Should a small business website have a chatbot?
A chatbot for a small business website is worth having when you answer the same few questions by message every day, about opening hours, prices or parking, and those messages arrive while you are busy. The assistant answers them from what you have told it and passes the real enquiries to you. With us the setup costs £450, before VAT.
Picture the owner of a small gym on a Monday in January. Between two classes there are fourteen messages from the website's contact form and the gym's inbox, and eleven of them ask some version of the same three things: what time the early class starts, whether a first session is free, and where to park. The owner answers each one by thumb in the changing room. Two of the fourteen come from people asking about personal training. Those get their reply last, because they took longest to write.
The assistant is for the eleven. It sits in a corner of the website and answers from what we write into it with you, such as the timetable and the way to the car park, at eleven at night the same way it answers at noon. When someone asks about personal training, or anything else it cannot answer, it asks for a name and a way to reach them and sends the enquiry to you. You open the two messages that need you and none of the others.
A chatbot brings no new people to the site. Owners sometimes expect it to and are disappointed. What it saves is the time you spend on visitors you already have, and it keeps the person who would have given up waiting for a reply. A site with a handful of visitors a week gets a handful of questions, and you will answer those faster yourself.
An assistant we set up says less than it could. It will not quote for work that someone has to see first, or book a colour that needs a patch test. When the answer is missing from what we gave it, the assistant says it does not know and hands the question to you. A wrong price costs you more than a slow reply, because the customer turns up holding it.
Chatbots earned their bad name in two ways. One is the box that leaps open over the page on a phone before the visitor has read a line, and covers the phone number they came for. The other is the bot that loops through menu buttons and never lets anyone reach a person. Ours stays closed until someone taps it, and a visitor who would rather ring sees the number first.
What you pay us for is the setup: writing what the assistant knows, deciding where it hands over to you, and fitting it to your site. The service it runs on is billed at cost by its vendor, and the bill grows with how much it answers. A typical starting figure is £20 a month. For £175 a month we read its conversations, correct what it got wrong and show you both. That monthly read is also how you learn what your customers keep asking.
Starting prices, UK, before VAT
AI website assistant
from£450
Answers the questions you get asked all day, and passes the real enquiries to you.
AI assistant, managed
£175/mo
We read what it said each month, correct what it got wrong, and show you both.
Sometimes the page is the problem. If the answers to your daily questions appear nowhere on the site, start there: opening hours in the footer, prices on a page of their own, a line about parking under the address. Then count the messages for a fortnight. The website comes first with us, and an assistant laid over a page that hides its hours spends its time saying what the page should. A consultancy whose clients want to speak to the person they will work with gains little from one, because that first conversation is the sale.
Our first question to an owner asking about a chatbot is what their last twenty messages said. Forward us a week of them, and we will tell you which belong on the website, which an assistant could answer, and which need you.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published