When a Chatbot Is the Right Answer (And When It Absolutely Isn't)

We turn down chatbot projects almost as often as we accept them. The honest answer is that for most small businesses, the question on the website is not the bottleneck. The reply time is.

Build a chatbot when

Your team is answering the same handful of questions every single day. The questions are factual, not emotional. The answers exist somewhere — in a price list, an FAQ, a property feed, a product catalogue. And you have a clean way to hand off to a human when the bot is out of its depth.

Don't build a chatbot when

The conversations are sales-flavoured ("can you do X for me by Friday?"). The right answer requires judgment, pricing nuance, or relationship. A bot that fumbles a sales conversation has actively hurt your business.

Don't build a chatbot when (part 2)

Your problem is that you only get 30 messages a month and you reply too slowly. The fix there isn't AI — it's a Slack notification and someone with their phone on them.

The honest test

If you can write the answers to your top 10 questions on an index card without lying, a chatbot will help. If your top 10 questions all start with "it depends," it won't.