A website chatbot for nurseries, preschools and childcare

A parent looking for childcare asks the same six questions of every setting in the area, usually after the children are in bed. The answers are fixed and your office repeats them daily. An Allinaa assistant on your website answers them from information you have approved, books show-rounds, and is built to step aside the moment a conversation becomes about a particular child.

Where the assistant stops, and why that comes first

A nursery website receives messages that must reach a person: a parent reporting an injury, a question about a child's day, a concern about another family, anything a safeguarding lead would need to see. Configure the assistant so that any message about a named child, an incident or a concern produces your approved sentence and an immediate handover - never an answer. It has no access to your records, your registers or your learning journals and should say so plainly.

Write that sentence yourself and test it before you publish by describing a concern. A setting that gets this wrong has a worse problem than an unanswered enquiry.

The six questions every parent asks

• "Do you have a space for a child of this age, and from when?"
• "What are your hours, and can I do three days?"
• "What are the fees, and what is included - meals, nappies, trips?"
• "Do you take the funded hours, and how does that work with your fees?"
• "What is your ratio, and how many children are in the room?"
• "Can I come and look round?"

Write each in your own words. The funded-hours answer is the one parents find hardest to get and the one that most often decides where they go, so write it carefully and keep it current - it is a dated block, like any rule that changes with the year.

Spaces: collect, do not promise

The assistant has no access to your occupancy and must not say a space is available or offer to hold one. Write the sentence it uses instead - that availability is confirmed by the office, with your typical response time - and let it take the child's age, the days wanted and the start month so your manager can answer in one reply. A waiting-list enquiry is still a valuable enquiry; say honestly that it is a list and how it works.

Fees, stated the way your invoice states them

If your fees are published, the assistant quotes exactly what is written in your knowledge and nothing else: no calculating a monthly total from a daily rate, no estimating a part-week, no working out what the funded hours leave to pay. Parents will ask it to do all three. Write what each session costs, what is included, what the extras are, when fees are reviewed and what notice you need, and let the office do the arithmetic for a specific family.

Show-rounds and the enquiry that follows

The assistant asks up to three short questions, one at a time: the child's age, the days and hours wanted, and when care is needed from. Then it offers the inquiry form. The parent confirms their own contact details and agrees to be contacted, you get an e-mail, and the enquiry waits in your inbox with a status, private notes and CSV export - so an enquiry made at ten at night is on the manager's screen at eight. Most childcare enquiries arrive outside your opening hours, which is precisely when no nursery can answer the phone. See after-hours answers and appointment requests.

Current parents, and keeping the two apart

Your current families will use the same chat box. Decide and write what the assistant may answer for them - term dates, closure days, what to bring, how to pay, your policies as published - and what it must hand straight to a person, which is everything else. Nothing about a child, nothing about an invoice, nothing about an incident. See existing-customer questions.

The claims it will not make

It will not describe your setting as rated or accredited unless your knowledge states the actual rating and who gave it, it will not promise that a child will settle, and it will not compare you with another setting. Write what you do, in your own words, and let that be the case. See the launch checklist.