From Nothing to a Working Chat Assistant

Before you start

Write down the twenty questions your customers actually ask most. Take them from your inbox rather than from memory — the two lists differ.

That list is what you will test against, and it is the only preparation that matters.

The setup steps

1. Create the bot and give it your business description
2. Crawl your website so it learns from your pages
3. Upload anything not on the site — price lists, policies, guides
4. Test your twenty questions and note what it gets wrong
5. Fix the content behind the wrong answers, then recrawl
6. Install the script on your site

Step five is where the value is. A wrong answer almost always means the page is missing, unclear or out of date — and fixing that helps your human visitors too.

What to configure

• The greeting, in your own voice rather than a default
• When it offers a human, and how that reaches you
• What lead details to capture, and when to ask
• The colours, so it belongs to your site

Test it like a customer

Ask awkwardly. Use the words customers use rather than your internal terms. Ask about something you do not offer, and check it says so rather than improvising.

Ten minutes of adversarial testing before launch prevents most of the embarrassment that comes afterwards.

The first week

Read the conversations. Every one, for the first week — it is the fastest way to learn what your visitors actually want and where your content falls short.

The unanswered-question list from week one is usually the best content brief you will ever get.

Frequently asked questions