An owner intends to add an assistant. She puts aside a day, opens a blank document to write out every possible question, and gets to about fourteen before the day is gone.
Three weekends later the document is still unfinished. Nothing is live, nothing has been learned, and the project has acquired the weight of something large.
The version that would have taken forty minutes covers six questions and answers the majority of what her customers actually ask.
Step 1: do not start with a blank document
Start with what already exists. Your website pages, your quotation template, the last twenty enquiries in your inbox. Most of the answers are already written somewhere.
Step 2: list the six questions you are asked most
From memory and from your inbox. Six is enough for a first version and it will cover most of what arrives, which is the whole point of starting.
Step 3: write the answers as you would say them
In plain language, the way you answer on the telephone. Answers written in formal website prose read wrongly and take three times as long to produce.
Step 4: decide what must go to you
Complaints, anything sensitive, anything requiring a decision. Setting this boundary takes five minutes and it is what makes the rest comfortable.
Step 5: decide what happens out of hours
An honest statement of when somebody will reply, plus capture of the details you would need. This is where most of the value will come from.
Step 6: install it update safe
A child theme, a snippets plugin or the theme's header setting, following the process in adding an assistant without breaking the theme.
Step 7: take a backup first
Ten minutes that turns an irreversible step into a reversible one, which is what makes it possible to do this on a Friday afternoon.
Step 8: launch on one page
Your busiest page or your contact page. One page means one thing to watch and one place to fix anything that reads badly.
Step 9: clear the cache and check on a phone
Two steps that account for most of the apparent failures people report immediately after installing anything.
Step 10: test it as a customer would
Ask your own six questions in your own words. Anything that answers badly gets fixed before a real customer ever encounters it.
Step 11: tell your customers it is there
A line in a confirmation email, a note on the contact page or a mention on social media. A new way to reach you that nobody knows about produces a quiet first week and a premature conclusion that it does not work.
Step 11: watch the first day of real questions
The questions arriving in the first hours tell you what to add next, and they are more accurate than any list you would have written.
Step 12: add the seventh question, then the eighth
Incrementally, from what people actually asked. This is how a good version gets built, rather than by imagining it in advance.
Step 13: expand to the rest of the site once it reads well
And handle several brands or sites separately if that applies, which is the ground in multisite and multi brand questions.
Step 14: keep the whole thing to an afternoon
Six answers, one page, one backup and one test, which is the approach in onboarding a saas assistant in one afternoon and the specific steps in how to add a chatbot to wordpress. See the integrations, features, start at try, and the sector view sits under small business.