Chatbot and assistant for your website
A visitor asking a question on a website expects an answer, not a form. Most sites offer the opposite, and that is exactly when they leave.
What a visitor actually expects
Do you do this?
The scope question. It comes first and decides whether the visitor stays.
How much, and how long?
The two questions a site avoids most, and that an assistant can frame without committing.
How do I reach you?
Few and repetitive: a useful assistant answers thirty recurring questions well and routes the rest.
Answering from your pages, not the whole web
The classic trap is plugging the assistant into too much content to "cover all cases". The result answers everything, wrongly half the time, and nobody dares show it to a customer.
A site assistant relies on your pages, documents and catalogue. That narrow scope is what makes it reliable, and it allows showing the source of every answer.
What it must say, and what it must refuse
It must be able to say it does not know. That is the most important and most often missing function: a system unable to admit ignorance produces a plausible answer, which is exactly the error nobody catches.
It must refuse to commit the company. A firm price, a contractual deadline or a feasibility promise fall outside a public assistant's scope.
When it hands off
Four situations require human follow-up: information is missing, stakes are high, the person asks for it, or the tone changed. Those rules are written before go-live, never after an incident.
The handoff must be clean. Context follows, so the visitor does not explain everything again. The wait is stated. And the promise is kept: an assistant announcing a callback that never happens does more damage than one that promised nothing.
What to measure once live
Three figures are enough: the share of visitors getting an answer without a human, the share of conversations becoming a qualified contact, and the list of unanswered questions.
That last list is the most valuable. It says exactly which pages your site is missing, in the order they are missing. Many organisations find their editorial roadmap in it.
What it changes on an existing site
Technically, little: the assistant is added without a redesign. Editorially, more. Unanswered questions reveal the vague pages, the missing prices and the procedures never written down.
It is a frequent and welcome side effect: the site improves because you finally see what visitors look for without finding it.
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Frequently asked questions
No, it complements it. It answers simple recurring questions and routes to a human as soon as the stakes rise. Some visitors will always prefer to write, and that is fine.
Your pages, your documents and your catalogue, not the whole web. That narrow scope makes it reliable and allows showing the source of every answer.
It must say so and offer follow-up by a person, passing the conversation along so the visitor does not explain everything again. An assistant that cannot admit ignorance ends up inventing.
Which questions do you keep being asked?
Your visitors' thirty most frequent questions are enough to start. Let's see which ones apply to you.