Guides / Guide 03
What a website assistant can and cannot do
A straight account of where one of these genuinely helps, where it makes matters worse, and the four rules that decide which of the two you end up with. There is one running on the front page of this site, so you can check the claims against the thing itself.
Most people have now had a bad experience with a box in the corner of a website. It appeared uninvited, it did not understand the question, and it would not let you reach a person. That is a fair reason to be suspicious of the whole category, and it is worth saying plainly that a badly set up assistant is worse than no assistant, because it wastes somebody's time and then loses them.
So this is the honest version, in three parts: what it does well, what it cannot do, and what separates the two.
What it genuinely does well
It answers at three in the morning
This is the whole point and everything else is secondary. The enquiry that arrives at eight on a Sunday gets a real answer at five past, not an autoresponder telling somebody how important their enquiry is. Nobody is impressed by that message and everybody has read it before.
It answers the same eight questions for the four hundredth time
Every business has them. Do you cover my area. How far ahead are you booked. Do you do small jobs. Do you take card. Is there a call-out charge. Those questions are not a burden because they are hard, they are a burden because they are endless, and answering them is the only thing standing between the customer and a decision.
It asks your questions back
The two or three things you always end up asking before you can say anything useful. What is the address, how big is it, when do you need it. Getting those in the first exchange rather than the fourth is most of the value, because it turns twenty messages across two days into one conversation you read once.
It sorts before you look
Not everything that comes through a contact form is a customer. A fair amount of it is somebody selling you search engine optimisation. Handling that without it reaching your phone is a small thing that adds up.
What it cannot do, and should not pretend to
It cannot price your job
It can tell somebody the range you have given it, if you have given it one. It must not guess, and any assistant willing to invent a number is a liability, because the customer will quote it back to you and they will be right to.
It cannot promise a date it cannot see
Unless it has been connected to a real diary, an assistant saying "we can do Thursday" is making it up. Connecting the diary is a piece of work, and until that work is done the correct behaviour is to offer a booking link and stop.
It cannot replace the conversation that wins the job
For anything of any size, people buy from a person. The assistant's job is to make sure that person actually gets the chance, which they do not when the message sat unread from Friday night until Monday.
It cannot fix what happens afterwards
If enquiries arrive perfectly sorted and then sit for a fortnight because nobody has time to quote, an assistant has changed nothing except the speed at which the backlog builds. It is worth being honest with yourself about which end your problem is at.
The four rules that decide whether it works
- It says when it does not know. An assistant that guesses is worse than a voicemail, because a voicemail does not put a wrong number in writing.
- A person is always one step away. Never a maze. If somebody asks for a human, that request is the end of the conversation, not the start of a negotiation.
- It knows what you do not do. Half of a good assistant is the boundaries. Areas you will not travel to, work you do not take, the size of job that is not worth anybody's afternoon.
- What it collects reaches you in one piece. If the conversation ends up somewhere nobody reads, you have automated the missing of enquiries rather than the answering of them.
Try the one on this site
There is an assistant on the front page. It is the same thing we would build for you, answering questions about us instead of about you. It has been told what we do, what we do not do, and that it must not commit to prices or dates.
Push at it. Ask it something awkward, ask it something it should not know, ask it for a price. Watch whether it makes something up. That is the only test of this category that matters, and it is a great deal more use than a page of adjectives about it.
What happens to what you type. Your message goes to our own automation service and to Anthropic, whose model writes the reply. It is not added to a mailing list and typing an email address into it does not sign you up to anything. The detail, including how long each part is kept, is on the privacy page, written in the same plain English as this.
See what it would answer for you.
Book the audit and we will go through the eight questions your customers keep asking, what you would want an assistant to refuse to answer, and whether it is worth doing at all in your case.