What an AI chatbot can and cannot do for a small business
Where AI chatbots save real time, where they go wrong, and how to set one up safely for your customers.
AI chatbots have become easy to add to a website. Adding one that actually helps customers, without embarrassing the business, takes more thought. This is a practical guide to what they do well, where they go wrong, and how to set one up safely.
What a chatbot does well
- Answering the same questions every day. Opening hours, delivery times, returns, prices and how a service works. If your team answers these by email or phone, an assistant can answer them instantly.
- Answering outside office hours. A customer who gets an answer at 10pm is more likely to book or buy than one who waits until the morning.
- Collecting the details for an enquiry. An assistant can ask the questions your team would ask first, and pass a complete enquiry to the right person.
- Helping staff find information. An internal assistant can search policies, product sheets and procedures faster than someone scrolling through folders.
Where chatbots go wrong
Language models are good at producing fluent answers. Fluent is not the same as correct. Without limits, a chatbot can state a price you do not charge, promise a delivery date you cannot meet, or answer a question it should have passed to a person.
Most of these problems come from the same cause: the assistant is answering from general knowledge instead of from your own information.
How to set one up safely
- Answer only from approved content. The assistant should search your own pages and documents and answer from them, and say when it does not know.
- Test with real questions. Collect the questions your team actually receives and check every answer before launch.
- Hand over to a person. Complaints, refunds, anything legal, medical or financial, and any customer who asks for a person should reach your team.
- Set a spending limit. Running costs grow with the number of conversations. A monthly cap avoids surprises.
- Be clear it is an assistant. Customers should know they are talking to software, and how to reach a person.
Customer data and UK GDPR
Conversations can contain personal information. Choose an AI provider that does not use your data to train its models by default, keep conversations only as long as you need them, and mention the assistant in your privacy notice. If the assistant will see sensitive information, decide in advance what it should and should not store.
Is it worth it?
A good test is to count the questions your team answers in a normal week, and how many of them have a single correct answer written down somewhere. If that number is high, an assistant is likely to save real time. If most questions need a personal judgement, improve the information on your website first.
We build assistants that answer from your own content, with clear limits and a handover to your team. See how we build AI chatbots, or send us the questions your team answers most.