Quality Assurance In Chatbot Powered Conversations
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.