A chatbot is not magic, and it is not an answering machine under another name. Set up well, it takes care of the repetitive work so your team gets to the conversations that really need a person. Set up badly, it is one more barrier between you and your customer. The difference lies in knowing what to ask of it.
What it can do
- Answer the usual questions. Opening hours, prices, location, payment methods: whatever your team answers twenty times a day.
- Log every enquiry. Name, contact details and what they need, saved as a lead instead of lost in a chat.
- Book appointments or reservations, with real availability and a confirmation.
- Report the status of an order, replying with the data from your system.
- Show the catalogue and quote.
- Take orders and pass them to your system.
- Collect payment, with a payment link inside the same conversation.
- Cover out-of-hours, or state your hours and take down the contact.
What you should not ask of it
- To replace your team. Its job is to filter and to solve the simple cases. When a case goes beyond that, the right move is to hand over to a person, not to keep insisting.
- To make information up. A chatbot answers well when it reads from a real source: your website, your catalogue, your documents or your system. Without that source, the best it can do is take the details and pass them on.
- To close the delicate ones. A complaint, a negotiation or a large sale deserves someone from the team. The bot can leave the conversation in order so that person arrives with the context.
With AI or with buttons
There are two ways to build it, and they can be combined:
- With AI, which understands what the customer writes in their own words.
- With a guided flow of buttons, more rigid but very predictable.
- Mixed: buttons for the most common requests and AI for everything else.
For most businesses the mixed approach is the best balance: the frequent cases are solved in two taps and the unexpected ones do not go unanswered.
What you need to get started
- A WhatsApp number for the business. It can be one you already have or a new one.
- The information it will answer with: your website, a price list, documents, or a connection to your system.
- A decision on who it hands over to and how they are notified: by email, in a group, in your CRM or on a board.
How to tell whether it is working
What to look at is not how many messages it answered, but what happened to each conversation. With a board, every enquiry is classified, by status or by product, and you can see how many chats ended in a sale and how many dropped off along the way.
And it does not have to live only on WhatsApp: the same assistant can handle Instagram, Messenger and the chat on your website from a single inbox.
If you want to see what it could do in your case, look at what an AI chatbot includes or request your quote.