Most of what people ask isn’t on your website.
The chat bubble that came with your site reads the first ten pages and guesses at the rest — and it’s only watching one of the three places people message you. What actually arrives, on the website and in Facebook and Instagram both, is where’s my order, have you got it in stock, will this one fit mine. None of those have an answer sitting on a page. We write the document that gives it one, and the rules for what it must never try to answer at all.
$97 one time to train it · $39 a month to run itA chatbot earns its keep before you teach it anything.
This is not a page about how chatbots don’t work. They do, and the cheap ones do the easy part well. It’s worth being precise about which part that is.
It doesn’t go home
The question that arrives at ten at night is the one that would otherwise have been a closed tab. Something answers it, and somebody’s still there in the morning.
It never gets bored of the same question
Where are you, are you open Sunday, do you do that here. Asked hundreds of times a month, and answered identically every time without anyone’s patience wearing through.
It gets the name and the number
Someone who would have left without a trace ends up as a conversation with a person attached to it. That alone tends to pay for the widget.
It’s faster than a person can be
Not faster than you at your best — faster than you while you’re serving someone else, which is when most of these arrive.
Nobody is doing this job for the money
You will not find anyone to sit on live chat between nine at night and seven in the morning for what a chat widget costs. That’s not a close comparison.
The off-the-shelf ones go on in an afternoon
Paste a script, point it at your site, done before lunch. Genuinely impressive, genuinely useful, and we’d never pretend that took us a fortnight to beat.
None of that needs us. If everything people ask you is on a page you’ve already written, the bot that came with your website is fine — and that’s what you’ll be told on the call.
Then somebody asks it something real.
Here is one month of chat at a business we run this for. It’s a workshop and a busy online shop, and we can’t name it — but the counts are its real log, not a survey and not an estimate.
Roughly two thirds of that is the top two rows, and not one of them can be answered from a page. An order status changes hourly. Stock changes hourly. Whether a part fits depends on what the person owns, which nobody has written down anywhere.
A bot trained on your website meets those three ways. It says it doesn’t know, which reads as useless. It sends them to a contact form, which is the thing they were avoiding. Or — and this is the one that costs you — it produces a confident, fluent, completely invented answer, and the customer believes it, because it’s on your website in your colours.
Forty-one of those messages weren’t customers at all. They were people selling something, people claiming a staff member had hired them and they were owed money, and people offering to make a bad review disappear for a fee. Every one of them arrives in the same chat bubble as are you open Sunday, and looks exactly like it for the first two lines.
A helpful bot with no instructions will engage with all forty-one. Politely, at length, and in writing. It will thank them for reaching out, ask a clarifying question, agree that it sounds frustrating, offer to pass it on — and do every bit of it under your business name, in a transcript somebody else keeps a copy of.
That’s the quiet cost of a chat window nobody has given rules to. It’s not that it wastes your time — it’s that a stranger with an agenda gets a fluent, cooperative, on-the-record conversation with something wearing your logo.
What it says instead“Thanks — this chat is for customers, and I’m not able to take sales approaches or agree to anything on the business’s behalf here. If you’ve got something genuine for the owner, there’s a contact form on the site. If you’re a customer with a question about an order, tell me the order number and I’ll sort it out.”
One line. It doesn’t confirm anything, it doesn’t deny anything specific, it doesn’t negotiate, and it closes by pointing a real customer back to being one. The nastier variants — money supposedly owed, anything touching your reputation — get their own line written the same way, in advance, by a person. Then it logs the conversation and puts it in front of you.
Every question you get lands in one of four piles.
Deciding which pile — for every kind of message your business actually receives — is the work. An off-the-shelf bot only has the first one, so everything else becomes the first one too.
It’s a fact, and it doesn’t change today
Hours, address, prices, what a service includes, your returns policy, whether you touch that kind of job at all.
It answers, links the one page that goes deeper, and points at the next step — book, buy, come in.
The answer exists, but in a system
Where’s my order. Is it in stock. When’s it back. The answer is true right now and false next week, so it can never be written into a document.
