Chatbots with artificial intelligence have changed a great deal: they are no longer menus with buttons, but assistants that understand questions written naturally. For a small business they can be a great help or a source of problems, depending on how they are set up.

How a chatbot works with your information

A useful chatbot does not answer with “what the internet knows”, but with what your business knows. For that it is given your own information (services, prices, opening hours, policies, frequent questions) and told to answer only from it. When it does not find the answer, it should say so and offer contact with a person.

What it does well

  • Answering frequent questions instantly, day and night.
  • Explaining services and guiding the client towards the right option.
  • Answering in several languages without preparing copy for each one.
  • Collecting contact details and the reason for the enquiry.
  • Summarising the conversation so your team can pick it up without repeating questions.

What it should not do

  • Make up answers. If something is not in your information, it should admit it. This is configured and tested.
  • Give firm prices or commitments that depend on each case.
  • Ask for sensitive data such as health or bank details.
  • Replace a conversation that needs human judgement: a complaint, a negotiation, a delicate case.

Privacy and transparency

Say that it is an automatic assistant and explain in your privacy policy which data it stores and what for. Choose providers that do not use your clients’ conversations to train their models, and limit what is stored to what is necessary. In the European Union, data protection rules apply just as they do to any other form on your website.

A chatbot, or a good questions page?

If your clients always ask the same five questions, a good frequently asked questions section may be enough, and it helps SEO as well. A chatbot makes sense when the questions are very varied, when there is a lot of volume, or when you want to guide the visitor towards the service that suits them.

How to start

  1. Gather the information you already give by email or phone: it is the basis of the chatbot.
  2. Define what it should do when it does not know something (usually, ask for contact details).
  3. Test it with real questions before publishing, the hard ones included.
  4. Review the conversations in the first weeks and improve its answers.

We explain how we do it in AI chatbot for your website.