Switching your website from another chatbot

Most businesses installing a chatbot have had one before. The switch goes wrong in the same three ways every time: something that was never exported is lost, two widgets end up on the page at once, and nobody tells the team the inbox has moved. None of the three is hard to avoid, in this order.

1. Export before you cancel, not after

Cancel a chat product and the data usually becomes unreachable at the end of the billing period, sometimes immediately. Before you give notice, export:

• Conversations, even if you think you will not read them. They are the best possible source for what to put in your new knowledge, because they are the actual questions your visitors asked.
• Leads and contacts, with their dates and the consent record if the product kept one.
• Your canned replies, intents or flow scripts. These will not import anywhere, but they are a written record of answers somebody in your business already approved.
• Files customers sent, if the old product kept them and any of them still matter.

Keep the export somewhere that is not the old vendor's dashboard.

2. Know what will not transfer, and stop planning around it

There is no standard format for chatbot content, so nothing imports automatically from one product to another. In practice that means your flows, buttons and decision trees do not come across - and with an assistant that answers from approved knowledge, you would not want them to. Instead of rebuilding a tree, you write the facts once and the assistant answers from them. Your old flow script is useful as a checklist of facts, not as a thing to recreate. See AI against rule-based chatbots.

Also not transferring: conversation history into the new product's panel, your old widget's styling, and any integrations the old product had. Plan for those as new decisions rather than as a migration.

3. Mine the old conversations for the knowledge

This is the step that makes the new assistant good in week one instead of week six. Read a few hundred old conversations and write down every question that appeared more than twice, and every question the old bot failed. That list is your knowledge. It beats writing from your own website copy, because customers ask about things no marketing page covers - parking, whether you take a particular payment, whether a thing fits in a car. See what to put in the knowledge.

4. Run both for a few days, on purpose

You can have the new assistant on your site while the old one is still live, as long as you decide which one visitors see. Two chat bubbles on one page is a bad experience and makes both look broken. The clean way is to put the new one on a few pages first - or a staging copy of the site - answer real questions through it, and only then switch the whole site and remove the old script. A free trial exists for exactly this; see how the trial works.

5. Remove the old script properly

Removing a chat widget is where sites break. Check all the places it might be installed: the theme, a tag manager container, a plugin, a hard-coded footer include, and any landing-page builder that has its own copy. Search your rendered pages for the old vendor's domain rather than trusting your memory of where it went in. If you installed through a tag manager, remember to publish the container, not just save it. See install troubleshooting.

6. Tell the team, before the first customer does

The one failure that costs money is nobody watching the new inbox. Decide who reads enquiries, who gets the e-mail, and what the response target is - then say it out loud in the team's own channel. On Premium you can give named accounts with roles and assign each enquiry to a person. Make the first week deliberately noisy: it is better to over-notify for seven days than to find a three-day-old request. See the inquiry inbox.

7. In week one, read what it could not answer

Every assistant has a list of questions it failed, and in week one that list is your work queue. Each one is either a fact missing from the knowledge or a boundary you want it to keep. Fixing ten of them in the first week is the difference between a product that gets used and one that gets switched off. See measuring the results.

Questions people ask about this

Can my old conversations be imported into Allinaa?

No, and that is true of every product in both directions. Keep the export for your own records and use it to write the knowledge.

How long does the switch take?

The installation is a script tag. The knowledge is the real work, and reading your old conversations is the fastest way through it. See how long setup takes.

Should I keep the old one as a fallback?

No. Two widgets confuse visitors and split your enquiries across two inboxes, which is how a request gets missed.