When the widget in the corner makes things worse
Most business chatbots are bad.
You have met them. They open by themselves, ask for your email before answering anything, then loop through three replies that do not touch what you asked. People close the tab and ring somebody else, and the business never learns that it happened.
A bad one costs you enquiries you were already going to get.
What gets built
Three questions, then a person.
Nearly every message a local business gets before the job is one of three questions. A useful one answers those and stops. It does not hold a conversation.
Do you cover my suburb
The one that wastes the most time on both sides. Answered instantly from your actual service area, so the people outside it stop ringing and the people inside it stop wondering.
Roughly what does it cost, and when could you come
A range you are willing to put in writing, and honest availability. Owners resist both. They are the two answers a customer is shopping for, and the business that gives them is usually the one that gets rung.
Hand over before it gets awkward
Anything outside those, it takes a name and a number and says a person will call. Then it does what most of them fail at, which is making sure a person actually does.
It says what it is in the first line. No invented staff name, no photograph of someone who does not work for you.
It never quotes a price you did not set. Everything it can say is a sentence you wrote and approved.
Whether this is you
Not for every business.
This suits a business answering the same handful of questions all week, where the answers are genuinely simple and the job is fairly standard. Trades, clinics, repairs, anything with a service area and a price range.
It suits you badly when the first conversation is the sale. If somebody is choosing a solicitor or spending forty thousand dollars, a machine standing between them and you costs more than the time it saves, and we will tell you not to have one.
The enquiries it catches still need somewhere to go, which is the follow-up that runs itself, and what it says about you needs to match everything else written in your name. It lives on your site, so how the site is built matters, whether that site serves Perth or anywhere else. It is one part of the automation work.
Where to start
Find out what people ask you.
Give us your web address. We read what your site already answers, compare it against the questions your competitors get asked in public, and tell you whether there are three worth automating or whether your enquiries are the sort that need a person from the first word.
We take on a small number of businesses at a time, and only when we are confident we can move the numbers. If we can take it on, you get a written plan: what we’d build and in what order. If we can’t, you get a short, straight email saying so. A build this small is usually a fixed fee rather than a share.
Free. A person reads it and answers within a couple of days.