It's 11pm. Someone lands on your website wanting to know whether you deliver to their town. You're asleep. Some people will fill in the form and wait. Some will go back to their search and try the next business. A chatbot is one way to answer that person at 11pm, if it's set up well.
This post is a buyer's checklist. For the wider picture of where AI helps a small business and where it doesn't, read how AI is changing what small businesses can do.
What a chatbot can do well
- Answer routine questions from facts you've approved: hours, service area, what you do and how booking works.
- Take a name, a phone number and a description of the job so a person can follow up.
- Ask a few useful questions, like zip code, type of job and timing, so the callback starts in the right place.
- Pass the conversation to you or your team straight away, by text, by email or into your CRM.
What it shouldn't do
- Quote firm prices or promise dates without a person checking.
- Handle complaints, refunds or anything to do with safety.
- Make up an answer when it doesn't have one.
- Pretend to be a person.
Ten questions to ask any vendor
- Does it say it's an AI at the start? It should tell people they're chatting with an AI assistant in its first message, not only when someone asks.
- Where do its answers come from? You want it limited to information you supply and approve, not whatever it picks up elsewhere.
- What happens when it doesn't know? Ask to see it. The right behavior is something like "I don't have that, but I can have someone call you", followed by taking details.
- Can I read every conversation? Transcripts let you spot wrong answers, and they show you questions your website should answer.
- How does a lead reach me? By text, email or CRM, and how quickly? Test it yourself at night.
- Who updates the facts? When your hours or services change, how long until the chatbot knows?
- What does it cost, all in? Ask about setup, monthly fees, charges per conversation or message, and what happens in a busy month.
- What happens to the data? Where are conversations stored, for how long, and is any of it used to train someone else's model?
- Does it slow the site down? Some chat widgets load a lot of code on every page. Run a speed test with and without it.
- Can I leave? If you cancel, can you export your conversations and leads?
Test it before it goes live
Spend half an hour trying to break it. Ask the ten questions customers ask you most. Ask something it shouldn't answer, like a firm price for a job it can't see. Ask in Spanish if your customers do. Type the way people really type, typos included. Then check that every test conversation reached you, and how long it took. Fix the facts it got wrong and test again.
Mistakes we see
- A chat window that pops open on every page and covers the content on a phone.
- A chatbot that only says "please fill in our contact form", which is just a slower contact form.
- Leads going to an inbox nobody checks.
- Answers that are months out of date because nobody updated the facts when the hours changed.
Is it worth it for you?
That depends on how many questions arrive outside business hours, and how many of them are the same. The first step costs nothing: look at your form submissions and voicemails from the last month and count how many came in after hours asking something routine. If it's a handful every week, a chatbot may help. If it's one a month, a clear questions-and-answers page might do the same job.
How we do it
Erica is the assistant we set up inside your workflows — it drafts, sorts and answers routine questions, and a person approves anything that matters. On a website it introduces itself as an AI assistant, answers from facts you've signed off and passes anything else to your team with the details already taken. Our current plans are on the pricing page, or book a free 30-minute call to talk through whether it fits your business.
We do this for clients: AI integration.