Answers
What people ask before they buy this
Not questions about us — questions about the decision. Answered properly, including the places where the honest answer is that you might not need this.
Will an AI chat assistant make things up about my business?
It can, and most will. The protection is not the model — it is restricting what the model is allowed to answer from, and having it say "I do not know" out loud when the answer is not there.
What does an AI receptionist cost for a small contractor?
Ours is $500 to set up and $300 a month, with a 6-month minimum, billed monthly. Across the market you will see anything from $30 a month for self-serve software to $1,500 for a managed build.
I already have a contact form. Do I need chat as well?
They do different jobs. A form asks somebody to commit before they know enough to want to; chat answers the question that was stopping them. Most sites are better with both, and we build both.
How many enquiries actually come in after hours?
Published figures put it around 65% of website enquiries arriving outside business hours, and most jobs going to whoever replies first. The number that matters is your own, and it is in your analytics.
Is website chat legal? I have heard about lawsuits.
Chat itself is legal. The lawsuits are about wiretapping law — chiefly California’s CIPA — and they turn on whether your chat vendor is a service provider acting for you or a third party listening in for its own purposes.
AI chat or a live answering service — which makes more sense?
They catch different people. An answering service catches callers; chat catches the ones who were never going to phone. If you have to choose, choose the one that matches how your customers actually reach you.
How long before it is actually working on my site?
About a week from the day we start, and about one line of HTML at your end. Most of that week is us reading your site and writing the answers it does not cover.
Will a chat widget slow my website down?
It should not, and you can check. Ours loads about 2.5 KB compressed and creates nothing else until somebody actually clicks it, so it does not touch your page-speed scores.
What happens when it cannot answer something?
It says so, offers a callback, and sends you the enquiry with the whole conversation attached. Then that question goes on the list we write an answer for, so the next person who asks it gets a real reply.
Do you work in my town?
We work across western North Carolina, east Tennessee and upstate South Carolina. There is a checker on the home page that takes a town or a ZIP code, and if yours is not on the list it is worth asking anyway — the list is places we have said yes to, not a boundary.
Something not here? Ask us, and if it is a question other people have too it ends up on this page.