A website chatbot for electrical contractors

Electrical work is the one trade where a chatbot giving helpful-sounding advice could get somebody hurt. That shapes the whole design: an Allinaa assistant on an electrician's website is built to answer the commercial questions - what you do, where you work, how you charge, how to book a site visit - and to refuse the technical ones on purpose, every time, in wording you have approved.

Start with what it will not do

Most industry pages save the limits for the end. For an electrical contractor they come first, because they are the design. Configure the assistant so that it does not:

• tell anyone to open a consumer unit, reset anything repeatedly, or touch a cable
• diagnose a fault from a description, however confident the description sounds
• say whether an installation meets any wiring regulation
• confirm that a circuit is safe to use
• quote a price for work it has not seen

Instead, write one sentence for each of those cases that sends the visitor to a person or, where there is burning, smoke or a smell, to your emergency number and to the advice to switch the circuit off at the board if they can do it safely. That sentence belongs in your knowledge word for word, so the same answer comes out every time.

The questions that are safe to answer, and worth answering

Almost all enquiry traffic is commercial, not technical:

• "Do you do full rewires on a house this age?"
• "Can you install an EV charger on a property with no driveway?"
• "Do you issue an electrical installation condition report, and how long does it take?"
• "Do you work on commercial units, or only homes?"
• "How far out are you booking site visits?"

Each has one correct answer that your office repeats all week. Written once into the knowledge, the assistant gives it in the same words at midnight on a Sunday, and sends the visitor to a site visit booking instead of to the next search result.

EV chargers: the enquiry that needs sorting, not advising

Charger enquiries arrive with a dozen variables - vehicle, parking, distance from the board, the age of the supply, whether the property is owned or rented - and nobody can price one from a chat. What the assistant can usefully do is collect the variables so your surveyor arrives knowing them: where the car parks, roughly how far that is from the consumer unit, whether the supply has been upgraded, and whether the visitor owns the property. On Premium a photo of the consumer unit and of the parking space answers more than any of those questions, and your surveyor can often tell at a glance whether it is a straightforward job.

What a site visit request should carry

The assistant asks up to three short questions, one at a time, and only the ones still missing: the address or postcode so your area can be confirmed, what the work is, whether the property is domestic or commercial, and whether the visitor owns it. Then it offers the inquiry form. The visitor confirms their own contact details and agrees to be contacted, your office gets an e-mail, and the request waits in your inbox with a status, private notes and CSV export, ready for whoever does the scheduling. See quote requests and files customers send.

Registrations, certificates and honest wording

Your knowledge can state the trade registration you actually hold, its number and what it covers, and the assistant will quote exactly that. It will not describe the firm as certified in something you cannot evidence, and it will not promise that work will pass an inspection or satisfy an insurer. If a landlord asks whether a report will keep them compliant with a local rule, the honest answer is what you do and what the report contains - the rule itself is between them and their authority.

Test it by trying to get it to do the wrong thing

Before you publish, spend ten minutes trying to make the assistant unsafe. Describe a burning smell. Ask it which breaker to flip. Ask whether an old fuse box is legal. Ask it to price a rewire. Each of those should produce your approved refusal and an offer of a person, not a helpful paragraph. If any of them produces advice, correct the answer from the panel and ask again - corrections become a new version of the knowledge, so the fix is permanent rather than a one-off. See the launch checklist and how accurate a chatbot is.