What Your Staff Need to Know

Tell them first

Discovering a chatbot from a customer is a poor introduction and it sets exactly the wrong tone.

Ten minutes in a team meeting before launch covers it and turns the people who answer enquiries into the people who improve it.

What to cover

1. What it answers, and what it always passes on
2. Where handovers and leads arrive, and who checks them
3. How to report a wrong answer, in one step
4. That it exists to remove the repetitive questions, not the jobs

The fourth point should be said plainly. People will wonder regardless; not addressing it leaves them to assume the worst.

Make reporting a wrong answer trivial

The people who handle enquiries will spot bad answers before anyone else. Give them a one-step way to flag it — a message to a named person is enough.

If reporting is effort, they will stop, and you lose your best source of quality feedback.

Share the log with them

• They will recognise most of the unanswered questions immediately
• They usually know the correct answers already
• It makes them part of improving it rather than subject to it
• It is also a good argument for writing things down at last

Set expectations about handovers

Somebody must own the handover queue. An unowned queue means a customer told a person would reply and nobody did, which is worse than having no chat at all.

Name the person, agree a response time, and check it in the first fortnight.

Frequently asked questions