Decisions to make before you add an AI chatbot
Which questions the bot may answer, when it must hand the chat to a person, and the three numbers worth reading after the first week.
Written by JantaraX Global IT Private Limited · Reviewed 26 October 2026 · 2 min read
Where a chatbot helps, and where it does not
A chatbot is useful when it answers a repeated question from a source you control, and hands the conversation to a person when it should not guess. It is a poor fit when every enquiry is different, or when a wrong answer would cost the customer money or trust.
Hours, what you sell, how to book, where you are, and what you do not do are good first answers. A custom quote, a legal position, or a medical suggestion is not. If your team would not let a new hire say it on day one, the bot should not say it either.
Write the allowed answers first
List the questions you already answer every week. The bot should answer from that list and from pages on your own site. If a question is not on the list, the bot should say so and offer a person. Letting a general model improvise prices or policies is how a helpful widget becomes a complaint.
Keep one source of truth. If the hours on the contact page and the hours in the bot’s notes disagree, fix the page and point the bot at the page. Two copies will drift.
Decide the handoff before you launch
Name the channel: a WhatsApp number, a phone number, or an email that someone actually reads. Write the sentence the bot uses when it stops. A bot with no handoff traps the visitor inside a conversation that cannot finish.
Also name the hours. If nobody reads WhatsApp after 7 pm, the welcome line should say when a person will reply. A promise of an instant human at midnight is a broken process, not a feature.
What to measure in the first week
- How many conversations ended with the handoff.
- How many were answered without one.
- Which questions had no approved answer.
The third list is the editorial work. A chatbot gets better when someone adds the missing answer to the source, not when someone asks the model to “be smarter.” Read the transcripts. Add the missing page or the missing sentence. Then let the bot use it.
A small starting scope
One language. Your own site as the only source. Office hours stated in the welcome line. A named human fallback. Add another language or another channel after you have read a week of real transcripts. JantaraX builds chatbots on that boundary: answer from your material, and stop when the material runs out.
Questions
Can the bot quote a price?
Only if the price is a published figure on your site and does not depend on a site visit or a custom scope. Otherwise it should collect the facts and pass them to a person.
Do we need a chatbot if we already reply on WhatsApp?
Not if a person replies the same day and the questions vary. Use a bot when the same answers are repeated and a person is spending the morning retyping them.
Use this on your own project
The project brief tool turns the same questions into a page you can copy and send.
Other guides
How to brief a software project before you hire anyone
A short brief that names the user, the job the software replaces, and what the first release must do — with a filled example you can copy.
A website or a web application: which one to build first
How to tell a public website from software people log into, and how to choose the one that fixes this quarter’s actual loss.
What to specify in a custom CRM before development starts
The record, the statuses in your own words, the ownership rules, and the one Monday report — the parts that decide whether a CRM gets used.
What hosting and maintenance should cover after a site goes live
What you should own, what a maintenance month includes, and the one restore test that tells you a backup is real.
Corrections: hr@jantarax.com. See also how this site is maintained.