Chatbots for Small Business: Turn FAQs Into Qualified Leads

Chatbots for small business do two jobs well. They answer the questions you get every week, and they take enquiries while you’re up a ladder, with a patient or closed for the night. A good one answers from your own website and FAQs, asks for the job, the postcode and the timing, and emails you the lead, so you call back already knowing what the job is. Ours start at £300 setup plus £29 a month.

This guide is written for UK trades and clinics. It covers where a chatbot helps, what it learns from, how to qualify enquiries without putting people off, and why most small business chatbots fail.

Start with the questions you already answer on repeat. Go through the last three months of calls, emails and messages and note every question that came up more than twice. For most trades and clinics, the list looks like this:

• Prices and quoting: “How much is a boiler service?” or “Do you charge to come out and quote?”
• Areas covered: “Do you come out to Harrogate?”
• Availability: “Can you fit me in next week?” or “Do you have Saturday appointments?”
• Out-of-hours enquiries: a leak reported at 9pm, or a patient trying to book after reception has closed.
• Practical details: parking, opening hours and what to bring to a first appointment.

A bot can answer all of these from your website and FAQs, then take the customer’s name, phone number and job details. Anything that needs judgement should still come to you: a complaint, a medical question, or a price for a job nobody has seen.

A chatbot is only as good as what you give it to read. Ours are trained on your website and FAQs. When a customer asks a question, the bot looks up the matching part of those pages and answers from it, rather than from general knowledge. If your website says you cover LS1 to LS17, that’s what it tells people.

So before launch, check that your prices, areas and opening hours are correct and match on every page. A bot can still miss a question nobody has written an answer for. If you have price lists or treatment guides to add, our guide to building an AI knowledge base from documents you already have covers how to get them ready.

Start with your website unless your customers already message you on WhatsApp. The Enquiry Bot and Business Bot sit on your website. The WhatsApp Bot answers on WhatsApp and your website, and includes the WhatsApp Business number setup and help with Meta’s business verification. It starts at £900 setup plus £69 a month, and Meta’s per-message fees are extra, passed on at cost. Our WhatsApp chatbot page explains how it works with Meta’s platform and its 24-hour reply window.

All our bots work in text and none of them answers the phone, so keep your number on every page. Someone with a burst pipe will want to ring you.

Decide what the bot must never answer before it goes live. For a trade, that’s firm prices for jobs it can’t see, complaints and safety. For a clinic, it’s anything that sounds like medical advice. When a question falls outside what it knows, our bots take the customer’s details instead of guessing.

• Tone: friendly and short, in UK English, with no hard sell.
• Sources: your website and FAQs only, never the open web.
• Off limits: prices outside your published ranges, medical or legal advice, and personal details beyond a name, phone number and the job.
• When it’s unsure: take the customer’s details and say someone will call back.
• Honesty: label it clearly as a chatbot, with your phone number next to it.

A good handover means the customer never repeats themselves. Every lead is emailed to you with the job details they typed, so your call back can open with “I see you need a new consumer unit in LS6”. On the Business Bot, leads also go to your Google Sheet or CRM.

Ask only what you need to quote or book the next step, and say why you’re asking. Most people will answer three or four quick questions if they can see it gets them a faster reply.

• Answer their question first, then ask for a name and number.
• Ask for the postcode, the job and when they need it. Ask for a rough budget range only where price decides the fit.
• Check the phone number looks right, and let people skip a question and still leave their details.
• Keep marketing consent separate from the reply to their enquiry.

Before you write a single bot question, write down what makes an enquiry worth calling back. Most owners can describe a good job straight away, but the description lives in their head, so it gets applied differently each time. Once it’s on paper, the bot can ask for exactly the facts you need.

Sort each enquiry into one of three piles and reply to each differently. A strong fit gets a call back first. A partial fit, such as the right job with an unclear postcode, gets one or two follow-up questions. An enquiry that isn’t a fit gets a quick, polite reply that says so and, where you can, points them somewhere more suitable.

On our packaged bots every lead is emailed to you with these details, so sorting takes a glance rather than a phone call. Automatic scoring and routing of leads is a bespoke build. Turning people away well matters too: a clear “we don’t cover that area” saves the customer a wait and leaves a better impression than silence.

A growing clinic faced out-of-hours enquiries and repeated pricing questions. We deployed a web and WhatsApp bot trained on policies and treatment pages, added escalation to reception during business hours, and routed quotes to a CRM with service type and postcode. Within two rounds of improvements, after-hours call-backs were pre-qualified and reception time on repetitive FAQs dropped noticeably, without a dip in customer satisfaction.

Measure enquiries and jobs, not the number of chats. Every lead arrives by email, so a simple monthly tally tells you most of what you need:

• Enquiries the bot captured, and how many arrived outside your working hours.
• How many fitted your criteria for the job, the area and the timing.
• How many of those booked a visit or an appointment.
• How many became paid work.

If the second number rises, the bot’s questions are working. If the last one rises, you’re spending your time on better enquiries. Note the questions it couldn’t answer too: each is a gap in your website or FAQs, and on the Business Bot and WhatsApp Bot, the monthly tuning closes them.

Most chatbots that disappoint were set up to fail before launch, and the technology was rarely the cause. These are the six patterns we see most often:

You can fix all six before you spend anything. If you can list your ten most common questions with a correct answer to each, the hardest part is done.

1. Write down what a good enquiry looks like: the job, the area, the timing, the budget and who decides.
2. Write a short, correct answer to each of your ten most common questions.
3. Make prices, areas and opening hours match across your website and FAQs.
4. Decide what the bot must never answer, and what it does instead.
5. Put your phone number next to the chat.
6. Test it with real questions from your inbox before launch.
7. Each month, check the leads and the unanswered questions, and update your answers.

Collect only what you need to reply, which is usually a name, a phone number and the job. To write its replies, the bot sends conversation text to the AI model provider that powers it, so your privacy notice should mention the chatbot and how you use enquiries. Before launch, we’ll talk you through where conversation data is stored and agree how long it’s kept.

We build and run text chatbots for UK small businesses, trained on your website and FAQs, with the limits and handover above set before launch. There are three packages:

If you need a website as well, the Trades Starter Kit puts a Business website and Enquiry Bot setup together for £950. CodeKodex isn’t VAT-registered, so no VAT is added.

Start with a list: your ten most common questions, each with a short answer, and what makes an enquiry worth calling back. Send us that with a link to your website and we’ll tell you which package fits, or whether you need a chatbot at all. You can also compare our chatbot packages and pricing.

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• #how-to-qualify-leads