What makes a good chatbot launch

Most chatbots fail because they get launched once, then abandoned. The ones that work share a few habits.

1. Start with the questions, not the bot

Before you train anything, write down the 20 questions your support team answers most often. If you can't fill a list of 20 from memory, you don't have a chatbot problem yet — you have a customer-research problem.

2. Train on real content, not marketing copy

The bot is only as good as the documents you feed it. Marketing pages are useless training material because they don't answer questions — they sell. Use product docs, FAQ pages, support transcripts, and README files.

3. Read the conversations every day for the first two weeks

The bot will be wrong about things you didn't expect. The only way to catch them is to actually read the chat logs every day for the first two weeks. Set a calendar reminder.

4. Make handoff to a human one click away

The single biggest improvement to chatbot satisfaction is putting a visible "talk to a human" button at the bottom of the chat. Users hate being trapped in a bot loop. Don't trap them.

5. Track which questions the bot can't answer

The "I don't know" responses are the most valuable signal you have. Each one is a gap in your documentation. Fix the docs, retrain, and the gap closes itself.