Training an AI on your business is not a technical job. It is a writing job, and the quality of what comes out is set almost entirely by the quality of what you put in. Most of the work is deciding what your business actually says — about prices, about what you will not do, about the awkward questions — and writing it down properly, probably for the first time.
What does "training" actually mean here?
Not retraining a language model. For a business chatbot it means grounding: giving the model a body of material that belongs to you, and constraining it to answer from that material rather than from what it happens to know. The distinction matters, because it is the difference between a bot that says "I do not have that, let me get somebody" and one that confidently invents your refund policy.
What material do you need?
| Material | Why it matters | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Your prices, exactly as you charge them | The most-asked question, and the one a bot must never guess | An hour |
| Your 20 real customer questions | Not the ones you think they ask. The ones in your inbox | An hour, and worth every minute |
| What you do NOT do | The single most-skipped input, and it prevents the worst answers | Twenty minutes |
| Trading hours, areas, lead times | Factual, checkable, constantly asked | Ten minutes |
| Your escalation rules | What must always go to a person, and how fast | Twenty minutes |
| Tone examples | Three real replies you were happy with | Ten minutes |
Why is "what you do not do" so important?
Because a model asked about something outside its material will try to be helpful, and helpful is the wrong instinct here. A plumber who does not do gas installations needs the bot to say so plainly; without that line it will produce something encouraging, and somebody will book a job you cannot take. Every business has five or six of these, and writing them down is the highest-value twenty minutes in the whole process.
How do you test it properly?
Not by asking it easy questions. Spend an hour deliberately trying to make it fail:
- Ask the 20 real questions and check every answer against what you would have said.
- Ask something you do not offer. It should decline clearly, not improvise.
- Ask a price question in an odd way. "Roughly what am I looking at for…" should get the same answer as "how much is…".
- Be rude to it. It should stay level and hand over.
- Ask if it is a person. It must say what it is. A denial is the one failure you cannot recover from.
- Ask in Afrikaans or isiZulu if your customers do.
If it improvises even once in that hour, it will improvise on a customer. The fix is a tighter refusal rule, not optimism.
How often should you update it?
Whenever a price, an offer or a policy changes — same day. And once a month, read the conversation log. That log is the single most useful by-product of running a bot at all: it is a verbatim record of what your customers actually ask, which almost no business has and every business would benefit from. Half the questions it could not answer are usually things that should simply be on your website.
How long does this take?
The writing is two to three hours of your time, spread however you like. The build itself is thirty minutes during business hours, Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 16:30 SAST — you send the material, we train and test it, you review it, it goes live. Sign up outside those hours and it lands at 08:30 the next business day.
The honest sequencing: the two to three hours of writing is the part that determines whether it is any good. A business that sends a link to its homepage and nothing else gets a bot that knows what its homepage says, which is not much.
The bot is only ever as good as the answers you were willing to write down. Most of the value of doing this is discovering how few of them your business had actually written down anywhere.
What does it cost?
A Website Chatbot starts at R299 a month plus R250 once-off — R549 at checkout, month to month. The training is included; there is no separate charge for us reading your material and configuring the refusals, and there should not be at any vendor.