What a website chatbot should actually do

You know the chatbot we mean. It pops up two seconds after the page loads, asks how it can help, and then answers every single question with “please contact us”. We close those so fast.

That isn’t a chatbot. It’s a contact form that interrupts you.

The ones we build are meant to feel more like your best receptionist, if your best receptionist had read every page of your website and didn’t mind working until midnight.

What we think a good one does

It answers from your information. Your hours, your packages, the areas you deliver to, your cancellation policy. Not some general knowledge it picked up off the internet.

It admits when it doesn’t know. This is the big one for us. If the answer isn’t in what you’ve given it, it should say so and offer to pass the question on. Making something up to sound helpful is worse than useless.

It gets the lead to you. When someone’s ready to book or buy, it takes their details and sends them through with the whole conversation, so you’re not starting from scratch when you call them back.

And it sounds like you. A wedding venue and a wealth manager shouldn’t have the same chatbot voice.

Who gets the most out of one

Any business where people ask the same questions again and again. Venues get “how many guests, is there parking, can we bring our own caterer?” Online shops get “do you deliver to Durban, which size do I need?” Service businesses get “do you do X and roughly what does it cost?”

Every one of those answered at 9pm is a lead that didn’t wander off to a competitor overnight.

That isn’t a chatbot. It’s a contact form that interrupts you.

Before you buy one, ask

Where do the answers come from? (You want to hear “your content, only”.) What happens when it doesn’t know? Can I read the conversations? Where do the leads go? Who updates it when my prices change? What does it cost each month, and is there a limit? Will it slow my site down?

If whoever’s selling it gets vague on any of those, we’d keep looking.

What we do

We train each chatbot on that client’s own site and documents, keep the widget light so it doesn’t drag the site down, and send leads straight to the client. For the first few weeks we read through the conversations together and fill in whatever it couldn’t answer. Next time, we’ll walk through how we build them, step by step.