An agency launches a client assistant, sends a link to a documentation page and closes the project.
Three weeks later the client changes a price. Nobody knows how to update the answer. Two weeks after that a customer is quoted the old figure and complains.
The client concludes the tool is unreliable. It was accurate on the day it launched and nobody was equipped to keep it that way, which is a handover failure rather than a product one.
Step 1: schedule the handover before the build finishes
A dated session in the plan, with named attendees. Handovers arranged after launch tend not to happen, because everybody has moved on to the next thing.
Step 2: identify the three people who need it
Whoever answers customers, whoever owns the content and whoever will be asked internally. Training only the person who signed the contract guarantees the knowledge is in the wrong place.
Step 3: run it as a working session
With their hands on it, making a real change during the session. Watching a demonstration produces confidence that evaporates by the following week.
Step 4: teach changing an answer first
This is the skill that determines whether it stays accurate. Everything else is secondary, and it should be practised rather than described.
Step 5: teach adding a new question
The second most important skill. Clients encounter questions nobody anticipated, and being able to add the answer themselves is what keeps them engaged.
Step 6: walk through the escalation rules
What goes to a person, when, and who receives it. This is a business decision the client owns and frequently does not realise they have made.
Step 7: show them the transcripts
Where to find them, what to look for, and how to read them as a list of things the website should say. This is the part clients find genuinely valuable.
Step 8: set the first month expectations
That there will be tuning, that new questions will appear and that this is normal rather than a sign something is wrong, which is the bounded period scoped in scoping a client assistant project properly.
Step 9: write documentation they will actually open
Short, specific to their setup, with screenshots of their own configuration. Generic vendor documentation is not a handover.
Step 10: agree who owns it internally
One named person at the client. Without an owner it belongs to nobody, drifts out of date and becomes the agency's problem again for nothing.
Step 11: brief the wider team
Anybody who might be asked about it by a customer. A staff member who does not know the business has an assistant gives a confusing answer when somebody mentions it.
Step 12: agree the support boundary
What the agency handles, what the client handles and what is chargeable, which is the arrangement priced in pricing assistant builds for clients.
Step 13: book the thirty day review
In the diary at handover, not proposed later. A scheduled review is where the retainer conversation happens naturally and where problems surface while they are small.
Step 14: keep the content training practical
Show them how the answers are drawn from their own site and documents, which is what how to train your chatbot on your website content covers, and the same structured client start appears in onboarding a new bookkeeping client without chaos. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under agencies.