The same eight questions arrive every week, by email, through the contact form and in the chat window, and the owner answers them personally between jobs. That is the normal state of customer service in a small business. It is also the easiest problem in the business to fix, because repeat questions are exactly what software is good at.
This is the sequence we recommend. It takes about a week of part-time attention to set up and about twenty minutes a week to keep running.
Step 1: List the questions you actually get asked
Not the questions you think you get. The ones you can count.
Search your sent email for the past three months and note every reply that explains something rather than arranging something. Do the same with your contact form submissions and any chat history you have. Ask whoever is on the phone to keep a tally sheet for two weeks with one line per call: what they wanted, in the customer's words.
Group the results. For most small businesses the list settles at 20 to 40 distinct questions, and they fall into two kinds:
- Fixed answers. Opening hours, delivery areas, returns, what to bring, parking, whether you accept a particular insurer, how long a job takes.
- It-depends answers. Price for a non-standard job, availability, whether you can do something unusual.
Both kinds can be automated, but differently. A fixed answer gets published as is. An it-depends answer gets a range or a worked example, plus the list of details you need before you can give a firm reply.
Step 2: Write each answer down once, properly
The answers are the asset. The software is only a way of delivering them.
Write one clean answer per question, in the plain language you would use on the phone, and publish it where a visitor can find it: an FAQ page, the relevant service page, a policies page. Resist the urge to hedge. "Prices vary, please call" is not an answer, and an assistant trained on it will repeat the hedge to every visitor.
For it-depends questions, write the honest version: "A standard end-of-tenancy clean for a two-bedroom flat is typically 180 to 240 and takes two cleaners about four hours. For a firm price we need the number of rooms, whether the oven and carpets are included, and the postcode."
Published answers help twice. Visitors who read find them, and the assistant you add in the next step learns from them.
Step 3: Put an assistant on the website, trained on those answers
Now add the chat. A website assistant reads your pages (or text you paste in) and answers visitors' questions from them, at any hour, in the visitor's language. It also collects a name, email and phone number when someone wants a reply from a person.
On SpideyChat the one-click setup reads 10 pages of your site on the Free plan, which is enough for the FAQ and the main service pages, and the Starter plan adds a crawler for the whole site. Installation is one line of code, or the WordPress plugin if your site runs on that. The features page lists what else is included.
Before any visitor sees it, test it with the list from Step 1. Ask all of the questions, in the sloppy way customers type them. Then ask five things your site does not cover and check that it says so rather than inventing something. Fix any wrong answer by fixing the page it came from, not by arguing with the software.
Step 4: Set the hand-off and ticket rules
Automation without an exit is how customers end up shouting at a chat window. Decide three things before going live.
When a person takes over. Any complaint. Any question about a specific customer's account, order or invoice. Any request for a refund or a discount beyond what you have published. Anyone who sounds distressed, or in a hurry about something that matters. The assistant should hand these over as soon as it recognises them, not after three attempts.
What happens when nobody is on duty. Evenings and weekends, the assistant should say that a person is not available right now, take the details and open a ticket, so the customer has a reference and you have a queue in the morning. On SpideyChat the ticket inbox is part of the Pro plan at $29.99 a month, and the hand-over to a live person works when someone on your team is signed in to the dashboard.
What the person receives. The full conversation, the contact details and the ticket number. Nobody should be asked to repeat themselves. How to set up human hand-off for your chatbot goes into the mechanics.
Step 5: Review the unanswered questions every week
Every assistant worth having keeps a list of the questions it could not answer. That list is your editorial calendar.
Set aside twenty minutes at the same time each week. Read the list. For each real question, write the answer onto the relevant page and re-sync the assistant. For questions that are really requests (a quote, a complaint), check that they were captured and followed up. Over a couple of months the list shrinks to genuinely new questions, and you will notice seasonal ones arriving before the season does. Turning unanswered questions into website pages describes the habit in more detail.
Step 6: Measure, with numbers you already have
Five numbers, compared before and after, are enough:
- Repeat-question emails in your inbox per week.
- Conversations the assistant finished without a person.
- Leads captured, and how many arrived outside your hours.
- Tickets opened, and your time to first human reply.
- Enquiries you missed entirely.
Here is a worked example with made-up figures. Say a cleaning company counts 70 enquiries a week across all channels. 25 of them are the same price, area and availability questions, and 18 of those arrive after 6pm. After the sequence above, the 25 are answered on the site, the 18 after-hours ones no longer wait overnight, and the owner's inbox drops to the questions that need a decision. Count your own version of those numbers at the start, then again after a month. Deflecting repeat tickets without hiding support covers the measurement in more depth.
What not to automate
Some things should stay with a person even though software could technically attempt them.
- Complaints. The customer wants to be heard by someone who can act.
- Cancellations and refunds with money attached. Decisions, not answers.
- Anything safety related. A gas smell, an allergic reaction, a child missing from a class list. The assistant should give the emergency route and stop.
- Specifics of a person's medical, legal or financial situation. Point to the published information and bring in the professional.
- Bad news. A delay, a mistake, a price rise after a quote. These land better from a human.
- Your highest-value first contacts. Let the assistant collect the details, then have the owner reply personally.
The test is simple. If a wrong answer would cost you the customer, the answer should come from a person, and the assistant's job is to get that person the details fast.
The first week, laid out
Monday, pull the questions. Tuesday, write the answers and publish them. Wednesday, build the assistant from those pages and test it. Thursday, set the hand-off and ticket rules and test them by pretending to be an angry customer. Friday, switch it on. The following Friday, read the unanswered list for the first time.