Automate Customer Questions on Your Website: 5 to Start With
Most of the questions arriving in your inbox have been answered before, in writing, by you. If you want to automate customer questions on your website, the place to begin is not with the clever ones but with the five that arrive every week and always get the same reply.
This post goes through those five, explains why each one suits an assistant, and shows what to upload so the answers come out right.
What "automatically" means here
An assistant built from your own documents answers from those documents and nothing else. A visitor types a question, the assistant searches what you uploaded, finds the parts that deal with it, and writes a reply in a few seconds. It does not reach out to the open internet, and when a question falls outside your files it says so rather than inventing something.
That limit is what makes the five questions below good candidates. Each one has a settled answer that already exists somewhere in your paperwork.
1. What does it cost?
This is the question people ask before any other, and often the one they leave without an answer to. A price list, a rate card or a page of packages covers it, and once that file is uploaded the assistant can quote from it at any hour.
It also handles the awkward middle cases well, because a visitor rarely asks the question as plainly as your price list states it. Somebody asking whether there is anything cheaper for a small job is asking about your lowest tier, and the assistant will find it as long as the tier is written down.
2. Do you cover my area, and when are you open?
Coverage and hours are dull to answer and expensive to get wrong. A visitor who cannot find out whether you serve their town will assume you do not.
One short file with your areas, your opening hours, your address and your holiday closures will handle a surprising share of the traffic. It is the smallest document you will upload and often the busiest.
3. How does the process actually work?
People want to know what happens after they get in touch. How long does it take, what do they need to send you, who turns up, what happens if it goes wrong.
Most businesses already have this written down in a welcome email, an onboarding note or a page of frequently asked questions. Uploading it lets a visitor walk through the whole process at eleven at night without booking a call to find out.
4. What are your terms?
Deposits, cancellations, refunds, delivery times and guarantees are the questions people are least comfortable asking a person, and most comfortable asking a chat window. They are also the ones where a vague answer causes trouble later.
Since the assistant quotes your terms as written, the visitor gets the real policy rather than a summary from memory. Your terms document does the work it was written for.
5. What makes you different from the other one?
Comparison questions sound like they need a salesperson, but they usually need a fact. Somebody asking whether you do same-day work, or whether your price includes materials, is comparing you against a competitor and wants a straight answer.
Your service descriptions cover this if they are specific. Where a document is vague, the assistant will be vague too, and that is a useful signal about what to sharpen.
What to upload for these five
Five questions, four or five files. A price list, a short note on areas and hours, whatever you already send explaining the process, your terms, and your service descriptions. PDF, Word, plain text, Markdown, CSV, PowerPoint and Excel files all work, up to 2 MB each.
Keep each file on one subject. A single long document that mixes prices, hours and returns is harder to search than three short ones, and short files give sharper answers.
If you upload a PDF, check that the text can be selected with the mouse. A scan or a photograph of a printed page holds no readable text inside it, so the original file gives a far better result.
Once the files are in place, press the Rebuild KB button. The system reads every document and prepares the assistant, and the status becomes Ready when it finishes.
Check the five before you go live
Ask the assistant each of the five questions in the wording your customers actually use, not the wording your documents use. A thin or missing answer nearly always means the fact is absent from your files or buried in a document about something else. Add it or move it, build again, and ask once more. Ten minutes of this is the difference between an assistant you trust and one you keep checking on.
Let the log tell you the sixth
Every conversation is written down for you: what the visitor asked, what the assistant answered, how long it took, and whether they rated it up or down. After a few weeks the log shows the questions you did not predict, which are the ones worth adding next.
That is the part most owners come back to. The five above are a starting point that works for almost any business, but the list that matters is the one your own visitors write for you.
Putting it on your site
The Share and install tab gives you one line of code and three ways to use it: a floating bubble in the corner of every page, the full chat built into a page of your choosing, or a plain web address you can send in an email or print as a code on a card.
When you are ready to try it against your own price list and terms, create a free account and upload those first few files.