Chatbot or FAQ page? When AI support pays off
How to tell whether your business needs an AI chatbot, and how to start one without annoying your customers.
Not every business needs a chatbot. A good FAQ page is cheaper, quicker to build and often enough. Here’s how to tell which one you need.
When an FAQ page is enough
- You get a handful of questions a week, not dozens a day.
- Most questions have one fixed answer: opening hours, address, returns policy.
- Customers mostly reach you through the website, during working hours.
If that sounds like your business, spend an afternoon writing a clear FAQ page and link to it from your contact form. Review it every few months.
Signs a chatbot will pay off
- Volume. The same questions arrive every day, by email, phone and messaging apps.
- After hours. Customers write in the evening and at weekends, and wait until morning for an answer.
- Several channels. Questions come through the website, WhatsApp, Viber and Messenger, and someone has to watch all of them.
- More than one language. You serve customers in several languages, and not every member of your team speaks all of them.
- Answers depend on details. “Do you have this in size 42?” or “Can I book Thursday at 3?” need a look-up, not a fixed text.
What a good chatbot does
A chatbot that annoys customers is worse than none. The good ones share a few traits:
- They answer from your own content. Prices, policies and product data come from your website and documents, not from the model’s general knowledge.
- They know when to stop. When the bot isn’t sure, it says so and hands the conversation to a person, with the history attached.
- They do things. Booking an appointment or checking an order status saves more time than a polite answer.
- Someone reads the transcripts. A weekly review shows which answers are missing and what customers really ask.
How to start
Collect the twenty questions you answer most often, with the answers your team actually gives. Launch on one channel first, usually the website or the messaging app your customers use most. For the first month, review the conversations every week and fill the gaps.
Running costs are charged per conversation and are usually small, but they grow with volume. Estimate them before you start, so there are no surprises. We do that as part of every AI audit.