What does AI chat on a business website actually do?

What it is

Website chat is the small box in the corner of a site where a visitor can type a question. There are three kinds. Live chat has a person on the other end. A scripted bot follows a fixed tree of buttons. An automated assistant reads what the visitor typed and answers from a set of facts about your business.

Sellers call all three "AI chat". Ask which one you are being sold. For a service business with nobody at a desk, the third kind is the one that can work at nine at night, and it is the one with the most ways to go wrong if it is set up carelessly.

What a good one does

The useful jobs are narrow and boring, which is the point.

• Answers the same questions you answer on the phone all day: hours, services, towns covered, and prices you have chosen to publish.
• Works when you are closed or on a job, and says when you will be back.
• Collects what you need to call back: what is wrong, a name, a number and where the job is.
• Sends you that as an email or a text right away, in a form you can read in ten seconds.
• Recognizes an emergency, such as a gas smell, and gives the standard safety step before anything else.
• Tells the visitor plainly that it is automated.

What it should never do

The risk with any automated assistant is that it says something confident and wrong in your name. A customer who was quoted a price by your website will expect you to honor it.

• Invent a price, a discount or an arrival time.
• Diagnose a fault or talk somebody through a repair.
• Guess whether you cover a town it has not been told about.
• Pretend to be a person.
• Hide your phone number behind the chat.

Questions to ask a seller

You can find out most of what matters with five questions and a ten-minute test.

• Where do its answers come from, and can I see and edit that list of facts?
• What does it say when it does not know?
• How does a lead reach me, and how fast?
• Does it slow my site down? Ask to see a speed test with it on and off.
• What is stored about my visitors, and for how long?

How to test one before you trust it

Ask it something that is not in your details, like the price of a job you have never priced. The right answer is that it does not have that and will have you call back. Ask it about a town you do not serve. Ask it something rude. Ask it in Spanish if your customers speak Spanish. Type "I smell gas".

Then check your inbox. The lead that arrives should have the visitor's own words in it, not a summary that lost the details.

One conversation, start to finish

It is nine at night. A homeowner opens a plumber's site and types that the kitchen sink is backing up and asks if anybody can come tomorrow.

A good assistant says first that it is automated. It confirms the business clears drains, because that is in its facts. It does not promise tomorrow, because it cannot see the schedule. It says the office opens at seven and asks for a name, a number, the town and a good time to call. The homeowner answers in two messages.

The plumber's phone gets an email a few seconds later: blocked kitchen sink, wants tomorrow, name, number, town, call after eight. At seven the next morning somebody calls and already knows the job. That is the whole product. Nothing clever happened. A person who would have closed the tab left a number instead.

Common mistakes when setting one up

Most chat problems come from the setup, not the software.

• Giving it thin facts. If the hours, towns and services are not in its details, it can only say it does not know.
• Letting old facts sit. A holiday closure or a dropped service has to be changed in the chat too.
• Sending leads to an inbox nobody reads at night or on a job.
• Placing the chat button over the phone button on a small screen.
• Turning it on and never reading the conversations. The first month of transcripts tells you what your website fails to answer.

Is it worth having

It is worth it when people visit your site outside the hours you can answer the phone, and when the same few questions come up again and again. It is not worth much if your site gets very few visitors, or if you already pick up every call. Look at how many visits your site gets in a month before you decide.

The one I build is AI chat + photo check, $149 a month with up to 500 conversations a month. It answers only from the details you give me and passes everything else to you.

Questions people ask