How can a small business answer customer questions out of hours?
Put the answers you have already written where a customer can reach them unaided. An assistant trained on your pricing, policies and service list answers at the moment the question is asked, cites which document it used, and takes a message when your documents fall short.
How it actually works
The economics of out-of-hours enquiries are unusual: they cost nothing to receive and a great deal to ignore. Someone comparing three suppliers at ten at night is making a decision that night. A reply the next morning arrives after it.
The reason most small businesses do not solve this is that the obvious fixes are all bad. Answering personally at night does not scale and is miserable. Hiring for evening cover is expensive for volume that is genuinely low. A static FAQ page only answers the questions you thought to write, and people ask questions in their own words rather than yours.
An assistant reading your existing documents avoids all three. Notably, it also tells you what it could not answer — grouped by topic, which turns the perennial question of what to add to your website into a list rather than a guess.
What it can't do
- It answers questions and books meetings. Anything needing judgement, negotiation or a decision only you can make gets escalated, not handled.
- Escalation is by email. There is no paging, no SMS and no phone call, so genuine emergencies need a route you should state plainly on your site.
- Free plans in this category are usually capped. Ours covers 100 customer messages a month, which is enough for most quiet weeks and not enough for a launch.
Related
See it on your own documents
One public assistant page and 100 customer messages a month, free, with no card required.