A website chatbot for IT support companies

An IT support company has two audiences on one website, and they must not be mixed up. Prospects want to know what you cover, how fast you answer and roughly what it costs per user. Existing clients want their ticket. An Allinaa assistant should serve the first properly and get out of the way of the second, honestly and immediately.

Separate the prospect from the client in the first turn

Configure the assistant to establish early whether the visitor is already a client. If they are, the correct answer is your support route - the portal address and the support number - and nothing else. An assistant that cannot see your ticketing system must never appear to be taking a ticket, because an outage reported into a chat box that goes nowhere is the worst thing this product could do to a support business.

Write that sentence yourself and test it by describing an outage. See existing-customer questions.

What a prospect enquiry needs

Managed IT is priced per user and per site, and a one-person firm and a sixty-user firm with three offices are different businesses to you. The assistant asks up to three short questions, one at a time:

1. How many people use a computer in the business
2. How many sites, and whether anybody works from home
3. What they have now - another provider, somebody internal, or nobody
4. What prompted the search: a specific problem, a contract ending, growth, or a compliance requirement from a customer of theirs

That fourth answer is the most useful line in the enquiry and nobody ever asks for it on a form.

Coverage and response times, stated exactly

These are the questions that get you shortlisted, and they have exact answers in your business: your support hours, whether out-of-hours is included or an option, your target response times by priority, whether on-site visits are included, the geography you cover, and what is explicitly out of scope. Write each in the words your contract uses, so nothing the assistant says can contradict the agreement a client later signs. Where your contract gives a target rather than a promise, keep that distinction in the wording - the assistant will repeat whatever you write, including an over-promise, so do not write one.

Security questions: answer the real ones, refuse the rest

Prospects increasingly arrive with a security questionnaire because their own customers demand one. The assistant can answer what you have written down: the practices you follow, the backups you take, what you do about multi-factor authentication, how you handle devices when somebody leaves. What it must never do is claim a certification or a compliance status for you or for Allinaa. If you hold an audited certification, state exactly which one and its scope; if you do not, the honest answer is what you actually do.

It must also refuse technical advice that could cause damage: how to recover a specific failed server, whether to pay a ransom, what to do mid-incident. Those get your incident number and a person, immediately, with no reasoning attached. See the security questions worth asking.

Pricing: a range you have published, or nothing

Per-user pricing varies with scope, so configure the assistant not to quote unless your website publishes a figure you stand behind. It quotes only what is written in your knowledge, so a published per-user price stays accurate and an unpublished one cannot be guessed at. Write the sentence it uses instead and let it offer a short call.

What happens to the enquiry

The assistant offers the inquiry form once it has the four answers. The visitor 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. A visitor can ask for a person at any point, and the conversation is handed over with the whole thread visible - useful here, because a prospect's third question is usually the one worth hearing. See the launch checklist.