The Right Performance Testing Approach for Virtual Assistants

Artificial intelligence (AI) has blessed several industries with its efficiency and accuracy. Businesses are leveraging AI to deliver flawless customer experience at a fraction of the costs that they used to spend before. Virtual assistants (VA) are ?helping businesses to automate customer support and engagement round the clock without any human intervention. AI-powered solutions have become increasingly popular among both startups and global enterprises to interact with customers at scale.?

Here are some reasons why VAs (Virtual Assistants) have become popular:?

• Round-the-clock customer support?
• Instant response to customer queries?
• Automated bookings of orders?
• Decreased customer support budget?
• Minimal ?chances of human errors?

However, just deploying the army of VAs cannot solve the entire problem. There are different capabilities of conversational virtual assistants that need to be analyzed judiciously by software testing services for the desired business outcome.?

Businesses are leveraging transactional chatbots and AI systems for web applications to ensure easy usage and quick solutions.??

But what if chatbots fail to meet user expectations? For example, if a customer’s checkout gets stuck in the middle of the transaction; he will connect to a virtual assistant and expect a quick resolution to complete the purchase. However, if the VA is slow or unable to give the right response instantly, it may lead to customer dissatisfaction and even loss of business.?

This is where performance testing can help. Apart from identifying whether a virtual assistant can give output to a large pool of concurrent users, it can also help in measuring whether the response time is ideal or not. Instant and accurate response can help you smoother the user experience.?

What is performance testing for virtual assistants??

Performance testing focuses on the time taken by a virtual assistant to respond to any question, the number of words returned by chatbot in its responses and the number of steps in which a user’s query is being resolved.?

The performance is evaluated as per the number of platform interactions and query-based responses to be measured and optimized. For a virtual assistant’s performance testing, its three main components –?

• The bot framework?
• Bot service?
• Channel tests?

Load testing of Advanced Virtual Assistants (AVAs) can be done using JMeter while testing the others depends on how they have been deployed.?

For instance, if a virtual assistant is based on AWS (Amazon Web Services) using Serverless Bot Framework, the integration of the application and bot services are executed using the bot channel. The performance testing of the application is done by the internal platform of AWS. You can also leverage the feature of real-time monitoring and the VA can auto scale in the event of abrupt heavy load on the application. It is advisable to not test the VA on the direct line. It is the developers who decide whether to test the automated conversational flow of the application.?

Points to keep in mind for VA performance testing?

Here are a few key points that you should consider for VA performance testing:?

• Check out the performance of virtual assistants with multiple connections of different bandwidths including 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi. ?
• Make sure the application is working smoothly while it switches from one network to another.?
• Make sure the messages are delivered instantly to the user.?
• Ensure the videos and images shared by users are loading fast with no resolution issues?
• Check whether the quality of video and voice calls are smooth and clear?
• Load test the application to identify how many concurrent customers can access the application. You can JMeter for this testing.?
• Find out the maximum number of users that can be active in a group chat concurrently.?

Key metrics to test virtual assistants?

It is essential to keep in mind the below mentioned key metrics when testing virtual assistants:?

1. Response time:?

Normally, AI-enabled virtual assistants are expected to reply instantly after an input is received from the user. Any lag in response can affect the user experience. Hence, it is business-critical to test the exact response time of the VA to ensure a customer delight experience.?

2. Answering/Response accuracy:?

Test the responses or answers by VAs to inputs or queries to ensure they are meeting the business objective efficiently.?

3. Error management:?

AI-enabled VAs are equipped to handle errors and address ?them. For instance, if a virtual assistant is unable to process user inputs, it should be able to think alternately and ask different questions from the user to eliminate dead air in the conversation. In worst case scenario, it should transfer the call to a live agent.?

4. Personality:?

Virtual assistants should have a unique tone that is pleasant for users. To ensure a great customer experience, its tone should be tested and rectified if needed.?

5. Navigation:?

Customers often feel lost while communicating with a virtual assistant. Make sure the navigation of the VA is user-friendly for an ?seamless experience.?

Wrapping Up?

With increasing adoption of advanced virtual assistants in multiple businesses to offer better customer experience, performance testing of VAs has become business critical. Only robust performance testing can help you launch AI-enabled virtual assistants that are reliable, humane and scalable.?