What most enquiries actually are

Do you have it in stock. What does it cost. Do you deliver to Hamilton. Is mine still under warranty. What time do you close. Each one costs a person a few minutes and a look in a system somebody has to know their way around. They arrive on the website, on WhatsApp, on Facebook, on WeChat and on the phone, and as many of them arrive after five as before it.

What we solve for

• Website, WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, phone.
• Answers read live from stock, price and order status.
• English and Mandarin.
• Handover to a person with the thread attached.
• After hours.
• Every conversation becoming a customer row.

In action

• Answers come from the record — stock, price, order status — not from a document of frequently asked questions.
• When it cannot answer, it says so and hands over, with everything already said attached.
• An enquiry that arrives at 9pm is captured, answered where it can be, and waiting in a person’s queue at eight.

Education & services · AImployee

Answer the enquiries

The agent sits on the live record, not on a page of FAQs. It can look up a student, check what is available and draft the reply.

Anything that commits the centre — a booking, a price, a change to a class — goes to a person before it is sent.

Answer the enquiries →

How to choose an AI receptionist

The two ways this goes wrong are well known. It invents a price with total confidence. Or it traps someone in a loop with no visible way to a human. Either costs more than the receptionist it replaced, which is why most owners here have already decided chatbots do not work. Four things to ask of any AI receptionist, with what each one costs when we build it:

It answers only from your data.

Stock, price, order status, hours, warranty — read live from the record. Anything not in the record, it does not answer. The cost: it will decline questions a person would have handled, until we widen what it can reach, and month one involves a list of those.

There is a way to a person on every single turn.

Not buried three levels down. The cost: some conversations hand over that could have been finished, particularly early.

It does not quote outside the price list.

Discounts, specials, anything negotiable goes to a person with the context attached. The cost: this does not replace a salesperson, and we will not claim it does.

Every conversation becomes a row on the customer.

The enquiry that would have died in a Facebook inbox is attached to a person, and the win-back agent can act on it a year later. The cost: none — but it is why we build this rather than resell a chatbot, and it only works if the data foundation is in.

How the engagement runs

• On the site you have, or the one we build. It does not require a new website.
• One agent, both languages: English and Mandarin, not two bots.
• Escalation to a named person, with the thread, not a notification.
• Every conversation reviewable. You can read what it said, any time.
• Monthly upkeep. Your prices and stock change; so must it.

What it needs first

The data foundation: one record of stock, prices, orders and customers for it to read. Without that it has nothing true to answer from, so we build the record first. It is for anyone whose staff spend the morning answering questions a system could look up.

How it starts

Every engagement follows the same four steps, in the same order, whatever the size of the job.

The full terms are on How we work; the other nine offerings are on Offerings; who owns the data is on Data ownership.