A website chatbot for heating and cooling companies

An HVAC office lives in two seasons: the first hot week and the first cold week. Both arrive with more calls than anyone can answer, and most of those calls are the same five questions. An Allinaa assistant on your website answers them from information you have approved, tells the homeowner what your diagnostic visit costs and what your service area is, and collects service requests your dispatcher can schedule from.

The five calls that fill the first cold week

• "My furnace is blowing cold air. How soon can someone come?"
• "What do you charge just to come out and look at it?"
• "Do you work on my brand?"
• "Do you come out to my town?"
• "My unit is 18 years old. Is it worth repairing?"

Four of those five have a fixed answer that never changes, and your office repeats it forty times a day. Put them in the knowledge once and the assistant gives the same answer every time, in the same words you would use. The fifth one is a judgement call, and the assistant should say so and offer to have a technician call back.

Say the diagnostic fee out loud

The single most common reason an HVAC enquiry goes cold is a surprise at the door. Write your service-call policy into the knowledge in the exact terms you want quoted, for example:

Write the actual figures in your own knowledge; the assistant quotes only what is written there, and it will not invent a number or guess a repair price. A homeowner who knows the fee before they book does not argue about it in the driveway.

Emergencies, and the honest limit of a web chat

No heat with a newborn in the house, or no cooling in a heatwave for someone elderly, is not a web-form situation. Configure the assistant to recognise urgency in what the visitor types and to put your emergency number in front of them immediately instead of walking them through a form. Gas smell is its own case: the right answer is to leave the building and call the gas utility, and that sentence belongs in your knowledge word for word, with the utility's number.

For everything that is not an emergency, a visitor can ask for a person at any time and the conversation is handed over, with the whole thread visible to whoever picks it up. See handing a chat to a person and after-hours answers.

What a service request should carry

The assistant asks up to three short questions, one at a time, and only the ones still missing:

1. The address or ZIP code, so your service area can be confirmed before anyone is promised a visit
2. Heating or cooling, and what the system is doing (no air, warm air, short cycling, a noise, water on the floor)
3. Whether it is a repair, a maintenance visit or a replacement quote
4. Whether the property is a house, a rental or a commercial unit, because the answer changes who signs

Then it offers the inquiry form. The homeowner 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. On Premium a visitor can send a photo of the data plate or the thermostat, which saves the dispatcher a phone call about the model number.

Maintenance plans and the questions they create

If you sell a maintenance agreement, the assistant can explain exactly what it includes, how many visits a year, what it does not cover and how to join - all from your own wording. What it should not do is tell an existing member what their renewal date is or whether a specific repair falls under their plan: it has no access to your customer records, and it should say so and offer a person rather than guess. The same goes for warranty questions about equipment you installed. See existing-customer questions.

The boundaries worth setting before you publish

HVAC advice can be expensive to get wrong, so decide these in advance and write them down: the assistant does not diagnose a fault from a description, does not tell anyone to reset a breaker or relight a pilot, does not quote a repair or a system price, does not promise a same-day slot, and does not comment on rebates or tax credits beyond what your knowledge states. Everything else - hours, service area, brands you work on, your fee policy, how to reach you after hours - it can answer all day without tiring. Test it by asking the dangerous questions on purpose before you go live; see the launch checklist.