The chatbots that fail are the ambitious ones. The chatbots that quietly save an hour a day answer the five questions the desk answers twenty times, and hand over everything else. Build that one first.
What the first bot should do
Out of hours, when a message arrives from anyone:
- Say you are closed and when you open.
- Offer three buttons: Timings & location, Prices, Talk to a person.
- Answer the first two from your own material.
- For the third, tag the chat "needs human" and say someone will reply at opening time.
That is the whole thing. It needs no AI and no integration, and a customer at 11pm gets an answer instead of a blue tick.
The blocks
- Trigger — "outside business hours" is the safest first trigger, because it never interrupts a live conversation. Keyword and first-message triggers come later.
- Text — the greeting. Short, with the opening time in it.
- Reply buttons — up to three. Their labels are what the customer taps, so write them as the customer would say them.
- Ask & Wait — if you want to collect something, like a name or a city, save it to a contact field so it is usable later rather than buried in a transcript.
- Handover — assigns the chat to the queue and stops the bot. Always reachable, always labelled plainly.
Adding the AI, later
Once the boring bot works, paste your prices, policies and FAQs into Brand Knowledge and add an AI Reply block for anything typed rather than tapped. The AI answers from your material only, and hands to a person for anything it cannot find there. Read its first week of answers before you trust it — that is what the run log is for.
Test it before you publish
Walk the flow yourself from a second phone. Then publish — it is one switch, and pausing it is the same switch. Nothing is deleted when you pause.
What to watch
The number that matters is the share of after-hours chats that needed a person in the morning. If it is falling, the bot is answering what it should. If a question keeps reaching the handover, that is the next button to add.