The first week is where most of the value gets made, and it costs about ten minutes a day.
Day 1 — install it and leave it
Resist the urge to keep tweaking. You need real conversations before you know what to fix, and your own testing will not produce them because you already know the answers.
Day 2 — read every conversation
There will not be many. Read all of them, properly.
You are looking for two things: questions you did not expect, and answers that made you wince. Both are useful. The unexpected questions tell you what customers actually care about; the wincing tells you what to fix.
Day 3 — fix the worst answer
One. The single worst answer from day two.
Usually the fix is a paragraph on your website, not a setting. Add it, re-crawl, ask the question again.
Day 4 — check what it could not answer
Every decent product logs the questions it had nothing for. That list is the most useful thing it produces, because every line is a specific gap you can close.
Work down it in order of how often each came up.
Day 5 — look at where people gave up
Find the conversations that ended abruptly. Something happened just before: a wrong answer, a question it dodged, a wall of text nobody read.
Abandonment is quieter than a complaint and tells you more.
Day 6 — tighten the welcome and the pills
Now that you have seen real questions, rewrite your quick-action pills to match them. If four people asked about pricing and none tapped "Our services", that is your answer.
Day 7 — decide what it is allowed to do
By now you know whether the conversations are producing anything worth capturing. If they are, switch on lead capture and point it somewhere you will actually look.
Do this in week one, not month three. An agent that has been having good conversations and recording none of them is the most common way this gets wasted.
After the first week
Move to weekly. Read a handful of conversations, glance at the unanswered list, fix one thing.
That is genuinely the whole maintenance routine.
The mistake that wastes the week
Tuning in isolation. It is tempting to sit with the widget on a quiet afternoon, ask it thirty questions, and adjust settings based on what you find.
It does not work, because you already know the answers. You phrase questions the way someone who understands the business phrases them, which is precisely not how a stranger with a problem phrases them.
Real conversations from real visitors are worth more than an afternoon of your own testing, and there is no substitute. Install first, tune from evidence.
What "good" looks like by Friday
You are not aiming for perfect. You are aiming for:
- The five most common questions answered correctly
- Leads going somewhere you actually check
- One or two content gaps closed
- A rough sense of what people ask that you did not expect
That is a working setup. Everything after it is refinement, and refinement is much easier once real conversations are telling you where to point.
Related: what content your chatbot needs and the metrics worth reporting.