What a website support bot should answer, and what it should refuse

A support bot is only as useful as the questions it can answer, and most small businesses switch one on without ever writing those questions down. Then a customer asks something ordinary, the bot says it is not sure, and the owner decides the bot is bad. Usually the bot is fine and the website is missing the answer. This guide lists what customers actually ask a small business website, what a bot should refuse, and a one-hour test to run before you go live.

The eight kinds of question customers ask

Across very different businesses, almost every question typed into a website chat falls into one of eight groups. A good bot covers all eight from your own content.

1. When and where. Opening hours, public holiday hours, the address, parking, whether you come to them. These are the most common questions and the easiest to get wrong, because hours change and websites lag behind.
2. What it costs. Your prices, or your price ranges, or at least how you quote. If you never publish prices, say so on the site and say how to get a quote, so the bot can say the same.
3. Do you do this? Whether you offer a particular service, stock a product, cover a suburb or handle a type of job. Customers ask this before anything else when they are comparing providers.
4. How it works. The process from first contact to done: booking, what happens at the first visit, how long a job takes, what the customer has to do.
5. What to bring or prepare. Documents, measurements, a list of symptoms, photos of the problem. Answering this well saves a wasted appointment.
6. The rules. Cancellation, refunds, deposits, warranties, late fees. People ask these at 11pm when they are deciding whether to commit.
7. How to pay. Accepted methods, when payment is due, instalments, and anything you want customers warned about, such as never paying into an account sent by email.
8. How to reach a person. The phone number, the email, the booking link, and when someone will reply. Every bot needs a clear way out.

If it is not written down, the bot cannot know it

A website bot of the kind this guide is about answers from what it has read: your pages, and any files or notes you add. It does not know what your receptionist knows. Botsmith, for example, retrieves the relevant text from your pages and uploaded files before replying, and when the answer is not there it says it is not sure instead of inventing a price or a policy. That is the behaviour you want, but it means gaps in your content show up as gaps in the bot.

The fix is usually small. A price list that lives in a PDF can be uploaded. A policy that only exists in your head can be pasted in as a paragraph. A page with twelve topics on it can be split into shorter entries so a short question like "are you open Saturday" finds the right one.

What a support bot should refuse

Some questions are better left unanswered by software, however well it writes.

• Professional advice. Legal, tax, medical, financial or immigration advice about the customer's own situation. The bot can describe your service and its cost; it should hand the actual advice to a qualified person.
• Anything about one customer's account or order, unless the bot is genuinely connected to that system. A website answer bot usually is not, and a guessed order status is worse than none.
• Promises you have not made. Delivery dates, outcomes, discounts. If it is not on your site, the bot should not offer it.
• Anything sensitive it does not need. A bot should not ask for card numbers, passwords or identity document numbers in a chat.

You enforce these with standing instructions. Our guide to writing instructions for your support bot covers how to word them, and the law firm and migration agency examples show what they look like in practice.

The one-hour test before you go live

1. Write down the ten questions you or your staff answered most often last month. Use the customer's words, not yours: "do u do weekends" is a better test than "What are your weekend trading hours?"
2. Add two awkward ones: something you do not offer, and something that needs a professional's judgement.
3. Ask all twelve in the bot's preview. Mark each answer right, wrong or "not sure".
4. For every wrong or "not sure" answer, find the page it should have come from. Fix the page, or add the missing information as a note.
5. For the two awkward questions, check that it declined politely and gave a way to reach you. If not, add an instruction.
6. Ask all twelve again.

Most sites need two rounds. When all twelve are right, you are ready.

After launch: let customers write the next list

The questions real visitors type will not match your list exactly. Check what the bot could not answer every week for the first month. In Botsmith, questions it could not answer are collected for you automatically, and a rule you write applies to every reply immediately, without re-reading the site. After a month the unanswered list is usually short, and it stays short as long as you update the site when things change.

Choosing a tool first? See Chatbase alternatives, sorted by how they charge, or how to install a bot on WordPress or Wix.