Chatbot for Small Business: How to Set One Up in Five Steps
When you run a small business, you are the support team, the sales team and often the person who updates the website. Customers still expect an answer in minutes, including evenings and weekends. A chatbot can take the repeat questions off your plate, but only if it is set up carefully: it should answer from your real information, say so when it does not know and leave you the details of people who want to talk. Here is a practical way to set one up without a developer and without a big project.
Step 1: Pick the three questions that cost you the most time
Do not try to automate everything. Look at your last month of emails, messages and calls and pick the three questions you answered most often: opening hours, prices or services, delivery or booking, how to reach you. Write the exact answer you give. These three are your launch scope. A chat that answers three things well is more useful than one that tries to answer thirty and gets half of them wrong.
Step 2: Put the answers on pages the chat can read
The chat answers only from what it can read: your website, documents and pasted text. Check that each of your three answers is written clearly on a public page, or add it as a document. Create your chat, enter your website address and choose the pages it should learn from. Pages behind a login cannot be read. The chat then answers in plain words and shows a numbered source next to each sentence, so a customer can open the page behind an answer. For answers that must never vary, such as prices or opening hours, write a saved answer.
Step 3: Start free and test it
You can start on the Free plan with no card. Free includes 50 AI credits a month, with up to 10 a day, one agent and the OneType badge on the chat, and it works on your live site. That is enough to test with real customers. Before you add the chat to your site, ask it your three questions in the test chat, and ask one it should not know. A good chatbot says it does not know instead of inventing an answer. Then add one script tag to your site's footer code; the same line works on any site where you can add custom code. OneType shows "Live on" followed by your site's address when it loads.
Step 4: Decide what happens when you are closed
A small business is rarely online all day. Decide what a visitor gets when the chat cannot answer or you are away. The chat can show a contact form, which needs an email and can take a name and phone number. Details a visitor types in the chat can also be saved to Contacts, depending on the agent's settings. With handoff turned on, which needs a paid plan, a visitor can ask for a person during the business hours you set. Outside them, or when nobody is online, the visitor gets the contact form. New leads show in your dashboard and can be emailed to you.
Step 5: Review it every week
Spend ten minutes a week. Open the questions the chat could not answer, which are grouped by meaning with a count, and add the missing answer once, as a page update or a saved answer. Check Analytics for conversations and leads. When your prices, hours or services change, read the source again with Sync now; on Free you can do this once a day. If the chat becomes busy, you will see it in your credits: you get a notice in the app at 80% and 100% of the month, and you can move to a paid plan when the free allowance is not enough.
Start small, start free
Learn how the chat reads your site: website training, see how contacts and leads are kept, or start free.