In recent years, the rise of AI has attracted a lot of attention, and both business and contact center leaders have recognized the potential to transform their digital CX channels and connect with customers like never before. AI-powered channels, such as chatbots and voicebots, offer a wide range of benefits including 24/7 service, rapid responses, increased self-service, and much more.
But while this technology has made significant advancements within only the past several years, its overall effectiveness relies on continuous testing and monitoring to ensure functionality, security, and performance throughout the entire development lifecycle. Without procedures for rigorous testing in place, your business can be exposed to many risks that can negatively impact your brand reputation, lead to compliance risks, and damage your relationship with your customers.
Understanding Chatbot-Related Risks
Whenever your business integrates chatbots and other AI-powered CX into its infrastructure, you are exposing your brand to a variety of risks, including the following:
- Inaccurate/Harmful Information: Just like humans, bots are immune from making mistakes, but it’s important to understand the severity of spreading misinformation through your chatbots. Depending on your training data, your chatbots may pick up on patterns or trends that don’t actually exist or may create responses that are simply incorrect. In other instances, bots have been found to reply with harmful language, which negatively impacts a brand’s reputation and leads to customer mistrust in your business.
- Security and Privacy: Data privacy and protection is a hot topic for many policymakers and consumers alike. Your customers want to make sure that they’re protected whenever they interact with your brand. But with the rise of data breaches and successful cyberattacks in recent years, it’s more important than ever to be sure that your bots aren’t exposing your customers to bad actors. Continuous testing and monitoring can identify vulnerabilities during the development process, before your customers are exposed.
- Reputational and Compliance Risks: When your business uses a chatbot, that bot stands in as a representation of your brand, and your business can be held liable for any information spread to your customers. In addition, your bot must adhere to government regulatory standards, or you could face hefty fines and penalties, further damaging customer trust and your overall reputation.
- Customer Frustration and Churn: Your customers expect quick, accurate responses to their queries. Whether they’re looking for a solution or further information, it’s up to you to ensure your CX channels are equipped to handle these interactions. But issues and defects can lead to customer frustration and drive your customers away to your competitors in search of better interaction quality.
- Performance and Scalability: Generally speaking, your AI-powered CX journeys must be able to meet customer expectations and enable operational efficiency. If your bots experience issues that lead to increased churn or drain your team’s resources to handle disruptions and other CX issues, then you aren’t able to reap the benefits. For these reasons, it’s essential that your chatbots are meeting your performance standards and enabling easier scalability.
The Importance of Chatbot Testing
As outlined above, there are many risks that can emerge when you implement AI-powered CX channels. Businesses that fail to understand the risks and take proactive measures to eliminate issues before they emerge can face long-lasting reputational damages, compliance-related fines, and increased churn rates.
Throughout the entire chatbot development lifecycle and beyond into the production environment, continuous testing and monitoring is necessary to understand potential risks and eliminate issues before your customers are impacted.
With continuous chatbot testing, your business can:
- Proactively identify, troubleshoot, and remediate issues prior to customer impact.
- Refine chatbot performance by ensuring your bots are responding accurately to customer queries and identifying instances if inaccurate information or hallucination.
- Improve reliability, so you can execute AI-led interactions with confidence.
- Boost team productivity by handling routine customer queries, so your human agents have the capacity to focus on higher-level priorities and customer interactions.
- Validate security and ensure your bots meet regulatory standards.
By implementing frequent and robust chatbot testing into your CX strategies, you can deliver high-functioning with confidence, assured that your journeys will meet customer expectations and support top-line business objectives, without any additional risk.
Optimize Your Chatbots for CX with Cyara
There are many risks that can arise when integrating chatbots and other AI-based channels into your CX strategy. Manual chatbot testing processes are incredibly time-consuming and resource-intensive, so you need an automated chatbot testing solution that will support your end-to-end chatbot development.
Cyara’s award-winning conversational AI optimization platform is designed to help businesses test, monitor, and assure quality through every stage of the chatbot development cycle, at a reduced cost. Leading businesses trust Cyara to provide support every step of the way, from selecting the right bot technology, improving self-service channels, providing data-driven insights, and performing every type of testing and monitoring from the earliest stages of development and beyond.
Don’t let chatbot-related risks endanger your reputation or drive your customers away. Cyara’s chatbot testing and monitoring solutions can help you significantly increase CX quality and deliver interactions that will delight your customers.