It asks for the one thing it needs, reads it live, and tells them. If it can’t reach the system it says so and hands over — it never invents a tracking status.
Somebody has to look at it
The bespoke quote, the odd fault, the thing that needs eyes on it or a photo before anyone could honestly answer.
It collects exactly what you’d have asked for anyway, tells them when they’ll hear back, and hands you a conversation you can pick up cold.
Engaging at all is the mistake
Cold approaches, money supposedly owed, anything touching your reputation, anyone fishing for a commitment in writing, anyone claiming a relationship with your business you can’t verify.
One neutral line, written in advance. No negotiating, no confirming, no promising. Logged, and put in front of you the same day.
Sorting your questions into those four piles, and writing what happens in each, is most of what you’re paying for. The bot is the easy part — every platform has one now, including the one you’re probably already on.
What that looks like at ten at night.
Three modes in one conversation, and nobody at the shop is awake for any of it.
hey are you open tomorrow?
We’re open nine till five tomorrow, and closed Sunday. Anything you want put aside before you come in?
Mode A · answered from the documentnah. actually where’s my order? ordered it last week and heard nothing
I can look that up right now — what’s the order number? It’s at the top of your confirmation email.
Mode B · asking for the one thing it needs48812
That one went out Thursday and it’s with the courier — the tracking says out for delivery tomorrow. Here’s the link so you can watch it yourself.
Mode B · read live, not guessedlegend. last thing — will the replacement part I’ve got in the cart actually fit mine? it’s a 2019
That one I’m not going to guess at, because it depends on your exact model and what’s on it now — and you’d be the one stuck with it if I got it wrong. Send me a photo and I’ll have someone confirm it first thing and reply right here. What’s your name?
Mode C · handed over, with the details already collectedThat conversation is made up — but every move in it is one of the four, and the last one is the one that matters. An untrained bot answers that final question. It has no instruction telling it not to, so it produces something confident and plausible, and you find out when the part comes back.
By the morning that whole exchange is sitting in your inbox as one thread with a name, a photo and an order number attached — and the only thing left for a person to do is the one thing a person was actually needed for.
A document, and the rules that go with it.
Not a prompt. Not a setting you tick. A written record of how your business actually works, which is the thing the bot has been guessing at.
The training document
Every customer-facing page you have, read in full rather than scraped — on the last one that meant more than forty pages, and around forty links checked live so the bot never sends anyone to a dead one.
Every fact reconciled against a single source, so one price can’t appear in two places with two different numbers. Then the answers to the dozen or so things only you know, that aren’t published anywhere: real turnaround, what you quietly won’t take on, who a hard one goes to.
The routing rules
Your real messages, read and sorted into the four piles — from your own chat history and inbox, not from a template of what a business like yours might get.
Each pile gets its instruction, and the sensitive ones get their line written out word for word, in advance, by a person. That is not something you want improvised at eleven at night.
The live lookups
Where the answer lives in a system you already run, we connect it, so orders and stock are read at the moment someone asks rather than copied into a document that goes stale in a week.
Where we can’t reach a system — some of them simply won’t let anyone in — the bot collects the order number, sets an honest expectation, and hands over. That’s a decision we make with you, on the record, rather than a gap you find out about later.
A gate on what stays private
Some things in your business must never come out of a chat window — a wholesale rate, a supplier’s direct number, a contact who doesn’t want to be found by the public.
On BikeTrade, the trade directory we run, that document is rebuilt automatically every time the underlying data changes, and the build is set to fail outright if a private field reaches the public copy. Not somebody remembering on the day.
One document. Everywhere they message you.
Not three bots configured separately and drifting apart — the same trained answers behind all of it, and every conversation landing in one place with a thread per person.
The bubble on your own site, on whatever it’s built with.
The ones piling up behind the page you haven’t opened since Tuesday.
Where a lot of people now ask first, and where a reply four days later is the same as no reply.
Same answers, same document. Worth it if that’s genuinely where your customers are, and not if it isn’t.
It picks up the calls that come in once you’ve locked up, and works from the same document the chat does — so what someone’s told at nine at night is what they’d have been told at nine in the morning. It is not a switchboard and it doesn’t answer during trading; your phone is still your phone.
