A chatbot on your website in one afternoon

A useful site chatbot needs three ingredients, none of which is "six months and an agency":

1. Your knowledge in one place — FAQ, pricing, policies, product details, exported to a handful of clean documents. This determines quality more than any tech choice.
2. A narrow, honest scope — the bot answers from your documents, says "I don't know, here's how to reach a human" otherwise, and never invents. Instructions of one page.
3. A hand-off — every conversation it can't finish goes somewhere a human sees (email, Telegram, CRM), with the transcript attached.

Measure one number in week one: deflection — the share of questions fully answered without you. 50–70% is normal for a decent setup. Every deflected question is minutes of your life back, every evening, forever.