In our current landscape, it feels like each new day marks the arrival of new technology that disrupts existing norms and demands attention. In the same breath, it’s no secret that customer expectations are continuing to evolve. Your customers want faster results, personalized customer experience (CX) journeys, and answers to all their questions. It’s a lot for even the most efficient of organizations to manage. But, for many contact centers, it can feel virtually impossible.
Conversational AI-powered chatbots are a great tool for bringing your CX to the next level. But they are also extremely complicated systems that require a significant amount of your team’s bandwidth. However, as increasingly more contact centers have turned to chatbots to provide rapid, cost-effective CX, it’s become more important than ever to ensure that your investment is worth it. At the end of the day, a chatbot that takes too long to respond to simple customer queries simply isn’t worth the cost.
To ensure that your chatbot is always running correctly, it’s critical to make continuous contact center testing a part of your overall CX strategy. Without it, you’re only opening the door to various AI-related risks that will affect your chatbot’s performance and leave your customers feeling frustrated.
The Chatbot Dilemma
Without a doubt, chatbots offer many key benefits for contact centers looking to stand out from the competition and deliver exceptional CX. Chatbots offer 24/7 service, can make proactive recommendations to your customers, and are a cost-effective alternative to agent-led interactions. Put together in an ideal situation, chatbots open an entirely new realm of new possibilities for contact centers.
However, it’s not an easy road to achieve this goal. Conversational AI-powered bots are extremely complex, often with thousands of ways of responding to the many various questions your customers may ask. And, in each of these scenarios, your brand can be exposed to numerous risks.
Additionally, chatbots can introduce a wide range of new concerns into your contact center. For example, security risks arise whenever your bots handle sensitive data, such as gathering patient information for a healthcare provider, or payment information for a retail brand. Privacy, ethical, and legal risks can all arise from a poorly managed chatbot and can put your brand’s reputation and revenue on the line.
The Problem of Scale
In addition to these other considerations, bot performance should remain at the top of the list of factors that you must test and monitor. For many contact centers, chatbots are appealing for their ability to provide rapid answers to customer queries, at any time. This allows your agents to focus on higher-level problems and support your customer beyond foundational screening and easy-to-solve issues.
But what happens when your bot performance falters?
Imagine that you’re a retailer headed into the holiday season. This period of time is critical for your brand, and it’s necessary to support hundreds, if not thousands, of customers at a time to generate enough sales to get your business through slower seasons throughout the rest of the year. However, just as your sales begin to ramp up and customers flock to your website and chatbots to ask questions and complete sales, your chatbot suddenly experiences downtime and lag. Where your bot was once able to respond to customer questions within seconds, it now takes minutes for the bot to generate even a single response.
This type of situation is extremely damaging for a brand. Within the chatbot working as designed, your brand would suffer significant revenue losses as customers grow frustrated and turn to your competitors.
At the same time, you’re left with two burning questions: What happened? And how can I prevent that from ever happening again? That’s where contact center testing comes into play.
Harnessing the Power of Contact Center Testing
In the scenario we just described, a defect escaped notice and created a massive issue that affected your chatbot’s ability to perform at scale.
You invest a lot of time, energy, and money into developing chatbots, so it’s important to understand exactly how well your chatbot is performing, and if there are any areas in need of improvement. In our example, it’s likely that the contact center lacked the ability to test for potential defects, which allowed it to go unnoticed until it finally snowballed. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
Contact center testing is necessary for any organization that’s serious about providing quality customer interactions. By leveraging frequent and thorough performance, functional, regression, and load tests, even after your bot is in the live customer environment. These tests allow you to proactively identify and address issues ahead of customer impact.
Load testing is especially important for reducing the chances of the scenario above coming true for your organization by allowing you to stress test your infrastructure and find the breaking point. This type of test enables you to verify how well your chatbot can handle a high volume of interactions, without exposing your real customers to potential CX issues. The fact of the matter is that it’s better to find your chatbot’s breaking point during a simulation, instead of experiencing a significant issue in the live environment and impacting real sales.
Embracing Automation with Cyara
Whether this is your first time introducing chatbots into your CX strategy or you’ve had them in your contact center for a long time, you should automate your contact center testing to save your valuable time and effort. Whereas manual processes require a lengthy, time-consuming process that doesn’t even scratch the surface of your infrastructure, automated tests can crawl every layer of your CX pathways to identify potential issues.
Cyara’s conversational AI optimization solution provides end-to-end chatbot testing and monitoring, so you can be confident that your bot is always performing as designed and delivering the exceptional CX your customers expect. With Cyara, you can automate every part of your chatbot and contact center testing, including load testing. Rest assured that your pathways are set to scale and you’re prepared for periods of high-volume customer traffic.
Chatbots are a great way to deliver exceptional CX that will meet your customers’ expectations. But you need the right tools to ensure that you’re always delivering quality at scale. With automated contact center testing, you can set your chatbot up for success and proactively eliminate any issues that might negatively impact your customers.
