There's a specific time of night when nursery enquiries arrive: about half past nine, once the children are asleep and a parent finally has twenty minutes to think about childcare for September.
They open four nursery websites. They're looking for the same handful of things. Fees, whether you have space for a two-year-old from January, how funded hours work, what the ratios are, whether they can visit. Most nursery websites answer some of it. None of them answer at half past nine.
So the parent fills in a contact form, or three, and waits until someone gets back to them mid-week. And the setting that replies first, warmly and completely, is very often the one they visit.
The questions never change
Every nursery manager could recite them:
- How much is a full day? A morning? A stretched session?
- Do you take funded hours, and how does that work with your fees?
- Do you have space for a [age] from [month]?
- What are your ratios?
- Do you provide meals? What about nappies?
- What's your settling-in process?
- What are your opening hours, and what happens in the holidays?
They're asked dozens of times a week. They're all answerable from content you've almost certainly already written. And they consume an enormous amount of a manager's time, a manager whose job should be running a setting, not reading out a fee schedule.
What a chatbot does here
It answers those questions instantly, in the evening, in a warm and complete way, and then does the thing that actually matters commercially: captures the enquiry properly.
The fees conversation
This is the one parents most want answered before they'll invest time in a visit, and the one nurseries are often most vague about online. Partly because the funded-hours interaction is genuinely complicated.
A bot can walk through it properly. Session costs, what's included, how funded hours apply, what the top-up looks like, what's charged in holidays. It doesn't get impatient explaining the same funding rules for the ninth time that week, and it explains them the same way every time, which matters, because inconsistent fee explanations are a common source of complaint later.
Availability and waiting lists
"Do you have space for a two-year-old in January?" is the question a bot usually can't answer definitively, and it shouldn't pretend to. Occupancy changes weekly and lives in your management system, not on your website.
What it can do is capture the enquiry in a form your manager can actually use: child's date of birth, desired start date, which days are needed, whether the days are flexible, and contact details. Instead of a voicemail saying "hi, wondering about spaces", your manager gets a structured list they can check against the room plan in one pass.
That's the difference between a waiting list and a pile of messages.
Tour bookings
The visit is where nurseries convert. Everything before it is just getting the parent through the door.
A bot's job is to make booking one as low-friction as possible. Capture the preferred days and times, the child's age, and contact details, and hand it to your office to confirm. Evening enquiries convert to visits at a much higher rate when a parent can request a tour in the same conversation where their fee questions got answered. Ask them to remember to follow up two days later and most will not.
The reassurance layer
There's a category of question parents ask that isn't really informational. "How do you settle a child who's upset?" "What happens if she won't eat?" "How will I know how her day went?"
These are anxiety questions, and answering them well (from your own published policies, in your own voice) does real work. A parent who reads a thoughtful answer at ten at night arrives at their visit already half-reassured.
The tone configuration matters more here than in almost any other sector. Warm, unhurried, and honest. And short, with a clear offer to speak to a person.
The absolute boundaries
This needs to be explicit, because childcare carries duties nothing else on this list does.
Nothing about a specific child. If a parent asks about their own child's day, an incident, an allergy, medication, or anything that has happened at the setting, the bot's only job is to connect them to a named person, immediately. No exceptions.
Nothing safeguarding-related. Any message that touches on a child's welfare, a concern about a child, or anything a parent raises about care quality must route straight to your manager and be visible to them fast.
No claims about Ofsted, ratios, or policy you haven't published. The bot answers from your documented policies. If it doesn't know, it says so and hands over.
Set these as the first instructions in the configuration, not as an afterthought.
Standing it up
Point it at your website so it learns your fees, sessions, funding information, policies, and staff structure. If your fee schedule is a PDF, upload it. That's usually where the real detail is.
Set the capture fields to child's date of birth, desired start date, days needed, and parent contact. Add a clear escalation rule for anything involving a specific child.
Then write one line into the configuration about tone: brief, warm, and quick to offer a conversation with a person.
What actually changed
The number to watch is evening and weekend enquiries captured, and what share of them convert to a booked visit. In childcare this is where the growth is hiding, not in more traffic, but in responding to the traffic you already get at the hour it actually arrives.
The second number is your manager's time. If the fees and funding questions stop reaching them individually, that's several hours a week back in the setting, which is where a nursery manager should be.