A marketing team would never hand a new agency a website address and nothing else. They would brief them on the audience, the positioning, the tone, the competitors, the sensitivities and the things never to say.
They then set up an assistant by pointing it at the website and seeing what happens.
The result is predictable. It is broadly right, occasionally wrong in ways nobody anticipated, and nobody can say whether it is performing well because nobody defined what performing well would look like.
Step 1: write what the business actually does
In two sentences, for somebody who knows nothing. This is harder than it sounds and it is the foundation of every answer that follows.
Step 2: describe who the audience is
Including the different kinds, since a technical evaluator and a first time buyer need different registers and different depth.
Step 3: supply the answers to the common questions
The twenty that arrive constantly, written properly once, which is the work that makes everything else possible.
Step 4: state the tone with examples
Three good answers and three that are wrong in tone. Examples calibrate considerably better than adjectives.
Step 5: define the boundaries explicitly
What must never be answered, what must always escalate, and where an incorrect answer would cause real harm.
Step 6: state the claims that may never be made
Guarantees, outcomes, regulated statements and anything the business cannot stand behind, which is the discipline in how to keep your chatbot on brand and on.
Step 7: define the handover rules
When a person takes over, how, what goes with the conversation and what the customer is told while they wait.
Step 8: supply the product and price detail properly
Not a link. The actual figures, conditions and exceptions, since this is where most wrong answers originate.
Step 9: state what a good outcome is
A booked call, a captured enquiry, a resolved question or a sale, so performance can be judged rather than felt.
Step 10: name who owns it
A person responsible for the answers, as with any agency relationship, or it decays within months.
Step 11: review the transcripts in the first fortnight
Which is the same as reviewing an agency's first drafts, and is where most of the improvement actually happens.
Step 12: feed the unanswered questions back
Each one is a gap in the brief, and closing them is how the thing gets better rather than staying at its launch quality.
Step 13: set a review cadence
Monthly at first and quarterly afterwards, since products, prices and positions change and a brief written once goes stale.
Step 14: decide what it should refuse to do
Taking payment details, giving advice it is not qualified to give, or committing the business to something. Writing the refusals down is as important as writing the answers, and it is the part almost everybody omits.
Brief it properly and it performs properly
An assistant given the audience, the answers, the tone, the boundaries and the handover rules behaves like a well briefed agency, and one given a website address behaves like an agency that was given a website address. Set it up through install the widget and train your bot. The measurement questions sit in conversion rate questions marketers ask about chat and attribution questions when chat is in the funnel, and the commercial side for agencies in pricing assistant builds for clients. The sector view sits under marketing agencies.