This is the Q&A pair almost everyone writes first:
Q: What are your opening hours? A: Our opening hours vary. Please contact us for more information.
It is polite, it is accurate, and it is useless. A visitor who asked that question wanted a time, and they have now been told to go and do the work themselves. A good chatbot Q&A pair would have given the hours, mentioned the exception, and offered the next step.
Q&A pairs are the most direct way to teach an assistant exactly what to say about something. They are also where most businesses accidentally write in the voice of a council leaflet. This post is about writing them the way your best team member would answer across the counter.
Where your team's voice actually lives
Do not start from your website FAQ. That page was written once, probably by whoever built the site, and polished until it said very little.
Start from your sent emails. Search your inbox for the questions you get every week: "how much", "do you cover", "can I cancel", "how long". Read how you or your staff actually replied when a customer asked. Those replies are usually shorter, warmer and more specific than anything on the website, because they were written to a person with a problem.
Copy the useful ones into a document. Strip out the customer's name and any details about their specific job. What remains is the raw material for your pairs.
Four rules, with before and after
Answer with a fact, not a pointer
Before: Prices depend on the job. Get in touch for a quote. After: Most boiler services are £95. If we find a fault that needs parts, we tell you the cost before doing any extra work.
If a price genuinely varies, give the range or the starting point and say what moves it. "From £95" plus the reason it might be more is honest. "It depends" is not an answer.
Include the condition people forget
Before: Yes, we offer next-day appointments. After: Usually, yes. Next-day appointments are available Monday to Thursday if you get in touch before 2pm. Friday requests normally go to the following Monday.
The condition is where complaints come from. A visitor told "yes" who then waits four days feels misled, even if the unconditional answer was mostly true.
Finish with what happens next
Before: We cover most of North Yorkshire. After: We cover York, Harrogate, Selby and the villages in between. If you're outside those, tell us your postcode and we'll let you know if we can make an exception for larger jobs.
Every answer should leave the visitor knowing what to do. Often that is leaving their details. Sometimes it is reading a specific page or waiting for a confirmation.
Sound like you, not like a policy
Before: Cancellations made within 24 hours of the scheduled appointment time may incur a charge. After: If you need to cancel, just let us know at least a day before. Inside 24 hours we charge £30, because we usually can't fill the slot at short notice.
Giving a one-line reason for a rule makes it feel fair. It also means the assistant can explain the rule when a visitor pushes back, instead of repeating it.
Writing the question side
People put less thought into the question than the answer, but the question shapes when the answer gets used. Write it the way customers ask, not the way you would title a section.
| Tidy version (weaker) | How customers actually ask (stronger) |
|---|---|
| Service area information | Do you come out to Selby? |
| Cancellation policy | What if I need to cancel? |
| Payment methods accepted | Can I pay by card on the day? |
| Emergency call-out availability | Can someone come tonight? |
| Parking arrangements | Where do I park when I visit? |
Keep one topic per pair. A single pair that covers prices, payment methods and deposits will be pulled up for all three questions and give a muddled answer to each. Three short pairs are better.
Things to keep out of Q&A pairs
A few categories of answer do more harm than good, however helpful they feel when you write them.
- Promises you cannot keep every time. "We'll always be there within the hour" becomes a problem on the first day it is not true.
- Discretionary deals. "We can usually do something for regulars" invites every visitor to ask for a discount. Point that kind of question to a person.
- Personal advice. In clinics, legal practices and financial services, answers should give general information and say clearly that specific cases need a qualified person. An assistant should never be the one to say a symptom is nothing to worry about.
- Dates that will expire. "This summer's offer runs until August" is fine in August and wrong in October. If you must include a date, set a reminder to delete the pair.
For the questions your assistant should decline, there is a separate post on when a receptionist should say 'I don't know'.
A worked example: your first batch
Say your inbox search turns up 40 customer emails from the last month. Group them by topic and you might find something like this: 11 about price, 8 about areas covered, 6 about availability, 5 about cancellations, 4 about payment, and 6 odds and ends.
That gives you roughly five topics that account for most of your email. Write two or three pairs per topic, covering the main question and the most common follow-up, and you have around 15 pairs. For many small businesses that first batch handles the bulk of what visitors ask. Replace the numbers with your own count; the method works the same.
If you are staring at a blank page, the free FAQ generator can suggest a starting list of questions for your type of business. Treat its output as prompts and rewrite every answer in your own words and with your own facts.
Your next hour
Search your sent emails for the phrase "how much" and read the last ten replies. Pick the clearest one, turn it into a pair using the four rules above, and add it to your assistant. Ask the assistant that question in two different ways and read the reply out loud. If it sounds like something your team would say, do the next topic.
Once the pairs are in, keep the tone consistent with the rest of the assistant's persona; the post on keeping your brand voice goes into that. And when your first real visitors start asking things you did not predict, how to prepare your FAQ for AI training is a useful follow-up.