequent requests. Testing methods defined should address each of its components, starting with input, knowledge base, intelligence and reasoning, infrastructure where bot will be hosted, connectivity and voice communication etc.

Industries across have begun transforming their voice process to conversational chatbots and are considering adoption of Chatbots as modern age contact Centre executives, minimizing turnaround time and cost along the way. Due to the novelty of this technology, most users have a tendency to treat the app as a real person during their Interaction with a chatbot, hence testing should be more focused on achieving the consistency of the app which means maintaining the same voice during entire conversation as the users shouldn't feel that they are talking to a different customer representative. Chatbots are required to do more than if/then controls as they can parse text and create their own answers, testers should play with different combinations of inputs and variations of the same input to identify the sytem's ability to understand. Advanced chatbot requires adequate testing and debugging.

A well-developed chatbot should be available round the clock for conversations with customers, provide similar experience regardless of the channel: may it be mobile, web etc., ability to flawlessly interpret various languages commonly conversed, should restrict response format to an easy to understand text, images and unified widgets for better conversations, provide swift response to any query without any delay or making the customer wait, capable of remembering customer interests or preferences and uses order history to recommend products, studies from customer responses to the products advertised, and cross sells effectively, Improves efficiency and reduces turnaround time through speedy information delivery, does mundane tasks at high speed, gives specific user input at each point, learns from client feedback and improvises, thus enhancing the end user experience by understanding the context and responding the user with most appropriate information even to the extent of distinguishing the slang or irony.

Chatbots are excellent examples of software that can be developed using Agile approach, to ensure no bugs are crawling into the bot, testing is good to be performed at each iteration. In the initial stages ensuring business logic, and in later phases automation helps QA teams to deliver improved version into the market, the significant Quality Assurance challenges of the chatbot automation process includes huge number of test cases, lack of previous prototypes, security, and of course lack of business logic prior to starting implementation. Next generation chatbots or interfaces should be more QA tested for behavior, dialogue accuracy, speed, Localization and multi lingual support, compatibility across platforms and collecting the right data and improve etc.  Large number of clients across industries have foreseen the power of these new interfaces and are already investing to create and deliver a value through chatbot powered conversations.