Answer the same five questions without being there

1. 01

   Decide what starts it

   2 minutes

   A bot can trigger on a first message from an unknown number, a keyword, a button press, a click-to-WhatsApp ad, or only outside business hours.

   • Keyword triggers with exact or contains matching
   • First-message triggers for anyone you have not spoken to before
   • Out-of-hours only, so daytime chats still go straight to a person
   • Ad-referral triggers, so a lead from an ad gets a different opening line
2. 02

   Draw the flow

   20–30 minutes for a first bot

   Drag nodes onto a canvas and join them. Ask a question, offer buttons, branch on the answer, send an image or a document, wait, or jump to another flow.

   • Message, question, button, list, condition, delay and jump nodes
   • Branches on what someone typed, a tag they carry, or a field you already hold
   • Media nodes for a menu, a price list or a location
   • You write every word it sends — nothing is generated behind your back
3. 03

   Collect what you need to qualify them

   part of the flow

   Ask for city, budget, product or appointment slot and save each answer onto the contact. The morning starts with a warm list rather than a cold one.

   • Answers saved to contact fields, not just to the transcript
   • Validation on phone numbers, emails and dates so you do not store rubbish
   • Tags applied as they qualify — “bulk enquiry”, “out of area”
   • A CRM deal opened at the end, with everything it collected attached
4. 04

   Point it at your own material

   10 minutes

   Give it your prices, policies and FAQs so its answers come from what is true about your business rather than from something it invented.

   • Answers drawn from the material you supply
   • Anything it cannot answer from that material goes to a human instead of guessing
   • Update the material and the answers change — no rebuilding the flow
5. 05

   Set the handover rules

   5 minutes

   Decide exactly when the bot steps aside: on request, on frustration, after a set number of failed attempts, or at a specific point in the flow.

   • “Talk to a human” stops the bot for that conversation immediately
   • The chat is tagged, assigned and flagged so your team knows it is now theirs
   • Any agent can take over mid-flow from the inbox at any time
   • The full bot transcript stays on the conversation, so nobody asks the customer to repeat themselves
6. 06

   Test it, publish it, then watch it

   ongoing

   Run the flow against yourself before it goes live. Once published, look at where people drop out — that node is almost always badly worded rather than badly built.

   • Test mode that walks the flow without messaging real customers
   • Per-node completion, so you can see exactly where people leave
   • Version it, pause it, or switch it off entirely without deleting it

The routine questions stop reaching a person, and the ones that need a person arrive already answered halfway.

Questions