01 / The honest test
A chatbot is worth it when it answers faster than your page would
If a customer’s question is answered by a sentence on your site, a chatbot is a slower way to read that sentence. If the answer depends on what they tell you (their postcode, their policy, their order number), a bot can genuinely help.
Most small business chatbots fail this test on day one. They are installed to look modern and end up standing between people and information that was already there.
02 / When they help
Four situations where a bot earns its place
The same question, endlessly. Opening hours, parking, whether you take a particular insurer, whether you deliver to a postcode. If your inbox has the same five questions in it every week, that is the brief.
Out of hours. Most enquiries arrive when nobody is there to answer. A bot that captures the question and books a callback beats a contact form that sits unread until Monday.
Triage before a human. Collecting what you need before a person picks it up means the first reply is useful rather than a request for details.
Finding things in a large catalogue. With hundreds of products or documents, conversation beats navigation.
03 / When they annoy
Four ways to make customers hate your site
It opens on its own, immediately. Somebody arrived three seconds ago. They have not read anything. Let them.
There is no way to reach a person. The single fastest way to lose a customer who was ready to buy. There must always be a visible route out.
It guesses. A bot that invents an answer about your refund policy has created a problem you will have to honour or argue about. If it does not know, it should say so and hand over.
It blocks the thing they came for. Covering the phone number with a chat window is an own goal.
04 / What a good one looks like
Five rules we hold to
- It answers from your material, and says where it got it. Not from the internet at large.
- It says “I don’t know” and escalates. Designed in from the start, not bolted on after a complaint.
- A human is one click away, always.
- It waits. Available immediately; intrusive never.
- You can see what it is being asked. The transcript log is often more valuable than the bot: it tells you what your site fails to explain.
05 / Honestly
Most small businesses should fix the page first
If people keep asking the same question, the cheapest fix is answering it clearly on the site, not building something to answer it repeatedly. We have told people this and talked ourselves out of the work, because a bot papering over a confusing site makes the confusion permanent.
Add the bot when the questions genuinely depend on the person asking. Until then, write the sentence.
Send us the five questions you answer most and we will tell you which ones belong on a page and which ones are worth a bot.