Crowdtesting is a great tool developers can use to both test chatbots as well as provide them with the feedback they need to improve their weaknesses. Doing this will help chatbots reach their full potential to become great communicators.
Crowdtesting is testing strategy that assesses the performance and/or user experience of an app, website, IoT, etc with the crowd, or community of professional, freelance testers located around the world.
Sometimes, the best lessons in life come as the results of our failures. Crowdtesting, as a testing tool, can find the shortcomings and failures of a chatbot in order to provide developers with valuable data they can use to improve them.
Scenario-based testing can be used to assess chatbots in very specific ways. This can include a chatbot’s ability to properly respond to a specific question related to a promotion or directions on how to make a new account, for example.
The precision of a scenario-based test is also effective when testing the chatbot's performance when it comes to a wide range of response times. When customers wait several minutes to answer a chatbot's question, does the chatbot respond appropriately? What happens when customers respond after more than 30 minutes? How well does the chatbot handle two questions at once?
Bugs or red flags that emerge from this type of testing can provide the development team with valuable data, which can then be utilized to teach and improve the chatbot.
Exploratory testing, like scenario-based testing, is another methodology that brings many benefits to the table. Exploratory testing with the crowd is a great way to perform real-world tests on chatbots simulating real interactions.
Crowdtesting is also makes it possible to interact with a chatbot using various devices, across dozens of configurations, and from a number of locations. This allows the crowdtesters to find a maximum number of bugs that may appear due to the sheer diversity of the testing devices and configurations as well as network characteristics in different countries.
Additionally, crowdtesting can be used to test a chatbot’s performance and feel. Posing multiple questions to chatbots in a variety of ways can help the testers asses the chatbot's ability to respond logically to different questions.
Testers can report irrelevant, confusing, or improper responses helping developers understand the chatbot’s limitations. From there, the development team can teach the chatbot how to improve its ability to respond.
Crowdtesting can also produce other kinds of data that can eventually help chatbots learn. For example, a chatbot that has trouble understanding a particular question may respond by providing with a handful of suggestions instead.
Using data on how the testers responded to the suggestions, the chatbot can be reprogrammed to accept the most popular answer as the right response to that question. When combined with machine learning, chatbots can be automatically programmed to learn from this data without human intervention.
Crowdtesting is useful when it comes to testing multilingual chatbots as well. Since the crowd is made up of many testers speaking multiple languages, it’s capable of finding different types of bugs including grammar and vocabulary mistakes that can make communication more difficult. Again, this data can be used by the developers, as a teaching tool, to improve the performance of the chatbots.
Furthermore, crowdtesting will measure the chatbot’s ability to respond to questions that can be asked in several different ways. For example, How can I pay for the tickets? What are my payment options? What payment methods do you accept? Can I pay with a credit card or PayPal?
Using the feedback from the testers, the developers can teach the chatbot how to properly respond to these types of questions in the future.
To review, chatbots are a lot like students. They have a ton of potential to do great things, but it largely depends on how well they are taught. Nonetheless, testing serves a crucial purpose in providing developers with valuable feedback on a chatbot’s performance.
Using this data, developers can make adjustments and teach chatbot to better assist customers. Crowdtesting, as an assessment, is a valuable tool that provides developers with a rich set of data that will help them create a smarter, more capable chatbot.
To learn more about crowdtesting, we invite you to download our crowdtesting guide below.