What does “training” mean here?
Not what it means in a research lab. Nobody is teaching a model from scratch on your business. A business chatbot is a general model with a fence around it: it may answer only from the content you gave it, and it must say so when the answer is not there. “Training” is choosing and cleaning that content. It takes an hour of a business owner’s time and no code.
What should you give it?
| Give it | Why | Keep away | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your website pages | What you do, where, for whom | Customer records | POPIA 2; it does not need them |
| Your price list | The most-asked question | Internal documents | It will quote them to a visitor |
| Your FAQs, in your words | The next twenty questions | Opinions about competitors | It will repeat them |
| Hours, address, payment methods, areas | The logistics questions | Anything not yet decided | A draft policy becomes a promise |
| Your previous replies (for an email agent) | Your tone | Replies you regret | It learns those too |
How do you know it learned the right things?
Ask it the questions your phone gets. Write down the twenty most common, with the answer you would give, and put them to the chatbot one by one. Where it is wrong, the content was wrong or missing; fix the content and ask again. Then let it run for a week and read every conversation in the dashboard. That week is the real training: each correction you make is an answer it will give correctly forever.
What does a good refusal look like?
“I don’t have that information, but I can pass your question to the team and they’ll reply by email. What’s the best address?” A chatbot that guesses instead of refusing is the one that damages a business: it invents a delivery area, a price or a policy, and the customer holds you to it. Google’s own guidance on AI content asks for the same discipline on a website: accuracy first, and be clear about what the automation is doing 1. The refusal, followed by a hand-over or a booking, is the feature to look for, and it is how ours behaves by default.
What about tone and language?
Tone comes from your own writing, so the FAQs should be written the way you speak to customers, not the way a brochure speaks. Language comes free: the chatbot answers in English or Afrikaans as the customer writes, and best-effort in the other South African languages, from the same content. You do not translate the FAQs.
What is the maintenance?
Whatever changes in the business: a new price, a new service, a closed day. Change it in the dashboard the day it changes. A chatbot that gives last year’s price is not a chatbot problem; it is a price list that nobody updated, and it happens to brochures too.
Where to start?
The website chatbot is trained on your site, prices and FAQs in the setup, live in about 30 minutes, and has a free trial of fifty messages over seven days so you can run the twenty-question test before paying. The email agent trains on your previous replies the same way and runs in draft mode until you trust it.
Questions people ask
Does it learn from customer conversations on its own?
It records them for you to read; it does not silently change its answers from them. You change the answers, so nothing a stranger types becomes something it says.
How long does training take?
The build is about 30 minutes, any time, any day. The useful part, reading its first week of conversations and correcting, is an hour spread over the week.
Can I train it on a PDF?
Yes, price lists and policies as PDFs are read in. Keep them current; the chatbot answers from the version you gave it.