So you’ve finally decided to create a chatbot – amazing! We’re so excited for you. Now you’re one step closer to transforming your property’s leasing process for the better. The thing is, it’s not quite enough to simply build a bot and call it a day. Every chatbot solution you create needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure it’s helping your property management team meet its goals. Additionally, if you’ve recently updated or upgraded an existing solution, it’s also important to run everything through QA. Ultimately, the better you understand your bot, the better you can make it work for your team’s unique needs. So how should you go about testing your bot? Keep reading for our tried-and-true best practices on how to test your chatbot.
How to test your chatbot
When it comes to effectively testing your multifamily chatbot, you’ll want to keep this flexible framework in mind. Every bot is different, but all bots need to meet these guidelines.
Hone in on your ‘why’
What do you want your bot to be used for? Answering questions about properties? Booking tours? Streamlining the leasing process? All of the above? Before you let your bot run free, it’s important to establish the ‘whys’ behind your bot. Write down every use-case you want your bot to cover, along with potential responses. Rank them by priority.
The more potential scenarios you can plan for, the better! At the end of the day, a successful bot will be able to accommodate each and every one of these scenarios, creating a more streamlined user experience. Having trouble coming up with use cases? Ask your renters directly what features they would most like to see!
Establish KPIs
Once you know what queries you want your bot to cover, you’ll want to establish clear KPIs. These will help you gauge your bot’s performance. Classic bot KPIs include number of users served, number of steps needed to complete a request, and self-service rate (how well your chatbot can resolve a request without human intervention). Other great KPIs to keep an eye on are customer satisfaction rate, which can be measured through surveys, and sales conversion rate. The better your bot is able to meet these indicators, the more functional it is.
Make sure it’s conversational
Your customers may be talking with a bot, but that doesn’t mean their interaction doesn’t have to be anything less than conversational. The best bots are one that create an engaging experience with users, so you’ll want to make sure yours doesn’t sound too robotic. When you’re drafting up possible responses, keep answers straightforward and friendly. People don’t want to spend minutes reading through long answers that could’ve been said in a sentence or two.
At this point, it may be helpful to bring in some test users to see how well the bot does. Additionally, this is a great point to implement A/B testing to see which types of responses prompt better conversion rates.
Run performance tests
Now that you have a comprehensive set of use cases and responses, it’s time to optimize your bot’s performance. Along with improving response speed, you’ll also want to focus performance tests on security as well. Conversations between users and your bot need to be encrypted and adhere to consumer privacy compliance.
Never stop testing!
Once you’ve got a chatbot you’re happy with, the work isn’t done yet! One of the great things about chatbots today is that so many of them can learn from user experiences and update themselves to improve. If your bot is designed to learn, it’s important to check in with it every month or so to ensure its responses are still up to par. Even if you manually update your bot, it’s still a good idea to check-in every so often and run speed and other performance tests. Continuous testing will help ensure both you and your customers are getting the most out of your bot!
At the end of the day, your chatbot solution is only as good as the quality of answers it can give. That’s why it’s so critical to run your bot through rigorous testing to ensure each user can get exactly the information they’re looking for.
Now that you know how to test your chatbot, it’s time to optimize your bot’s presence on your website. Learn what to do (and what to avoid) here!