Both are month to month, and both meter on what they actually send or answer on top of the fee — unlike the three on the left, a WhatsApp message and a phone minute cost real money every time. Switch either on when you want it and off when you don’t.
It’s plain text, it’s yours, and it’s readable by a person — you could hand it to a new starter on their first morning and it would do the same job. If you ever leave, you take it with you and it works on whatever you move to. We’d rather you stayed because it’s being kept up to date than because you’d have to start again.
Once to teach it. Then a little each month.
Your pages read, your real messages sorted into the four piles, the document written, the sensitive lines drafted, the lookups connected where they can be. You read the whole thing and mark up anything wrong before it goes anywhere near a customer.
It’s the same fee whether you switch on one channel or all three. The document doesn’t get written three times — that’s the point of there being a document.
Ninety-seven dollars, once. Everywhere else on this site that figure is a monthly one — this isn’t.
Prices move, policies change, you stop stocking something. When they do, the document changes — that’s what the monthly buys, and it’s the difference between a bot that’s right and a bot that was right in March.
Changes are part of it, not a quote. Stop whenever you like; the document is yours either way. The two add-ons are month to month as well: thirty-nine on its own, fifty-eight adding WhatsApp, eighty-eight adding after-hours calls, a hundred and seven with both.
The bot’s replies are written by AI, and AI replies bill on what actually gets answered — so a quiet month bills like a quiet month, and a month where it fielded four hundred questions costs more than one where it fielded forty. Sending the messages themselves is free on all three included channels, which is exactly why they’re included: it’s WhatsApp messages and phone minutes that cost money every time, and that’s the whole reason those two sit outside the $39 rather than inside it. You get the rates before you sign anything, not on the first invoice.
This stands on its own, on whatever your website is built with. If you already run the rest of what we do, it sits on top of that instead — same document, same rules, and the conversations land in the inbox you’re already reading.
Nothing goes live until you’ve read it.
About two weeks, and roughly an hour of your time in the middle of it.
We read what already comes in
Your last few months of chat and email — the actual messages, not a summary. Your four piles won’t be the ones on this page, and that’s the whole reason we look.
Then a call, and your website
Every page read properly, and about an hour with you for the things that aren’t written down anywhere. That hour is the only real demand on your week.
You read it before it does
The document comes to you first, in plain English. You’ll find two or three things that are wrong — everyone does, and finding them now is the point of this step.
It answers, and you can read every word
Nothing happens off the record. When it gets something wrong, we change the document rather than fiddle with the bot — so the fix is one you can read too.
What we won’t tell you.
That it’ll answer everything
It won’t, and one that tries is worse than one that hands over — a wrong answer given confidently costs you more than no answer at all. A decent slice of what arrives should end up with a person. The job is making sure it’s the right slice, and that they get there quickly.
That it sounds like one of your staff
It doesn’t, and we don’t try to make it. It says what it is when it’s asked. People are far more forgiving of a bot that’s straight with them and actually useful than one they catch pretending to be a person named Sarah.
That the document is ever finished
It isn’t. A training document nobody maintains becomes a bot confidently quoting last year’s price to a customer standing in front of you. That’s the whole reason there’s a monthly fee rather than just a build fee.
That those numbers are a result
The counts in section 02 are one month at one business we can’t name, and they show you the shape of the problem — nothing more. They aren’t a case study, they aren’t your numbers, and we haven’t attached a dollar figure to them, because we’d be making that part up.
The ones we always get.
Teach it your business. Then let it answer.
Fifteen minutes. Tell us the three questions you get asked all day and we’ll tell you which of the four piles each one lands in — and whether the chat you’ve already got can handle them, because sometimes it can.
Pick a time No demo and no deck. If what you’ve already got covers it, that’s what you’ll hear, and you’ll have got fifteen minutes back. Hayden — Leadout · Sydney · working remotely nationwide
We build the workflows and follow-up tools around the software you already use, so the work happens whether or not anyone remembers to do it.
