Turn website questions into useful enquiries

The value is in the configuration, not the software

This is the part worth being blunt about, because it explains our price. You can buy chat software for less than we charge. What you cannot buy cheaply is somebody working out what your assistant should say, what it must never say, which questions actually qualify a job in your trade, and what happens to the conversation afterwards.

That is the work. The widget is the easy bit, and anyone selling you access to a widget as though it were a solution is leaving the hard ninety percent on your desk.

It has to know the same things your phone knows

The failure we see most often is a business running a chatbot that contradicts its own receptionist. The chat says one thing about lead times, the person on the phone says another, and the customer notices.

Ours works from the same approved information and the same enquiry rules as your forms and your AI receptionist. Update the answer once, and every channel changes. That sounds like a technical detail and it is actually the whole point.

Answers the questions you get constantly

Every business has a handful of questions that arrive over and over. Do you cover this postcode. Are you insured. How long does this normally take. Do you charge for a call-out. What are your opening hours over Christmas.

None of those need a person, and all of them decide whether somebody contacts you. Your assistant answers them from information you have approved, in your words, at any hour.

Recognises what kind of enquiry this is

A new customer pricing a job, an existing customer chasing one, and somebody trying to sell you something are three different conversations. The assistant works out which it is dealing with and handles each the way you would want.

That also means your team stops being interrupted by the ones that were never going to be work.

Collects what you need before it hands over

When the conversation is heading towards a real enquiry, it gathers the specific facts your team needs in order to quote. For a repair that might be make, model and what happened. For a maintenance job it might be the property type, the access arrangements and the urgency.

The point is that the enquiry arrives ready to price, rather than starting another round of back and forth.

Creates a lead, not a transcript

On the connected plans the conversation becomes a record in your pipeline with an owner and a next action, and the visitor gets an acknowledgement confirming somebody will be in touch.

Without that last step you have simply moved the problem: instead of a missed enquiry you now have a chat log nobody has read. That is why we do not sell the cheapest tier as a lead system.

Do not let it pretend to be a person

Ours says what it is in the first message. Some businesses want to hide it, and we push back on that every time. A customer who works it out mid-conversation feels tricked, and that costs more than the automation saves.

Being upfront also sets expectations sensibly. People ask an assistant different questions than they ask a person, and they are more forgiving when it hands over.

Be specific or be quiet

The temptation is to have it answer everything vaguely so it never gets anything wrong. That is the worst outcome, because a vague answer wastes the visitor's time and teaches them the website is useless.

Better to answer forty questions precisely and say "I will get somebody to confirm that for you" on the rest.

Watch what people actually ask

The list of questions visitors put to your assistant is the cheapest market research you will ever get. Within a month it will tell you what your website has failed to explain, which is usually the thing costing you the most enquiries.

We have rewritten whole pages of our own site off the back of that list.

Know when it should give up

A visitor going round in circles with an assistant is a lost customer. Ours is set to offer a human path quickly when it is not helping, rather than persisting because the flow says so.

What it needs from you

Roughly an hour of somebody's time at the start, and a look over the answers before it goes live. That is genuinely it. If a supplier is asking you to write the content yourself, you are buying software rather than a service.

It helps enormously if you can forward us a handful of real enquiry emails, because the way customers phrase things is rarely the way a business describes itself.

What happens when your business changes

Prices change, services get dropped, you stop covering an area. The assistant needs to know, and on managed plans that is our job rather than a task on your list. Send us a line and it is updated everywhere it appears, including the phone if you have the receptionist too.

An assistant quoting last year's prices is worse than no assistant, which is exactly why we do not leave the maintenance with the customer.

Data protection, briefly

Chat transcripts contain personal data, so the usual duties apply and they sit with your business rather than with us. We set the retention sensibly, tell visitors what is happening, and keep the conversation data inside your own space rather than pooled with anybody else's.

If you want the underlying rules, the ICO publishes guidance written for small organisations that is genuinely readable.