Website Support Chatbot Development

What it is trained on

This is the part that decides whether the bot is useful or embarrassing. We build with retrieval, which means the bot searches your approved content and answers from what it finds, rather than generating an answer from general knowledge.

In practice that means we ingest:

• Every page of your website, including the ones nobody links to any more.
• Your price list, in whatever form it exists — a PDF, a spreadsheet, an email you send to enquiries.
• Policies: delivery, returns, warranty, payment terms, service areas.
• Past enquiry replies, if you have an inbox worth mining. This is usually the richest source and almost nobody thinks of it.
• Product or catalogue data, if you have a lot of SKUs.

How much a website chatbot costs

The build is a one-off. The running cost is monthly and scales with how many people talk to it. Both matter, and only the first is usually quoted.

A website bot is cheaper to run than a WhatsApp bot because there is no per-conversation platform charge. Meta bills WhatsApp conversations; your own website does not bill you for anything.

Stopping it from making things up

Hallucination is the objection everyone raises and it is a solved engineering problem, provided the supplier bothers to solve it. Three things do the work.

First, retrieval grounding: the bot can only answer from documents it retrieved, and if the retrieval returns nothing relevant it is instructed to say so rather than improvise. Second, refusal training: we give it explicit examples of questions it should decline. Third, adversarial testing before go-live, where we deliberately try to make it quote a price that does not exist or promise a delivery date it cannot know.

What we cannot fix is stale source content. If your website still lists last year's prices, the bot will quote last year's prices with total confidence. Ownership of the content is the client's job and we say so before the project starts.

Where the handover to a human happens

The fastest way to make a customer resent your business is to trap them with a bot that cannot help and will not let go. Every widget we build has explicit escalation triggers.

• The visitor asks for a discount or starts negotiating.
• The visitor uses complaint language, or repeats a question the bot has already failed to answer.
• The visitor explicitly asks for a person.
• Retrieval confidence falls below a threshold you set.

On escalation the conversation is handed over with the full transcript attached, so your team does not start from nothing. Outside working hours it captures a callback slot instead.

The transcript is the real deliverable

Clients consistently underestimate this. After a month live, you have a searchable list of exactly what prospective customers want to know, phrased the way they phrase it. Not what you assumed they wanted to know — what they actually asked at 11pm on a Sunday.

That list rewrites your website copy, your FAQ, your ad targeting and often your product. We include a dashboard that groups questions by frequency and flags the ones the bot failed on, and we review it with you at day thirty.

What you get at handover

A trained widget installed on your site, escalation rules configured, lead capture writing into your CRM or a Google Sheet, the question dashboard, and the source code. Thirty days of tuning after launch is included, because the questions real visitors ask are never quite the ones anyone predicted during the build.